People imagine a god according to their faiths and the social paradigms they exist in. Then they take the shape of their imaginations. The first Gods were forces of nature imagined as rulers or even animals. Consider the carrion jackals of the Sahara; they became the harbingers of Death, and later Anubis, Death himself. God was imagined as a tree stump in Eastern India. It’s something that was incomplete in it, but completed everything else as a source of everything on Earth. Jagannath, which was called the lord of the universe.
Jesus has the most number of followers. It is increasing even now especially in places like Korea and China. People have imagined him as a blonde-ish man of middle years and fair complexion, oftentimes with blue eyes and fair skin too, for centuries.
As the Europeans, who would go on to conquer the Earth and take their [Son of] God with them to their new frontiers, imagined him in their own image, the image stayed the longest in public imagination.
But that couldn’t be really what Jesus looked like and many people would tell no. The Chinese, Indians, and Africans imagine him and his apparel in a certain way.
But “our lord”, which I describe, would be the most common one.
British scientists and Israeli archaeologists came together in one of the most brilliant of ways a couple of years ago: they would go on to recreate the face of Jesus Christ using police forensic techniques. Someone who lived in the area at the point of time believed to be the time of Christ.
One of the scientists in the study, Richard Neave is convinced that this is the limit of accuracy that can be achieved using the data at hand. Even though this is not Neave’s first foray into something like this, it is by far the most controversial. He previously reconstructed the faces of King Midas of Phrygia and King Phillip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great.
Even though this particular study combines studies from many more fields together with forensics and archaeology, this study falls under the broader field of palaeoanthropology. They considered about nutrition, habitation and social lives, in the first century AD, in then Judea.
We understand to be Christ’s image with the slick hair, fair skin and well-groomed beard. But the image is very different from it. The latter image was propagated by the Romans, after Christianity was legalised in Rome in around 300 AD.
Here’s a video with the explanation of the process of reconstruction that went into recreating the face.
sources used : truththeory.com
