In his A Short History of Christianity, Geoffrey Blainey points out that, “by the standard of the times, his life is astonishingly documented”. A man of unremarkable background who only emerged from complete obscurity in the last years of his life, and even then, only in a backwater province of a sprawling empire – yet at least four biographies were written within 50 years of his death.
But of all the wealth of detail that the early writers recorded about Jesus – or Yeshua ben Joseph, as they would have known him –nothing was written about what he looked like. This should be no surprise, as the Gospel writers were most concerned with what Jesus did and said. But ours is a strongly visual culture, especially in the age of celebrity. We’re obsessed with physical appearance.
Jesus’ appearance, then, has become the subject of much debate. In the 1960s cartoonist Ron Cobb satirised the clashing iconography of Jesus. Interestingly, his ‘historic’ Jesus is remarkably close to a modern scientific reconstruction of the sort of first century Jewish peasant probably looked like.
But more recent scholarship has taken on a rather more obscure aspect of Jesus’ physical appearance: How tall was he?
By studying what the Bible does not say about Jesus and by examining the physical attribute of people who lived during his time, scholars have a pretty good idea of how tall Jesus was.
The Bible offers a couple of sparse details about what Jesus Christ looked like. But it doesn’t say anything about how tall Jesus was. To some scholars, that’s key – it means that he was of average height.
Notably, the Bible writers tended to comment on peoples’ height only if it was unusual in some way. Goliath’s and Saul’s tallness, for instance, or the “short man” Zacchaeus, described in Luke 19:3-4. So, if Jesus’ height isn’t mentioned, it’s probably because it just wasn’t notable.
So, how tall was Jesus? He was probably of average height for his day. And to figure out his exact measurements, some scholars have looked to people who lived in the Middle East in the first century.
If Jesus Christ’s height was average for his day, then it’s not too hard to determine.
“Jesus would have been a man of Middle Eastern appearance,” explained Joan Taylor, who wrote the book What Did Jesus Look Like? “In terms of height, an average man of this time stood 166 cm (five feet five inches) tall.”
It’s all guesswork, of course, but given that none of his peers or immediate successors thought it particularly remarkable, we can guess that Jesus was therefore physically unremarkable. After all, in Matthew 26:47-56, the betrayer Judas has to point Jesus out to the Roman soldiers in Gethsemane. Which suggests that he didn’t stand out among the disciples.
Today, we have a fairly good idea of how Jesus Christ probably looked. Living in the Middle East in the first century, he was likely between five-foot-one and five-foot-five. He probably had dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes. Taylor postulates that he also kept his hair short and wore a simple tunic.
All That’s Interesting
We’ll never know for sure, of course – and it doesn’t matter. Unlike modern celebrities, Jesus didn’t become famous for his smouldering good looks or killer abs. He was the teacher who preached a message so remarkable that it has captured the imagination of up to a third of humanity for 2,000 years.
