Jesus the Short King

Was Jesus short? A Clusterhuck investigation.

What did Jesus look like? For a lot of people in my circles, this question is usually answered in the negative. He wasn’t white. He didn’t have chestnut curls. He didn’t have blue eyes, beautiful abs or straight teeth. People who say these things are correct, but they sometimes say it with such smarmy condescension that it’s hard to care. 

In 2024, I think most normal Christians are probably aware that Jesus didn’t actually look like Prequel Obi-Wan. We, as a society, have moved beyond Billy Ray Jesus. The fact that The Chosen actually cast a person of Middle Eastern descent as Jesus is probably radicalizing a generation of normie Sunday School teachers as we speak. Whatever else you think of The Chosen (I haven’t seen it), that’s not a bad thing. Getting Jesus’ ethnicity right is valuable, because it helps us understand his context in the culture. 

But that will only get you so far. What did Jesus look like? I think of comic book art, where even good artists can fail to give their characters distinctive features beyond skin and hair color and maybe some sort of telltale trait (Clark Kent has a little hair curl on his forehead, for example). You can usually tell who’s who by the big red ‘S’ or bat ears, but without the costumes, these guys all kinda run together. This is how most of us picture Jesus — a stock character with long hair and a beard, and even his little white robe/red towel superhero uniform. Give our mental image of Jesus a haircut and a shave and he would literally just be a Guy.  

Shoutout to Olivier Coipel, an artist who does a great job giving his superheroes interesting, distinctive faces that suggest real personality underneath the capes and spandex. I think this is the sort of art I’d like to see used for Jesus — a face with some character. This was the goal of Richard Neave, an anthropologist who used an ancient Galilean skull to render an image of this guy, who you may have seen.

People claim that this picture shows what experts think Jesus looked like, but that’s not quite right. It’s just an image of what one random guy in ancient Israel looked like, and Neave was trying to push modern audiences to think beyond Stock Jesus with the Roman nose and Pattinson jawline.

What do we know? The long hair and beard are a little tricky, as most men in the Roman empire prized a clean shaved face and tidy hairline. (The long hair and luxurious beards we see on ancient art of Roman deities were considered a trait of gods; not necessarily indicative of fashions at the time.) But it does seem that a little facial scruff was associated with philosophers and other guys who had more cerebral things to do than shave. Plus, Jesus, being itinerant, probably didn’t have access to a barbershop. So he might have been a little scruffier than your standard guy, but not Jared Leto or anything.   

Was he ugly? It’s possible. The Bible says basically nothing about Jesus’ physical appearance, but Origen quotes Celsus, who says early Christians remembered their Messiah as being “ugly and undistinguished.” This was about 150 years after Jesus, so it’s hard to know how much weight to give it. But it’s safe to say that nobody was picturing Jesus as particularly handsome until later generations got their mitts on his legacy. 

A fun fact that will bore pretty much everyone at a party is that historical and biblical evidence alike suggest Jesus was short. Maybe even very short. The average height of a middle eastern man in this time was about five foot five inches, so most were already shorter than your average contemporary guy. But Jesus may have been extra short. 

The biblical evidence for this is fun, and mostly comes from the work of Dr. Isaac Soon’s article “The Little Messiah,” which centers on the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:3. Everyone knows Zacchaeus was a wee little man, but what Soon’s theory presupposes is: What if he wasn't? Luke says Zacchaeus "was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature." 

Obviously, the Church has long assumed this meant Zacchaeus was short. But as you can see, it's just as likely that it was referring to Jesus. The ambiguity in the English translation is no clearer in the original Greek. Maybe Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree because he was too short to see over the crowd. But then again, maybe he needed a higher vantage point because he couldn't see the short king of kings through the crowd. Soon argues that ancient readers would have assumed the latter. 

And that’s not all. In his own writing, Origen wrote that Celsus says Christian tradition remembered Jesus as “little.” He also drew comparisons between Jesus and Aesop and Socrates — both of whom were famously short. So if the average guy at this time was five and a half feet tall, how short would someone have to be for them to be meaningfully short? You do the math.

I’m not sure any of this really matters for people reading this. I assume the idea of Jesus being short and unattractive would be personally offensive to a certain type of American Christian Man whose religious practice is just retrofitting Jordan Peterson bullshit with evangelical jargon. On the other hand, the idea of Jesus being short is probably cause for celebration among the short king community. I am 5’10”, the most boring height, but I support our short kings and release Jesus to them with a glad heart. 

If it’s valuable at all, it’s valuable for those of us who want to stop thinking of Jesus as a mascot or a convenient vessel for our socio-political aspirations. Voltaire has that line that says something to the effect of “God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to return the favor ever since.” Thinking about Jesus’ appearance can help us get out of this cycle. We don’t really know what Jesus looked like, but it helps to think about the fact that he looked like something. The clearer we can get it in our heads that Jesus was an actual, unique individual, the harder it is to remold him into something convenient for us.