I like to imagine that Jesus looked like the young Benjamin Netanyahu.
Oh boy, Megyn....duck....
I didn’t know Bibi had olive skin and looked really Middle Eastern!
Well slap my thigh and call me Shirley!
Here is Jack Webb's assessment of Jesus' race.
“I like to imagine that Jesus looked like the young Benjamin Netanyahu.”
My image is an older Jackie Mason.
Yes, Jesus probably looked Middle-Eastern. Like a Sephardic Jew or an Arab perhaps.
Or a young version of Albert Einstein.
It’s about as plausible as anything that Jesus of Nazareth looked like a typical Nazarene. Which was Israel’s idea of trailer trash, if I am picking up on the New Testament context correctly.
I.e. Jesus was redneck before redneck was cool. The manual labor class (he was a carpenter) didn’t get a lot of respect. The big glory, to Israel, was in the literati. And the irony was... here was the Guy who, as God in eternity, breathed those holy books they were priding themselves over!
Anyone can imagine Jesus any way they want to, but for what it’s worth, there are plenty of blond and blue eyed people in the Middle East, as can be seen in Lebanon, and Jesus is of David’s lineage, which was supposedly noted for its fairness/redness of hair. So the idea that European depictions are false, but Ethiopian ones are true, or that he looks like this or that modern Jew, are almost all equally unprovable. So, whatever works for you.