A class was shown several dozen art slides portraying Jesus in a variety of forms--African, Korean, Chinese--and then asked to describe what they thought Jesus looked like. Virtually everyone suggested he was tall (unlikely for a first-century Jew), most said handsome, and no one said overweight. They were then shown a BBC film on the life of Christ that featured a pudgy actor in the title role, and some in the class found it offensive. We prefer a tall, handsome, and, above all, slender Jesus.

One tradition dating back to the second century suggested Jesus was a hunchback. In the Middle Ages, Christians widely believed that Jesus had suffered from leprosy. Most Christians today would find such notions repulsive and perhaps heretical. Was he not a perfect specimen of humanity? Yet in all the Bible there is only one physical description of sorts, a prophecy written hundreds of years before Christ’s birth. Here is Isaiah’s portrayal, in the midst of a passage that the New Testament applies to the life of Jesus:

Just as there were many who were appalled at him--his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness . . . “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”