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Are beards a symbol of ugliness?
by Scott Gilbreath ~ January 4th, 2009
I came across this disconcerting passage in How To Read A Church by Richard Taylor.
Images of Jesus with a beard may also have developed through a wish to symbolize ugliness. There was some debate in the early Church as to whether Jesus was in appearance the most handsome, or the most repulsive of men. One view was that since God is supremely beautiful, and Jesus was God on earth, so Jesus too must have been supremely beautiful. The opposing view was that God the Son took on himself all human misery when he entered the world, and so had a horrible, diseased appearance. This ‘ugly’ view claimed support from the Prophet Isaiah: ‘he had … nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others … surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases’ (Isaiah 53:2-4). Bearded and unbearded images of Jesus appeared concurrently until around the eleventh century. The theory runs that during this period, if an artist wanted to emphasize Jesus’ divinity then he would take the ‘beauty’ side of the debate, and symbolize this by having Jesus beardless, whereas he would portray him as bearded if he wanted to emphasize Jesus’ humanity and supposed ugliness. From around the eleventh century, images of Jesus with a beard took the ascendance.
Images of a bearded Jesus originated from a need to represent human ugliness? Surely not.
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January 4th, 2009 at 04:09 PM
It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I tend to think of Jesus as looking like Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ.
January 4th, 2009 at 04:21 PM
He is kind of ugly.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:46 PM
So I take it your beard isn’t a deliberate theological symbol of human misery?
January 5th, 2009 at 12:52 PM
No, human depravity is more like it.