Replies

Actually, the people of the Middle East look very much as they did in Christ’s time (at least if one looks at Sephardic rather than Ashkenazic Jews).

The most traditional Orthodox icons of the Virgin Mary are patterned on three which the Evangelist Luke painted from life while Mary was still alive. Orthodox icons of Christ in the style dominant in Greece, Cyprus and among Christians in the Middle East are all patterned on the “Icon-not-made-by-hands” and the style that was dominant in Palestine before iconoclasm (cf. the famous icon of Christ from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai).

(One of those things St. John refers to in his Gospel as Christ having done something not recorded therein appears to have been sending an image of His face miraculously imprinted on a cloth which He pressed to His face to King Abgar of Edessa to cure his leprosy. King Abgar believed that merely to see Jesus image would cure him, and, the account tell us that his faith was not disappointed. The cloth, called the “Icon-not-made-by-hands” was preserved at Edessa, later moved to Constantinople, stolen by the Crusaders, and kept in Paris until it was destroyed in the name of “Reason” by the French Revolutionaries. Icons depicting it, well sort of, with Christ’s only shown on a cloth, are now called “the Icon-not-made-by-hands”.)

As an Orthodox Christian, I firmly believe the best of our iconographic tradition, as I described it above, keeps a recollection of what Christ and the Virgin Mary looked like during their earthly lives. And, from what I can see from the article, the reconstructions from the Shroud of Turin agree with our tradition.

The inherited factors of inhabitants of a given region change little over time without much outside factors such as war, intermarriage and famine/diseases. People were much shorter then than now. IIRC, the figure on the shroud is over six feet tall, which would practically make him a giant among the populace of the first century, including the Romans. According to first century Josephus, in his description of Jesus, he was not unlike anyone else in the crowd, which fits with the description of the prophecy of Isaiah:

Isaiah 53

1 Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
3 He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
4 Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He opened not His mouth;
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
And as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
8 He was taken from prison and from judgment,
And who will declare His generation?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.
9 And they[a] made His grave with the wicked—
But with the rich at His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was any deceit in His mouth.
10 Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him;
He has put Him to grief.
When You make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
And the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.
11 He shall see the labor of His soul,[b]and be satisfied.
By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,
For He shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great,
And He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
Because He poured out His soul unto death,
And He was numbered with the transgressors,
And He bore the sin of many,
And made intercession for the transgressors.