Jesus Quarterly

It's Easter Sunday, the papers and the airwaves are filled with images of Jesus.
I turn on the tv and there before me, is Jesus Christ Superstar, the smash musical from 1973. At the time, I was only 8 years old, so I didn't really pay that close attention to it or it's lead. Now that I am grown, I can take a moment to make an observation or ask a question or two. In this version, Jesus is characterized as a stunning but discontented hippie, prone to strong emotions and outbursts of passion. In Gibson's Passion, our Jesus was above average in looks with piercing blue eyes and a shock of black hair, a toned carpenters body, wreaking of masculinity and power.
It occurred to me the other day that every portrayal we have ever seen, whether in print, stained glass or film, Jesus is always viewed as "hot". Why? Is there any proof of this in the bible? (Old or New Testament) Was he really that good looking? Is this a ridiculous question? Are we once again putting too much emphasis on looks? Is this what influences people over words? I did some checking and here's what I found:
Our earliest written source, the New Testament, tells us nothing about Jesus' appearance: It never mentions the color of Jesus' eyes, the length of his hair or his beard, his height, his weight or any other physical attribute. So some early Christians turned to the Old Testament to find clues to how the messiah should look. The contrasting descriptions they found might be the source for the belief that Jesus should be depicted two distinct ways. The second-century church fathers Justin Martyr and Origen point to Isaiah 53 as evidence that Jesus was unattractive: "He [the messiah] has no form nor glory, nor beauty when we beheld him, but his appearance was without honor and inferior to that of the sons of men." At the same time, Origen and others cite the portrayal of God in Psalm 45 as testimony that Jesus was the "most handsome of men" (Psalm 45:2).Additionally: He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
Isaiah 53:2 (New International Version)
I look at it this way, it's possible that it's easier to believe that Jesus was above average in looks and this is what endeared him to his followers. It's widely agreed that attractive people have a broader influence on society. Christian artists appropriated pagan figure types (Gods)in their portayals of Jesus, therefore transforming their meaning and how we have come to view him. In his beardless portraits (this is not widely how we see him), Jesus bears a striking physical resemblance to certain junior or transitional pagan gods, including Apollo, Dionysus, Hercules, the sons of Jupiter and other semi-divine heroes who are associated with working wonders, shepherding souls through the underworld, bringing light from the darkness, being born through miraculous or divine conception, or dying and then rising again. The resemblance is so strong that art historians have at times been unsure whether an image depicts Jesus or a pagan deity.
So, in image and text we find two contrasting images of Jesus: youthful/mature and handsome/ugly. But what do they mean?
One possibility, as art historian Thomas Mathews of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, puts it, is that the two images show Jesus as winner in a clash between the pagan and Christian gods. By subsuming the attributes of the young and old pagan gods, Jesus triumphs over both. He is everything they are, but more and all rolled into one divine being. Therefore, the art presents Jesus as both Jupiter and Apollo, both Serapis and Dionysus and greater than them all.
Augustine suggested a second possibility, that everyone has a different image of Jesus. He wrote: The physical face of the Lord is pictured with infinite variety by countless imaginations, though whatever it was like he certainly had only one. Nor as regards the faith we have in the Lord Jesus Christ is it in the least relevant to salvation what our imaginations picture him like. What does matter is that we think of him as a man.
Perhaps it's true then, people saw in him exactly what they wanted to, in that, he represented everything they were not and therefore, his word had greater influence over them. Afterall, he brought salvation and healing into peoples lives. Was it the color of his eyes that accomplished this? Could it have been the muscles in his arms? The tan of his skin? His chiseled features? Were his disciples so drawn to him simply because of his gaze? Perhaps for all of these reasons, perhaps none. If thinking of him as good looking helps, then I am all for it. Afterall, if we were to be repulsed by the divine, that would be the perfect definition of irony.