Personal Appearance of Jesus

PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF JESUS. Following the series of articles on Passion Week, which the Era published for the purpose of keeping up an interest among our improvement association members in the life of Christ, we publish the following in respect to his personal appearance, confidently believing that while the descriptions are not reliable as portraits, they cannot fail to be of interest as the conceptions of men concerning the man who was "God manifested in the flesh." None of the Evangelists, not even the beloved disciple and bosom friend of Jesus, has given us the least hint of his countenance and stature. In the absence of authentic representation, Christian art in its irrepressible desire to exhibit in visible form "the fairest among the children of men," was left to its own imperfect conception of ideal beauty. The church under persecution in the first three centuries was rather averse to all pictorial representations of Christ, and associated with him in his state of humilation (but not in his state of exaltation) the idea of uncomeliness; taking too literally the prophetic description of the suffering Messiah in the twenty-second Psalm and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. The victorious church after Constantine, starting from the Messianic picture in the forty-fifth Psalm and the Song of Solomon, saw the same Lord in heavenly glory, "fairer than the children of men" and "altogether lovely." Yet the difference was not so great as it is sometimes represented. For even the ante-Nicene fathers (especially Clement of Alexander), besides expressly distinguishing between the first appearance of Christ in lowliness and humility, and his second appearance in glory and majesty, did not mean to

PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF JESUS. 821 deny to the Savior even in the days of his flesh a higher order of spiritual beauty, "the glory of the only begotten of the Father full of grace and truth," which shone through the veil of his humanity, and which at times, as on the mount of transfiguration, anticipated his future glory. The first formal description of the personal appearance of Christ, which, though not authentic, and certainly not older than the fourth century, exerted great influence on the pictorial representations, is ascribed to the heathen Publius Lentulus, a supposed contemporary of Pilate and proconsul of Judaea, in an apocryphal Latin letter to the Roman Senate which was first discovered in a manuscript copy of the writings of Anselm of Canterbury, and is as follows: "In this time appeared a man, who lives till now, a man endowed with great powers. Men call him a great prophet;his own disciples term him the Son of God. His name is Jesus Christ. He restores the dead to life, and cures the sick of all manner of diseases. This man is of noble and well-proportioned stature, with a face full of kindness and yet firmness, so that the beholders both love him and fear him. His hair is the color of wine, and golden at the root; straight, and without luster, but from the level of the ears curling and glossy, and divided down the centre after the fashion of the Nazarenes. His forehead is even and smooth, his face without blemish, and enhanced by a tempered bloom. His countenance ingenuous and kind. Nose and mouth are in no way faulty. His beard is full, of the same color as his hair, and forked in form; his eyes blue, and extremely brilliant. In reproof and rebuke he is formidable; in exhortation and teaching, gentle and amiable of tongue. None have seen him to laugh, but many, on the contrary, to weep. His person is tall; his hands beautiful and straight. In speaking he is deliberate and grave, and little given to loquacity. In beauty surpassing most men." Another description is found in the works of the Greek theologian, John of Damascus, of the eighth century. It ascribes to Christ a stately person, beautiful eyes, curly hair, "black beard, yellow complexion and long fingers, like his mother." This is the description as far as we are able to secure it: He was beautiful and strikingly tall, with fair and slightly curling locks, on which no hand but his mother's had ever passed, with dark eyebrows, an oval countenance, a pale and olive complexion, bright eyes, an attitude slightly stooping, and a look expressive of patience, nobility, and wisdom.

m IMPROVEMENT ERA. On the ground of these descriptions arose a vast number of pictures of Christ which are divided into two classes: the Salvator pictures, with the expression of calm serenity and dignity, without the faintest mark of grief; and the Ecce Homo pictures of the suffering Savior with the crown of thorns. But it must be confessed as being beyond all question that "no figure of Christ, in color, or bronze, or marble, can reach the ideal of perfect beauty which came forth into actual reality in the Son of God and Son of Man. The highest creations of art, even if true portraits of Messiah's outward seeming, could be but feeble reflections of the original in heaven; yet they prove the mighty influence which the living Christ continually exerts upon the imagination and sentiment of the great painters and sculptors, and which he will exert to the end of the world."* Another noted author says: "Anyone who has studied the representations of Christ in mediaeval art will have observed that some of them, particularly in missals, are degradingly and repulsively hideous, while others are conceived in the softest and loveliest ideal of human beauty. Whence came this singular divergence? It came from the prophetic passages which were supposed to indicate the appearance of the Messiah, as well as his life. The early church, accustomed to the exquisite perfection of form in which the genius of heathen sculpture had clothed its conceptions of the younger gods of Olympus—aware, too, of the fatal corruptions of a sensual imagination—seemed to find a pleasure in breaking loose from this adoration of personal endowments, and taking as their ideal of the bodily aspect of our Lord, Isaiah's picture of a patient and afflicted sufferer, or David's pathetic description of a smitten and wasted outcast. His beauty, says Clement of Alexandria, was in his soul and in his actions, but in appearance he was base. Justin Martyr describes him as being without beauty, without glory, without honor. His body, says Origen, was small, and ill-shapen, and ignoble. "His body," says Tertullian, *The foregoing is largely drawn from Shaft's History of the Church,, Vol III: p. 571.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF JESUS. 823 "had no human handsomeness, much less any celestial splendor." The heathen Celsus, as we learn from Origen, even argued from his traditional meanness and ugliness of aspect as a ground of rejecting his divine origin. Nay, this kind of distorted inference went to even greater extremities. The Vulgate rendering of Isa. LIII: 4 is, "Nos putavimus eum quasi leprosum, pecussumma Deo et humiliatum" [We have thought him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted]; and this gave rise to a widespread fancy, of which there are many traces, that he who healed so many leprosies was himself a leper! Shocked on the other hand, by these revolting fancies, there were many who held that Jesus, in his earthly features, reflected the charm and beauty of David, his great ancestor, and St Jerome and St. Augustine preferred to apply to him the words of Psalm XLV: 2, 3, "Thou art fairer than the children of men." It was natural that, in the absence of positive indications, this view should command a deeper sympathy, and it gave rise both to the current descriptions of Christ, and also to those ideals, so full of mingled majesty and tenderness, in— ' 'That face How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than beauty's self," which we see in the great pictures of Fra Angelico, of Michael Angelo, of Leonardo de Vinci, of Raphael, and of Titian. Independently of all traditions, we may believe with reverent conviction that there could have been nothing mean or repugnant—that there must, as St. Jerome says, have been "something starry"—in the form which enshrined an Eternal Divinity and an Infinite Holiness. All true beauty is but "the sacrament of goodness," and a conscience so stainless, a spirit so full of harmony, a life so purely noble, could not but express itself in the bearing, could not but be reflected in the face of the Son of Man. We do not indeed find any allusion to this charm of aspect, as we do in the description of the young high-priest Aristobulus whom Herod murdered; but neither on the other hand, do we find in the language of his

enemies a single word or allusion which might have been founded on an unworthy appearance. He of whom John bore witness as the Christ—he whom the multitude would gladly have seized that he might be their king—he whom the city saluted with triumphal shouts as the Son of David—he to whom women ministered with such deep devotion, and whose aspect, even in the troubled images of a dream, had inspired a Roman lady with interest and awe—he whose mere word caused Philip and Matthew and many others to leave all and follow him—he whose one glance broke into an agony of repentance the heart of Peter—he before whose presence those possessed with devils were alternately agitated into frenzy and calmed into repose, and at whose question, in the very crisis of his weakness and betrayal, his most savage enemies shrank and fell prostrate in the moment of their most infuriated wrath—such an One as this could not have been without the personal majesty of a prophet and a priest. All the facts of his life speak convincingly of that strength, and endurance, and dignity, and electric influence, which none could have exercised without a large share of human, no less than of spiritual gifts. "Certainly," says St. Jerome, "a flame of fire and starry brightness flashed from his eye, and the majesty of the Godhead shone in his face."* Of course all personal representations of Jesus are confessedly ideal, whether on canvas or in poetry; but among the latter we have always admired the following description of Jesus from N. P. Willis' beautiful poem, "The Leper." Jesus had just healed Helon and the latter arose and looked upon him with the result that— Love and awe Mingled in the regard of Helon's eye As he beheld the stranger. He was not In costly raiment clad, nor on his brow The symbol of a princely lineage wore; No followers at his back, nor in his hand Buckler, or sword, or spear,—yet in his mien Command sat throned serene, and if he smiled, A kingly condescension graced his lips, The lion would have crouched to in his lair. ♦Canon Farrar's Life of Jesus.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF JESUS. 825 His garb was simple, and his sandals worn; His stature modell'd with a perfect grace; His countenance the impress of a God, Touched with the open innocence of a child; His eye was blue and calm, as is the sky In the serenest noon; his hair unshorn Fell to his shoulders; and his curling beard The fullness of perfected manhood bore. ODE. THE SLEEPING BRAVE. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest, By all their country's wishes blest! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallowed mould, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod. By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay, And Freedom shall awhile repair To dwell a weeping pilgrim there. Collins.