Jesus has been making a lot of appearances lately, potato chips, grilled cheese sandwhiches, rust stains on church walls and knots on tree bark. There's even been a cameo, sharing top billing on a sonogram. But what I want to know is how do people know it's Jesus? No one knows what he looked like, the relevant religious documents do not have one iota of physical description, and he left no images on contemporary paintings, sculpture or coins. Once he reached divine status during the late Roman Empire, Jewish proscriptions against graven images were still in force, so it seems pretty fair to say no one would have dared circulate his likeness, even if it had been available, until centuries after his Crucifixion. We can't even make an intelligent guess from the ethnography of the area, there was a great mixture of races in that part of the world in the first century, as there is today.

We can probably say with some certainty that Jesus was a charismatic individual, perhaps attractive or even imposing by the standards of his time. His ability to communicate to his followers and strangers would certainly have benefitted from a striking physical appearance. But we have no way of knowing for sure.

There are a lot of Jesus images around now, in religious art and church literature, and in the US at least, they all seem to cluster around an almost effeminately handsome wimpy Caucasian face with a neatly trimmed beard and a glossy and immaculately groomed pageboy hairdo. But of course, we have no reason to believe he looked like that, and I suspect he would have wryly amused if presented with that picture. The image we recognize today on sonograms and grilled cheese sandwiches seems to come to us from Rennaissance art, and can even be traced back to medieval and Byzantine iconography, but it must even have been obvious to artists of that era that they had no clue what he looked like. One theory is that the face comes to us from the Shroud of Turin, but I always thought that looked more like Burt Lancaster than the guys in Catholic pamphlets and the illos in Sunday School books. Another theory is the face owes its origin to the visage of the statue of Zeus in Olympia, one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Ironically, the temple and the statue were destroyed by early Christians because the graven image of the idol offended them.

Everything we know about the man comes from the New Testament, but none of the accounts of his life present there can be proven to have been written by his contemporaries. They are hearsay, at best, honest but hazy reports compiled from the dim memories of very old witnesses, or perhaps removed even further in time from the actual events described. No contemporary accounts outside the Gospels survive, and it is likely none were ever written. In fact, we know little about him. It is even possible he never existed at all, or that he is a composite character representing several men, but I personally do not accept this. I think there was a historical Jesus and that he initiated a great religion. Beyond that, I really do not know.

Even the languages he spoke are not clear from the record. He certainly knew Aramaic, the common tongue of his country. Perhaps he was conversant in Hebrew, due to his religious training. There is also a good chance he spoke Koine Greek, the lingua franca and trade tongue of the Hellenistic Levant. This explains his conversation with Pontius Pilate who as an educated Roman almost certainly spoke it as well as his native Latin. It is unlikely either spoke the other's native language, but of course, we really don't know. We do know that in those days it was not uncommon for even the humblest people to be fluent in several languages.

Still, artists use the traditional face as it has become accepted to identify the subject of their work. The most striking, and in a way, the most genuinely reverent likeness of Jesus I have ever seen myself was in, of all places, Playboy magazine, many years ago. It was the cover illustration for an article about Jesus, I cannot recall the issue, author or title, or even what the article was about. It shows the traditional representation of the face, Jesus's head is thrown back, and laughing; not a dignified smile, but a howling, thigh-slapping, diaphragm-cramping guffaw, the kind you get only very rarely. He is having such a good time he appears to be on the verge of tears, or pissing in his loincloth. John 11:35 tells us "Jesus Wept". But it is sad the Bible never tells us he laughed.