Was He of an impressive physique and height for His time?Correct me if I’m wrong,but I understand the average height increases every 100 or so years(not sure if there is any truth in that).In any event,someone gave me His estimate height to be 5’9".Was this height normal or abnormal for 2000 years ago?
A lot of people claim that the man on the Shroud is too tall (5’8" at the lowest and 6’2" at the highest, with 5’11½" being a pretty good estimate) to be a 1st century Jew.
Now while the idea that ancient folks were short may prove true in some cultures, we have to take caution not to apply this rule to everyone. For a start, we know the heights of almost no one in antiquity; the only exceptions to this was Augustus Caesar as described by Suetonius (according to him, he would be just under 5’7, and even then, Octavian was still considered “short”) and the people who perished at Pompeii and Herculaneum (according to one estimate the average height for males in Pompeii was around 167 cm (5’5.7") and females about 154 cm (5’0.6"), while the average height for Herculaneum is approximately 169 cm (5’6.5") for males and 155 cm (5’1") for females).
Greeks and Romans usually cremated their dead, so aside from the remains at Pompeii and Herculaneum we have little skeletal evidence on which to draw any meaningful conclusions concerning the average height of people at the time of Jesus. While Israelites, and later Jews, did bury their dead, few skeletons from the time have been recovered intact because of the custom of secondary burial, where the family would return a year after the corpse was first deposited inside the tomb, take all that remains of the now-decomposed body (i.e. the bones) and rebury them, either by depositing them in a pile (hence the Biblical expression “to be gathered to one’s fathers”) or - more common during Jesus’ time - on a stone box called an ossuary. Apparently the most extensive collection was from Giv’at ha-Mivtar near Jerusalem, where archeologists were able to harvest thirty-five well-preserved skeletons, eight of which are adult males. The shortest of these men is said to have measured 5’2", with the tallest being 5’11; the average height would be around 5’6.
If the eight men from Giv’at ha-Mivtar were representative of their time and place (and given that the measurements were indeed correct), then there would really be nothing unusual or abnormal about the height of the man on the Shroud, contrary to what detractors say. If we assume that the man on the Shroud is Jesus, then we can say that He may have been a little tall, but not exceptionally so.
