With sincere apologies to Skuzzy...
The fact that we will never be able to accurately represent Jesus and Mary, and the fact that we inevitably remold them in our own image, was only one of the many reasons that the early church did not make Icons and Images of them. Certainly the apostolic church didn't, and they at least
knew what they looked like. It is possibly because the inspired Apostles knew our tendency towards idolatry that they didn't leave behind a single physical description of Christ or his mother from which we could construct a portrait.
I wrote some time ago:
"the only wise God went to great lengths not to leave us with any description of the physical appearance of His Son lest we fall into the sin of image making. Therefore all of our representations of Jesus are inevitably speculations usually based upon our own desires. We create an image of Jesus that says more about the Jesus we
want than the Jesus whom God
sent.
For instance, isn't it remarkable that the Jesus of The Passion of the Christ, as in almost all physical representations of Christ, is tall, slim, and handsome? Why should not The Son of David (Luke 18:38) have been a relatively small man like His great ancestor? It never seems to have occurred to most image-makers that Jesus could be relatively short, or stout, or even have had a receding hairline. This is in spite of the fact that one of the few details the Bible does give us about Christ's appearance is that "He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him." (Is. 53:2b) The fact that we have any concept of what Jesus looks like and that Gibson's Jesus looks like the traditional Jesus, is a testament to the abiding impact of past iconography. While the Gospels, purposely leave out any description of Jesus that we might use to construct an idol, people have created an image of Jesus that has become almost an industry standard, and it is solely for that reason rather than any basis in fact that audiences would have been outraged had Gibson cast Danny DeVito and not James Caviezel in the leading role. "
and...
"Jesus is the Lord of the Nations. In Him the middle wall of separation is decisively broken down and "there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free." When we make a picture of Christ we inevitably portray him as representative of one race or another. Mel Gibson's Jesus, for instance, is obviously very white. We have once again created a false Jesus that one race can feel comfortable with. He is "one of us." While this is comforting to members of that particular race, it is inevitably irritating to people of other cultures and can actually be a barrier to communicating the gospel to other nations and races. As a result of all the images of the Scandinavian Hippy that westerners have called Jesus, there has been an inevitable backlash and now images of Asian, Middle-Eastern, African, etc. Jesus' are being demanded, and these counter-images offend many Westerners. "That's not Jesus!" they angrily proclaim, because they know what Jesus looks like - they've been seeing images of him since they were children. He's tall, and blond, has a beard and a vaguely sorrowful expression.
The sad thing about this whole argument over what Jesus looked like is that it is so needless. The Apostolic church turned the whole world upside-down via the preaching of the Gospel. Not once did they use pictures of Jesus. What would Peter or Paul say coming into one of our churches and seeing one of our many images of Jesus? Obviously they wouldn't recognize it as the image of the Savior they knew. Wouldn't they assume that this was yet another example of the kind of Hellenistic idolatry they were so familiar, "Men of America, I perceive that in all things you are very religious..."
* Aren't we best served proclaiming the gospel of a Christ who is too glorious to be portrayed as a mere man from any one race?"
- SEAGOON
* see this is if you don't get the analogy
