Close your eyes and picture Jesus. Most people see someone immediately: a face, a complexion, a kind of hair. Church historian Dr. Ryan Reeves, who teaches theology and history at Gordon-Conwell Seminary’s Jacksonville campus, gives a short answer for why that someone is so often white. Older European painters drew Jesus the way they drew the people around them, and in his account the deliberately white Jesus is “very much 20th century,” shaped by a message about success. This guide spends little time on that history. It asks the harder question underneath: what would it take to see Jesus as he actually is, and not as an image shaped after ourselves? You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a group over one or two meetings. Bring a Bible (passages are quoted from the King James Version), a pen, and a sheet of paper you are willing to write on honestly.
Start with the picture you already have
Before reading further, write a description of Jesus as you picture him. Be concrete: face, skin, hair, build, expression, clothing. Then add his manner. Is he gentle, stern, calm, amused, tired? Under each detail, note where it came from as best you can tell: a church window, a children’s Bible, a film, a sermon, nowhere you can name.
Keep this sheet; you will return to it. In a group, do not ask anyone to read theirs aloud. People describe more honestly when the page stays private.
What the text gives, and what it withholds
The Gospels never describe what Jesus looked like. They report what he said, where he went, whom he touched and how he died. They give no height, complexion, eye color or hair length. Every portrait you have seen fills a space the text leaves empty.
The text does place him in history. Matthew opens, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). Jesus belonged to a people and a family line, a Jewish man of the first-century eastern Mediterranean. In his conversation with Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, Reeves makes the same historical point: the first Christians were “Semitic people who converted everyone else first.”
John adds the claim that makes this matter: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Jesus had a real body among a real people. The Gospel writers simply chose restraint. They show his glory through his words and works and leave his face undescribed.
Observe: Read John 1:14 again. What does John say the disciples “beheld”? Notice that the answer is not a physical feature.
The oldest version of the problem
Making God in our image is an old habit, and Scripture names it repeatedly.
Isaiah 44:9-20 is a satire of idol making. The prophet follows a craftsman who cuts down a tree, burns half of it to cook his dinner, and carves the other half into a god. He “maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man” (Isaiah 44:13). The idol’s shape comes entirely from its maker. It looks like a handsome human because a human designed it.
Psalm 50 moves the problem from wood to the mind. God addresses people who recite his covenant while living carelessly: “thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes” (Psalm 50:21). No statue is involved. The error is a mental picture of God that matches the person holding it, and God answers by correcting it.
Paul describes people who “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things” (Romans 1:23). Read with care: Paul describes the idolatry of the nations as the first step of an argument that ends in Romans 3 with everyone under sin. He is not writing about paintings of Jesus. Applying his words to our mental portraits extends a principle; it is not the passage’s direct subject.
Observe: In each passage, who supplies the shape of the false god? What makes Psalm 50 different from the other two?
How the old problem shows up in a portrait of Jesus
Reeves brings this pattern into Christian art with a distinction. Older European painters often made Jesus look lighter than a Semitic man would have looked. But, Reeves says, “they’re not self-consciously saying, Jesus is me.” Lisa Fields frames it the same way: “art depicts life.” A painter who had seen only one kind of face painted the human figure he knew.
Reeves offers a test for any image, speaking of the artist: “what is the author trying to say?” One answer is legitimate in his view: “Are you trying to say that Jesus can be identified with” by every people? That impulse explains why Christians in many cultures have painted him with their own features.
The danger begins when the image is built to make us comfortable. Reeves describes a 20th-century shift in which health and prosperity teaching presented Jesus as the model of the successful life. His diagnosis reads like a commentary on Psalm 50:21: “Some of that art in the 20th century in particular capitulated, this idea that Jesus is like us in every way, not we have to become like him in every way.” The result, he says, is that “It’s purposely making him look like, if you’re not like this, you’re not in”.
The warning applies to well-meant versions too. Trying to make Jesus resemble us “makes Jesus tame.” Reeves explains: “It makes it where we’re the one controlling him.” And again: “And he doesn’t really challenge us because he just looks like the ideal version of what we think we are.”
So the real issue is who holds control. Isaiah’s craftsman controlled the shape of his god, and a tame Jesus is one we have shaped to agree with us. Recalling John Calvin, Reeves names the source: “our hearts are factories for idols.” He adds that “the idol doesn’t come to you, you make it”.
Observe: Pick one image of Jesus you listed on your sheet, from a painting, film or book. Apply Reeves’s test to it. What does it seem to be trying to say about Jesus? Does it invite every people to identify with him, or does it present one kind of person as the ideal? Then ask the same question of your own mental picture.
A test of method: two passages people use for portraits
It is tempting to correct the white Jesus by finding a better physical description in the Bible. Two passages are often used this way, and reading their genre shows why neither works as a portrait.
Isaiah 53:2 says of the servant, “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” This is Hebrew poetry about the servant’s lowliness and rejection. The Bible itself connects the servant to Jesus in Acts 8:32-35, where Philip explains Isaiah 53 to the Ethiopian official and “preached unto him Jesus.” Still, the verse says nothing about complexion. It says the servant was not the kind of figure people admire at first glance, which cuts against any portrait designed to be admired.
Revelation 1:14-15 describes the risen Christ: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace.” Some readers take the wool or the brass as evidence about his skin or hair. But this is apocalyptic vision. White hair like wool echoes the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:9 and points to eternity and purity; fiery eyes and burning feet picture searching judgment and glory. John is overwhelmed, and in verse 17 he falls at Christ’s feet “as dead.”
Read in context, both passages push the same way. The biblical Jesus is either the lowly servant we would have overlooked or the glorified Lord we cannot look at steadily.
The question about the second commandment
Exodus 20:4 reads, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Verse 5 continues, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”
Reeves notes that some Reformed Christians, some Anglicans and others want no depictions of Jesus at all, and that some will leave the baby out of a Christmas manger scene. The disagreement turns on the incarnation. One side argues that since the invisible God took a visible human body in Jesus, who “is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), depicting that body need not break the commandment. The other side argues that no painter knows what Jesus looked like, so any picture is a human invention presented as God, which the commandment still forbids.
Faithful Christians land on both sides, and Reeves does not settle it. Their advice to stop painting and “talk about the Jesus of the Scriptures” may not be final: “Whether or not that’s the answer, I don’t know.” But he values it: “it’s at least good medicine sometimes for the problem.”
For group leaders: if your group includes people from traditions that use icons and people from traditions that avoid images, let each restate the other side’s reasoning before anyone evaluates it.
A practice: auditing your portrait
Return to your sheet and work through it in three passes.
- Beside each physical detail, write S if Scripture states it, A if it came from art or film, M if you suspect it simply resembles you or someone you admire. Most physical details will not get an S. That is the point of the exercise.
- Read Mark 10:13-22 and Mark 11:15-18. Next to each quality of manner on your sheet, note whether these passages confirm it, complicate it, or contradict it.
- Write one sentence naming a trait of Jesus from those passages that your picture had left out. Ask whether you left it out because it was unfamiliar or because it was uncomfortable.
Alone, this takes about twenty minutes. In a group, give people the time to work silently, then invite anyone who wishes to share only the final sentence.
Questions for discussion
- Isaiah 44 and Psalm 50:21 describe two kinds of idol making, one carved and one imagined. Which seems more common among Christians today, and why?
- When you applied Reeves’s test to an image on your sheet, was the answer clear or hard to tell? What makes an artist’s intent difficult to read from a picture?
- Paul’s argument in Romans 1 concerns the nations’ idolatry, not religious art. How far can Romans 1:23 responsibly be applied to our mental pictures of Jesus, and where would applying it go too far?
- In the Mark passages, where does Jesus challenge the person in front of him? What would it look like for him to challenge you that way?
- Why might the Gospel writers have described Jesus’s words and actions so fully while saying nothing about his appearance?
- After reading Isaiah 53:2 and Revelation 1:14-15 in context, what do you think each passage is actually trying to show?
Where the reading leads
Idols are made to look like their makers. The true God reshapes the people who look at him. Paul puts it this way: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Beholding comes first, and change follows. Reeves’s phrase about becoming “like him in every way” describes exactly this.
The remedy for a flattering portrait is time spent looking at the Jesus the Gospels present, until his words correct our picture. This week, read one Gospel chapter a day. Each day, write down one thing Jesus said or did that you would not have predicted from the image you started with. At the end of the week, read the list beside your original sheet.