The Virgin Mary may have looked something like this

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Ridgerunner said:
Why?. You didn’t explain your response.
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One of the responses to Jesus’ divinity and the Virgin birth among its opponents, even medieval Jewish writers, is the idea that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman legionnaire. The idea is that Mary had an affair with a Roman soldier, and in a society that took a dim view of single mothers, especially single mothers sleeping with the member of an occupying army…presto, there’s your virgin birth myth. (To be clear, I’m not saying this. Just saying some writers have argued it.)

My point is that if we had any evidence that Jesus was unusually fair skinned, or had more European features that would have been somewhat unusual for a Jew at the time, proponents of that theory would have been trumpeting it to the skies because it would bolster their argument. They’d be going “See?! We even have accounts of His appearance describing Him as fair with blue eyes. That makes way more sense if His father was actually a Roman soldier of Germanic origin.”
 
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RolandThompsonGunner said:
we can guess that Mary probably looked somewhat similar.” I don’t think anyone is claiming that she absolutely 100% had a dark complexion. It’s certainly possible she was unusually light skinned.
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I don’t think we know what “unusually light skinned” would have been in the first Century Levant.
Nor do we know what “unusually dark skinned” would have been then. Nor do we know for sure that a young woman of that time would never have gone out in the sun and thus had no tanning or change in hair color.

But regardless, the kinds of challenges shown in Post #30 seem to be the purpose of these kinds of threads.
 
Not all Teutonic people have blonde hair and blue eyes. Actually, most don’t. My wife is 100% Alsatian and has darker skin than the prevailing Scots-Irish around here, and brown eyes. I don’t think those who oppose the divinity of Jesus will ever be convinced of His divinity because their disbelief has nothing to do with coloration.
RolandThompsonGunner said:
unusually fair skinned
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You’re assuming your premise with “unusually”.

I say we don’t know what Jesus or Mary looked like, though we do have some strong suggestion from the Shroud of Turin as mentioned in Post 66. Rather than keep this up, why don’t you let me imagine Mary as being more like Post 66 when I think of such things, which is almost never, and you can continue to think of her as she appears in the OP.

Deal?
 
Ridgerunner said:
Not all Teutonic people have blonde hair and blue eyes. Actually, most don’t. My wife is 100% Alsatian and has darker skin than the prevailing Scots-Irish around here, and brown eyes.
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Individual examples are, well, individuals. I’m sure you’d agree that generally speaking, ethnically Greek people have a different look than ethnically Nordic people. Saying “well, I met a blonde Greek” or “some Swedes have a swarthy complexion” doesn’t change the fact that it’s possible to talk about an average or a trend. No one is claiming that every Teutonic person looks like a Nazi propaganda poster. Every large group is going to have variation among individuals, which I’ve acknowledged throughout.
Ridgerunner said:
You’re assuming your premise with “unusually”.

I say we don’t know what Jesus or Mary looked like, though we do have some strong suggestion from the Shroud of Turin as mentioned in Post 66. Rather than keep this up, why don’t you let me imagine Mary as being more like Post 66 when I think of such things, which is almost never, and you can continue to think of her as she appears in the OP.

Deal?
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You can do whatever you like. I’m not forcing you to participate in the conversation. I do think you’re being a little willfully obtuse in claiming that we have limited to no insight into what the average persons complexion was in the Levant at the time, but you do you.
 
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RolandThompsonGunner said:
I do think you’re being a little willfully obtuse in claiming that we have limited to no insight into what the average persons complexion was in the Levant at the time, but you do you.
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Imagining, even insisting, that Mary looked like an Ethiopian based on the premise that she surely looked like what we imagine a “typical” Iraqi Jew looks like, is just bizarre to me. But I do understand it’s important to some to dispel any illusions that Mary might have looked European; something Europeans don’t insist on anyway.
 
I have to say, my only complaint of this beautiful woman is her eyebrows are a bit way too bushy…which makes me wonder? Do Semitic peoples tend to have much heavier eyebrows than Europeans? I know they have heavier beards amongst their men and nowadays women all over shape their eyebrows. So, I’m off to look at pictures of Arabs and see if their eye brows are that much thicker than ours! 😂. Not what I pictured myself doing fifteen minutes ago!
 
@Pattylt it depends where in Europe…
Italian women (but I am pretty sure also other women in Southern Europe) are really supporting the waxing center business… 😎 🤣 🤣
 
YHWH_Christ said:
This is a reconstruction of what a 1st century 12-14 year old Jewish girl from Galilee may have looked like.
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Umm… yeah, she probably looked like a stereotypical Jewish girl. I don’t see the point, did someone think that this was new news?
 
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Pattylt said:
r? Do Semitic peoples tend to have much heavier eyebrows than Europeans? I know they have heavier beards amongst their men and nowadays women all over shape their eyebrows. So, I’m off to look at pictures of Arabs and see if their eye brows are that much thicker than ours! 😂. Not what I pictured myself doing fifteen minutes ago!
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Quite a lot of groups have naturally bushy brows (hairy all over, generally speaking), including some European ones. My brows, if untouched, would look exactly like that. As these brows are often thought of as too much/ugly now (as can be seen from the comments here and in general from society tbh), most women shape them. I know some strict Muslims who are against that, but I’ll be honest, I rarely see them nowadays…although I’m sure COVID has definitely brought out some of us, lol.
 
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I went and looked at pictures of people from the Levant. Eyebrows are all over the map. I know that even some Nordic people can have really bushy eyebrows, too…usually blonde or red! Women have a less pronounced eye ridge than men and will usually have a thinner brow as well, but thicknesses are all over the map.

The OP posted picture is beautiful whether Mary looked similar or not.
 
Pattylt said:
went and looked at pictures of people from the Levant. Eyebrows are all over the map. I know that even some Nordic people can have really bushy eyebrows, too…usually blonde or red! Women have a less pronounced eye ridge than men and will usually have a thinner brow as well, but thicknesses are all over the map.
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“Black Irish” tend to have heavy, dark eyebrows. Supposedly the pronounced eye ridge in European men (more so than for other men) is a residuum of neanderthal ancestry that European men apparently have but which not all other men on earth do.
 
Ridgerunner said:
neanderthal ancestry that European men apparently have but which not all other men on earth do.
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When I did my genetic ancestry, I discovered I have a larger than average percentage of Neanderthal genes…4.7%. I’ve always wondered if that’s where my larger bone structure and reddish skin tones and blonde hair that pulls out reds easily all came from!

Perhaps it’s also why I grunt when getting off the sofa? 😂
 
Ridgerunner said:
There are different segments of Ethiopians. “White” Ethiopians look very much like the OP drawing. Iraqi Jews, not so much.
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This kind of highlights my point. The mere fact that we can speak, broadly, about the way White Ethiopians or Iraqi Jews or Koreans or whatever look is evidence that it’s possible for us to approximate what someone may have looked like from the population they belonged to.

A lot of your posts (and maybe I’m just misreading you) seem to suggest that there’s no way we could possibly make even broad conclusions like “probably dark eyes and hair” or “likely olive/brown skin.”
 
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And a lot of the people who created artistic depictions in the Middle Ages had probably never actually seen a Middle Eastern person. Most people in human history lived and died within 10 miles of where they were born and probably were only dimly aware of the wide variety of human appearance.
 
Julius_Caesar said:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She looks beautiful to me.
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When I was in my first year of college I was acquainted with an Iranian girl who looked much like that, and her arms had as much hair as mine. She was stunningly beautiful… I was very disappointed when she wouldn’t go out with me.
 
RolandThompsonGunner said:
A lot of your posts (and maybe I’m just misreading you) seem to suggest that there’s no way we could possibly make even broad conclusions like “probably dark eyes and hair” or “likely olive/brown skin.”
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Probably not. An Iraqi friend of mine has very fair skin and green eyes.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Probably not. An Iraqi friend of mine has very fair skin and green eyes.
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Right. But that doesn’t disprove the general principle that most Iraqis have dark (as in, darker than people from Europe anyway) skin and eyes. I served in Iraq and saw tons of Iraqis daily. Very few had very fair skin and green eyes. The vast majority were immediately recognizable as Middle Eastern in the sense most people think of that “look”. Individual anecdotes do not disprove the rule.

I mean, I get that we’re just not going to agree here, but I think this is a really straightforward, common sense idea.
 
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