Was Jesus White?

Usually around Christmas and Easter, many in the media feature something about Jesus. This year, many chose His appearance, based on a professional study done in 2001.

That study was attempting to discover what the true race and face of Jesus might have been. The study, sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corporation, France Three and Discovery Channel, used one of three first-century Jewish skulls from a leading department of forensic science in Israel.

A face was constructed using forensic anthropology by Richard Neave, a retired medical artist from the Unit of Art in Medicine at the University of Manchester.
The face that Neave constructed was a model of a Galilean man. If Jesus looked like that man, He would have had a broad face and large nose, and differed significantly from the traditional depictions of Jesus in renaissance art.

In another study, the National Police in Italy created a digital image of what they believe Jesus Christ looked like as a young child, based on computer forensics and the world’s most famous relic, The Shroud of Turin.

Using the Shroud, the supposed burial cloth of Jesus, police investigators generated a photo-fit image from the negative facial image on the material. And from this they reversed the ageing process to create an image of a young Jesus, by reducing the size of the jaw, raising the chin and straightening the nose.

The technique effectively reverses the method that Italian police use to generate current likenesses of criminals, including senior mob bosses, for whom new photo-fit images are needed when they have been on the run for decades.

Like you, I am asking, why this insatiable interest in Jesus? Why not in Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus? Why not in Herod the Great? For centuries, scholars want to know more and more about Jesus. What is it about Jesus that generates this interest?

According to the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, “some people have made transformational changes in one department of human learning or in one aspect of human life. But Jesus Christ changed virtually every aspect of human life.” Exploring such claims would be much more profitable than trying to determine the appearance of Jesus.

The influence of Jesus on the world is immeasurable. Dr. James Allan Francis put it so well in his famous narrative – One Solitary Life.

He was born in an obscure village
The child of a peasant woman
He grew up in another obscure village
Where he worked in a carpenter shop
Until he was thirty when public opinion
turned against him

He never wrote a book
He never held an office
He never went to college
He never visited a big city
He never travelled more than two hundred miles
From the place where he was born
He did none of the things
Usually associated with greatness
He had no credentials but himself

His friends ran away
One of them denied him
He was turned over to his enemies
And went through the mockery of a trial
He was nailed to a cross between two thieves
While dying, his executioners gambled                    
for his clothing
The only property he had on earth

When he was dead
He was laid in a borrowed grave
Through the pity of a friend

Nineteen centuries have come and gone
And today Jesus is the central figure                          
of the human race
And the leader of mankind's progress
All the armies that have ever marched
All the navies that have ever sailed
All the parliaments that have ever sat
All the kings that ever reigned put together
Have not affected the life of mankind on earth
As powerfully as that one solitary life.

Since His death and resurrection, the followers of Jesus have made more changes for good than any other movement or system in history. Space would not allow me to expand on the Christian influence on the history of health-care, university education, abolition of slavery, modern science, civil liberties, capitalism and free enterprise.

When asked to arrest Jesus, the Temple guards replied to the chief priests and Pharisees: “No one ever spoke the way this man does.” Now, after almost 2,000 years, that statement is still true.