Imagining Jesus, part one
Imagining God is a task beset with problems.
Painting an image of God is even more problematic.
Not only have there been laws against doing any such thing ...
Not only does the Second Commandment prohibit it ...
It's simply that God is so utterly other than anything we know or can imagine.
Whenever we talk about God we can only use metaphors and similes. We call God 'Father', but what we mean is that God is like a father.
Even that is thin ice. Anyone who imagines they can describe what God is like has missed the point (take it up with me after the service ...).
But imagining Jesus - creating a likeness of Jesus - has to be easier.
After all, we know that Jesus was a human being. We know that he was a male human being. We know that he didn't get much beyond 33 years of age. What's the problem?
Okay. Here we go.
Forensic anthropologists at Manchester University created a model of a typical (that is, unremarkable) 1st Century Palestinian male head, using three Semite skulls found by archaeologists in the region of Jerusalem. The skulls dated from around the time of Jesus.
Here it is.
No-one (except a few excitable journalists) claimed that this was the face of Jesus. The Manchester team simply declared that this what many 1st Century men from Palestine would have looked like. Biblical scholars pointed out that there was nothing unusual about the appearance of Jesus (Judas has to deliberately identify him in the Garden of Gethsemene, etc). There is every reason to think that Jesus looked something like this.
So how did we get from the Manchester image to Robert Powell?
