First images of Jesus?

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Shaolen

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My wife asked me what were the first images/paintings or depictions of Jesus? How do we know what he looked like?
 
A large floor mosaic unearthed in the English village of Hinton St. Mary (Dorset) is thought to be one of the earliest image representations of Christ. There is no definitive proof of this, however, and the museum that houses the mosaic admits as much. I am personally dubious because it shows a clean-shaven man, but I’m no archaeologist or Church historian.

Even if it’s indeed meant to be Jesus, the mosaic dates from the fourth century so it’s possible, perhaps likely, that the artisans who created it didn’t even know themselves what Christ looked like.

The full mosaic is quite large, about 26.6 feet by 17 feet. A photo of the panel suspected to illustrate Jesus can be found here. Further info from the British Museum Web site here.
 
Shaolen said:
My wife asked me what were the first images/paintings or depictions of Jesus? How do we know what he looked like?
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I believe one of the earliest examples of Christian art can be found at the house church in the city of Dura-Europos in Syria. One of the earliest depictions of the crucified Jesus meanwhile is actually an anti-Christian graffiti found in Rome, from around the early 3rd century.

http://silouanthompson.net/images/dura-europos-paralytic.jpg
Jesus curing the paralytic, from the Dura-Europos house church. Jesus is the figure in the center. (An image of Jesus as the good shepherd - a common subject in early Christian art - was also found.)

We don’t exactly know what Jesus looked like because the earliest images themselves either don’t agree or are not reliable indicators themselves. (The early Christians never pretended to know what Jesus looked like, or that their portrayals of Him reflects what He really looked like*. In fact, throughout all of early Christian art, the only biblical subjects who are likely to have been portrayed by Christians according to what they really looked like are Sts. Peter and Paul.) I mean our modern image of Jesus (long hair and beard) only became the definitive standard by the 8th-9th century or later. Before that, Jesus can either be portrayed as a (1) clean-shaven, short-haired guy, (2) a clean-shaven long-haired guy, (3) a long-haired guy with a beard, or (4) a frizzy-haired guy with a beard.
  • By the time we get to the Iconoclast controversy, you begin to see some writers give descriptions of what Jesus and Mary supposedly looked like, but those descriptions are not so much historical but based on icons which were supposedly painted during Jesus’ and Mary’s lifetimes (their point being was to defend Christian use of images by appealing to supposedly ‘true-to-life’ icons) and thus, should be taken with a grain of salt.
 
I think St Luke made a statue of the black Madonna (our lady of Montserrat in Spain). So he knows how Mother Mary looks like, also of Jesus. Jesus lives in before 33AD, and he also has apostles… St Peter (Jesus’s apostle) was the first pope, so… I think it is not difficult to know how Jesus looks like
 
therese14 said:
I think St Luke made a statue of the black Madonna (our lady of Montserrat in Spain). So he knows how Mother Mary looks like, also of Jesus. Jesus lives in before 33AD, and he also has apostles… St Peter (Jesus’s apostle) was the first pope, so… I think it is not difficult to know how Jesus looks like
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You are wrong. We don’t know what he looked like and frankly it doesn’t matter.
There is no physical description of Jesus in the bible.
 
therese14 said:
I think St Luke made a statue of the black Madonna (our lady of Montserrat in Spain). So he knows how Mother Mary looks like, also of Jesus. Jesus lives in before 33AD, and he also has apostles… St Peter (Jesus’s apostle) was the first pope, so… I think it is not difficult to know how Jesus looks like
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This is what I’m talking about.

The thing is, during the height of the Iconoclast period (the 8th-9th century), a story began to circulate among the iconodules (those who defended the use of icons) that St. Luke painted an icon or icons of Mary and Jesus from life, and that those icon/s had survived to the present day.

But the problem with the story is, the story was simply unknown before that time - it’s no older than the 8th-9th century. St. Augustine in the 5th century expressedly stated that:

[W]e believe that our Lord Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin called “Mary.” But we do not believe, we simply know, what a virgin is, what it is to be born, and what a proper name is. However, whether that was the outward appearance of Mary that came to our mind when we said or recalled these things, we do not at all know, nor do we believe it so. Here, then it is permissible to say without violating the faith that perhaps she had such an appearance and perhaps she did not have such an appearance; no one, however, without violating the Christian faith could say concerning Christ was born of a Virgin, “Perhaps.” (On the Trinity VIII.5)

In other words, Augustine says flat-out that we don’t know what Mary looked like, and anyone is at liberty to imagine her appearance. Quite unlikely that he would say that if there were really ‘true-to-life’ icons of Mary. The story in fact, seems to have been unknown in the West (which was barely affected by Iconoclasm) before the Middle Ages, when Westerners also began identifying whatever icon or statue of Mary of obscure origin as being the original one made by St. Luke.

In fact, you might say the story came out at a suspiciously convenient time. In all likelihood, the story was developed as a way of emphasizing the legitimacy of icons of Mary or Jesus by ‘proving’ that they were either actual portraits or were copies of actual portraits rather than idolatrous images, and that an evangelist himself was the very first icon painter. (Before the Luke story became popular, there was a minority 5th-century tradition that a painter who was part of the Magi’s entourage painted a portrait of the holy family, which the Magi took home with them. But unlike the Luke story - which eventually supplanted this version - it credits the making of the first ‘Christian’ image to a pagan artist, neither does this version mention whether copies were made of the supposed image or whether the icon made its way westward.)

The other thing is: many images attributed to St. Luke.too Our Lady of Montserrat is not even the earliest of these ‘Lukan images’.

And to directly answer your question: we simply don’t have any surviving Christian art from before the 3rd century (200s). We know based on scattered references that Christians were already making artworks at least by the late 2nd century, but the thing is, at that time, images were still something where Christians disagreed with one another: some - usually clergymen - did not like them (either because of the prohibition in Exodus or because it reminded them too much of pagan idols), but others - mainly the laity - were okay with them.

As it stands, the only people from the New Testament who are likely to have a tradition of their appearance preserved are Sts. Peter and Paul - because they are depicted almost consistently since the earliest days. (Since many of our surviving examples of early Christian art are from Rome, maybe the Roman Christians handed down a tradition of what they looked like.)
 
*“Eudocia sent to Pulcheria from Jerusalem an image of the Mother of God painted by the apostle Luke.” *
- Theodorus Lector (A.D. 530)

I know its not proof 🙂
 
irenaeuslyons said:
*“Eudocia sent to Pulcheria from Jerusalem an image of the Mother of God painted by the apostle Luke.” *
- Theodorus Lector (A.D. 530)

I know its not proof 🙂
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The problem with the reference is that while it is claimed to be by Theodorus Lector (a 6th century Byzantine historian), this quote is only known from the 14th-century writings of Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopolous, the last Greek church historian and from 13th century. Many scholars think that Nikephoros interpolated a story already common in his day about an icon of Our Lady supposedly painted by St. Luke (specifically speaking, the Hodegetria icon) into an original passage from Theodorus about the Empress Pulcheria founding three churches to Our Lady in Constantinople (the Blachernae, the Chalkoprateia, and the Hodegon churches). Even if the quote is authentic, Theodorus’ statement would be our earliest attestation to a supposed icon of Mary painted from life.

Speaking of Theodorus Lector:

At the time of Gennadius (458-471) was withered the hand of a painter who dared to paint the Saviour in the likeness of Zeus. Gennadius healed him by means of a prayer. The author [Theodorus Lector] says that the other form of Christ, viz. the one with short, frizzy hair, is the more authentic.
  • Theodorus Lector, Historia Ecclesiastica 1.15 (ca 540s), from Theophanes the Confessor (ca. 810-15)
Theodore the historian of Constantinople, from his History of the Church, about Gennadius, archbishop of Constantinople:

“I shall set down other things about him full of amazement. A certain painter, while painting an icon of Christ our Master, found that his hand shriveled up. And it was said that, as the work of the icon had been ordered by a certain pagan, in the adornment of the name of the Savior he had depicted his hair divided on his forehead, so that his eyes were not covered—for in such a way the children of the pagans depict Zeus—so that those who saw it would think that they were assigning veneration to the Savior.”
  • Theodorus Lector as quoted by St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (720s-30s), Treatise 3, 130

Depictions of Jesus with “short, frizzy hair.” During the Byzantine period this ‘Semitic’ way of depicting Jesus - more commonly associated with Syria and Palestine - was one of the main rivals of the ‘long-hair and beard’ (aka the ‘Hellenic’/‘Greek’) type.
 
This is a collage I made a while back showing some depictions of Jesus up to the 7th-8th century, arranged in roughly chronological order (starting from the 2nd-3rd century at the top).



See? The artists themselves never really agreed with one another.
 
The one image that is missing is the Shroud of Turin.

To the pertinent bit from a documentary.
youtu.be/Ro_A7bvKXMQ?t=27m56s

I thought it was a forgery until I watched this Discover Channel feature. Ray Rodgers, a member of the STURP team that examined it confirmed they accidentally dated a sample with medieval cotton interwoven into the linen on that edge of the cloth. He still had a piece at his lab, and confirmed it. Unfortunately, this discovery did not receive any attention in the press that so vigorously declared it a fake. Universities (like mine) still teach from textbooks that cite this famous case of science revealing a forgery, but its simply not the case anymore.
 
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