What Did Jesus Look Like? by Joan E. Taylor

Author:Joan E. Taylor [Taylor, Joan E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780567671516
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 63 Gathering of philosophers (first century CE), mosaic, from the House of the T. Siminius Stephanus, Pompeii. Museo Archeologico di Napoli, inv. no. 124545.

Given this, they may have ascribed to him some human imperfections of appearance, as with other philosophers. Aesop was remembered as being misshapen and odd-looking.32 There is also the prototype of Socrates, who is considered to have been balding, pot-bellied and ugly (e.g. Plato, Symposium 215a; Xenophon, Symposium 2:19; 5:1–10; Aristophanes, Clouds 362–63), looking much like the god Silenus.33 Numerous portrait busts of Socrates make this point (Figure 64). The Socrates tradition may be at work in regard to another aspect of Irenaeus’ description of the portrayal of Jesus: that it was Pilate who had an image of Jesus made. While it is tempting to consider the Pilate cycle at this point, particularly the Gospel of Nicodemus/Acts of Pilate, a notion of the condemning officer commissioning an image of the executed man replicates the story of Socrates: Diogenes Laertius (Lives 2:43) mentions that there was a bronze statue of Socrates made after his execution, crafted by the sculptor Lysippus, which was commissioned by the remorseful Athenian council and set up in the Pompeion. There may then have been some story told by the Carpocratians of a repentant Pilate doing the same, though it is not found in any extant part of the Pilate cycle as we have it.34

Whatever the case, it is not Celsus who makes conclusions about Jesus’ appearance independently. He was representing what ‘they (= the Christians) say’, and some of his source information at this point appears Carpocratian.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.