Christ, Mary, and Physical Appearances

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blackforest

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I have no idea if this post is in the appropriate sub-forum, but here goes.

I stayed up late last night (@#$%$ time change!) pondering an odd thought. On some level, it’s understandable to lionize somebody we admire and follow as looking very attractive. Most depictions of Christ and Our Lady, from earlier icons to Hollywood movies, show attractive people. We also contend with the cultural myth that physical beauty = virtue. Most old fairy tales and modern Disney movies, for example, portray attractive good people and ugly bad people.

But where Christ was a poor, ordinary man born into a poor, ordinary family, is there a chance that He was, say, scrawny and homely? Or that Mary was short and stout with a big nose? Did He look like that cab driver you saw in Tel Aviv? Did she look like that fruit vendor in Jerusalem? If we were to travel back in time, would we recognize mother and Son by physical appearance alone? Or would our culturally ingrained images of them cloud our judgment?
 
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blackforest said:
If we were to travel back in time, would we recognize mother and Son by physical appearance alone? Or would our culturally ingrained images of them cloud our judgment?
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They where poor but dignified and majestic in there own way ,respected and honored by their virtues, love and compassion for all .

Jesus was handsome as said in Psalm 45:2 You are the most handsome of men;grace is poured upon your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever.

Mother Mary is also beautiful with out sin ,as she was blessed among women Song of Solomon 4:7 You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.

John 17:17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
 
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It is very sad that we use beautiful portrait for good people and ugly portrait for evil people. That is an insult to ugly people.
 
Francis said:
Jesus was handsome as said in Psalm 45:2 You are the most handsome of men;grace is poured upon your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever.
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Isaiah 53:2-3

He grew up before Him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no stately form or majesty to attract us,
no beauty that we should desire Him.

He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
Like one from whom men hide their faces,
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
 
blackforest said:
We also contend with the cultural myth that physical beauty = virtue.
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Which is completely false. You don’t earn beauty. Its just handed to you. Beauty is power , but its unearned power. So it easily corrupts people. So if Jesus and Mary were good looking, it would just reinforce their holiness - that they did not permit the power of unearned beauty to corrupt them.
 
True

Mother Theresa would not have won any beauty contest but to me she is lovelier than the Kardashians.
 
My understanding is that this is why St. Rose of Lima shaved her head - to avoid the temptation to exploit the power that came with beauty.
 
I think Jesus must have been average looking because many people could not even pick him out of a crowd!:

Luke 4:29 They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went away."

Matthew 26:48 His betrayer had arranged a sign with them, saying, “The man I shall kiss is the one; arrest him.”
 
I agree. But there is also the possibility that Jesus and St James the Less looked alike (he was called the Lord’s brother for that reason maybe) and so that made it harder to pick out among his inner circle.
 
I’m a little baffled by the idea that because Jesus in art has been depicted in all kinds of idealized ways, we somehow would be taken aback if we met him and he looked like any number of ordinary Jewish people.

My own personal concept of Jesus is similar to the various Mandylion images and the Shroud of Turin. None of them portray a physically handsome man; all of them appear to show a pretty typical-looking man of Middle Eastern heritage with a very prominent nose, which wouldn’t be unusual for a Jewish man.

I don’t think of Mary (or Jesus) as “stout” simply because given their economic status and daily activities, they were probably thin from a lot of physical exercise coupled with a limited and low-fat food intake.

I have read of a mystic on the path to canonization who claimed to have met and spoken with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and said he looked like an ordinary guy with peasant-type features and a ruddy complexion and hair.

As people have posted above, the Bible itself refers to Jesus as not particularly attractive from a pure physical standpoint. I have always just presumed he looked very Jewish, which would not have been considered physically beautiful in the Roman culture.
 
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While I don’t disagree that Jesus was probably considered ordinary looking, your interpretation of the passages is debatable.
Stephen_says said:
I think Jesus must have been average looking because many people could not even pick him out of a crowd!:

Luke 4:29 They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went away."
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Jesus “passing through the midst of them” has been interpreted as him miraculously disappearing or somehow teleporting himself out of the mob, in order to escape harm. As God, he could do this. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that they couldn’t pick him out of a crowd.
Matthew 26:48 His betrayer had arranged a sign with them, saying, “The man I shall kiss is the one; arrest him.”
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The people coming to arrest Jesus may not have ever seen him in person and thus, since Judas couldn’t show them a photo or anything, Judas would have to point out who the right guy was. Not a case of Jesus blending in, simply that those coming to get him weren’t familiar with him. Also, it was dark in the Garden at night and there were trees hanging down (the same type trees are still there, including one or two reputed to be from the time of Christ, and they hang low).
 
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Although Christ is often spoken of as “poor” I wonder how accurate that portrayal is. He was of course born in a stable but that was a fluke of circumstances - babies are often born in unusual places.

But Joseph was a (skilled?) carpenter and Jesus himself was literate so it is not unreasonable to assume that as a one child family in the days when large families would have been more usual, Mary and Joseph were actually better off than neighbours who tended sheep or tilled the land.
 
Yes, that’s true from what I have read. They were middle-class or lower-middle-class by the standards of the time. Remember, by the “standards of the time” a whole lot of people were basically illiterate and starving in the streets. Jesus was relatively well educated in that he could read and write and was taught a skilled trade probably including some knowledge of math and geometry to do carpentry work. He wasn’t forced out to herd sheep or otherwise work as a child. His family also had sufficient resources - or he saved up enough money working - that he could more or less go “on the road” for three years and his mom wasn’t going to starve or lose her housing in his absence.

However, they were not well off by the standards of the time, either. Joseph’s offering at the temple when Jesus was presented was two turtledoves (Luke 2:24) which was the offering for those who were not well off; as stated in Levicitus 12:6 , the offering for well-off people was a lamb and one turtledove. Furthermore, the sheer amount of walking to get around and the physical labor involved in going about your day looking after animals, doing carpentry work, washing the laundry, going to market, tending a garden, preparing the food would have been significant.
 
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I think Jesus and Joseph has periods of prosperity when business was good and periods of poverty when business was not so good. They were the contractors of their time and sometimes went through periods when the construction business was in a slump.
 
I have to say that by far my favorite image of Mary is Our Lady of Guadalupe. Obviously not a Jewish woman but regal even while not being “commercially” beautiful. By contrast the blonde blue eyed Western looking Marys from the kind of holy cards I grew up with make me gag.
 
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