The earliest portraits of Jesus showed a beardless young man with short hair
The long-haired, bearded Jesus familiar from centuries of paintings did not exist for the first Christians. The oldest known portrait, found in Syria and dated to about 235, shows a clean-shaven young man with cropped hair, dressed in the everyday tunic and cloak of a Greco-Roman citizen.
The Gospels give almost no physical description. Apart from mentions of the tassels on his prayer shawl, nothing is said of his face or build, and the dazzling figure in Revelation, with hair white as wool and eyes like fire, is a vision rather than a likeness. Many first-century Jews read the commandment against graven images as ruling out any picture of people or animals, so no figurative art came out of Judea or Galilee in Jesus's lifetime. By the third century attitudes had loosened; the synagogue frescoes at Dura-Europos, around 240, are the earliest known Jewish figure art.
Early Christians, persecuted and wary of pagan idols, started with symbols: a fish, a peacock, an anchor. Stand-ins followed, such as Jonah, whose three days inside the whale foreshadowed the resurrection, or the Good Shepherd, a beardless youth carrying a sheep, modelled on the classical ram-bearer. Some catacomb and church images even show Jesus working miracles with a wand; the carved fifth-century doors of Rome's Santa Sabina are one example. Some read that as a wonder-worker's tool; others, like Lee M. Jefferson, see an echo of Moses's staff.
Theologians argued over whether he should look handsome at all. Justin and Tertullian, citing Isaiah, held that he was unremarkable; when the pagan Celsus mocked Christians around 180 for worshipping an ugly god, Origen countered with a psalm praising beauty. By the time of Jerome and Augustine, the consensus had swung to ideal beauty.
A bearded, long-haired type appeared around 300, borrowing from images of emperors, of Zeus, and of charismatic philosophers such as Apollonius of Tyana. It became standard in the East by the sixth century and much later in the West. Resistance persisted: in 306 the Synod of Elvira banned pictures in churches, a canon Calvinists later invoked to strip images away.
Source: Depiction of Jesus
