Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (8 page)

Jesus is the most recognizable bearded man in Western civilization. Though he has been portrayed in a variety of ways over the centuries—laughing or weeping, with lighter or darker skin, more or less thin—one can always count on his flowing hair and medium-length beard. Jesus simply wouldn’t look like Jesus without it. The consistency of this image over time provides a false sense of authenticity, as if we knew what he really looked like. We don’t. The bearded Christ is not a portrait; it is cultural convention developed over a very long period of time. In the first centuries of Christian history, believers experimented with different images of Jesus, and during this time it was more common to see him without a beard than with one. How and why Jesus’s beard became an essential part of his image reveals a good deal about the meaning Christian civilization has assigned to facial hair. The bearded Christ is the product of a time when theology and symbolism were artists’ prime motives. The face of Christ was meant to convey something of the nature of a man who was both human and divine. To tell the story of Jesus and his beard, it is best to begin at the end.

As his followers grew in number, the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, found himself in conflict with both Jewish and Roman authorities. The Romans had little tolerance for disorder, and though they hardly cared about religious disputes among their tumultuous Jewish subjects, they were brutal in the defense of their authority. When Jesus was denounced by religious leaders as a threat, the Romans were content to put him to death. A Roman execution was a public, elaborate, drawn-out affair—a true festival of pain. In 71 BCE, after Spartacus’s great slave revolt in Italy was crushed by Roman armies, six thousand rebels died in slow agony on six thousand crosses stretching for mile after mile from the gates of Rome. This form of torture was particularly agonizing, lasting many painful hours before death arrived by asphyxiation. The Gospels report that Jesus’s anguish began when soldiers of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem tossed a purple robe on the condemned prisoner’s shoulders and a crown of thorns on his head. They mocked him with blows and spit and derisively scrawled “This is the King of the Jews” on his cross. After nine hours of misery it was finished.

After he was buried, rumors spread that Jesus had come back from the dead, though some of his own followers found this hard to believe. Near the end of his Gospel account, St. Luke tells of two disciples who were walking to a village near Jerusalem debating the recent end of the Jesus movement. A man came up to them and asked what they were discussing. The apostles were surprised that the stranger was so poorly informed about recent events in the city. They told him of Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion, and their disappointment in the death of the supposed liberator of Israel. There were dubious reports he was alive, but they had not seen him. The newcomer was astonished at their despair. Did they not know that the Messiah was to suffer first before entering glory? Reaching the village, the two disciples asked the stranger to stay with them for the night. When the newcomer sat down for supper, broke the bread, and said the blessing, they suddenly recognized him as the risen Lord. Only when he reenacted the last supper did he become seen and known. At this moment of realization, however, Jesus vanished from sight.

Luke was writing for Christians several generations removed from the time of Christ. No one living had seen him, nor had the faithful preserved
a physical description of the “Son of God.” In this little story, Luke was assuring believers that the physical absence of Christ was not a problem; after all, even his followers had failed to identify him after the crucifixion. It was important only that the faithful know Christ’s teaching and remain in ritual communion with him. In other words, Christians must see by faith rather than with their eyes.

In spite of Luke’s admonitions, Christians had an unquenchable desire to see Christ for themselves, and to represent him in human form. This desire was complicated not only by a lack of eyewitness accounts, but also by his composite nature: according to doctrine settled by the Council of Nicea in the fourth century, Jesus was both wholly human and wholly divine. He was, therefore, a paradoxical being who was difficult to explain, much less visualize. Not surprisingly, early symbols of Christ were abstract, such as a fish or a stylized “good shepherd” modeled on conventional depictions of Hermes, the patron god of shepherds. Even so, portraits of a human Jesus proliferated. A letter attributed to Eusebius, the influential bishop of Caesarea in Palestine during the early 300s, describes his having seen many old paintings of Christ and the apostles Peter and Paul that believers had placed in their homes; in particular, he remembers one woman bringing him an image of Paul and Christ “in the guise of philosophers” (which was to say, with long beards). Eusebius confiscated the painting from the woman, declaring that such images diminished the sublime majesty of Christ.
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Eusebius told this story in his response to Constantia, the sister of the Roman emperor Constantine, who had asked him to send her a true likeness of Christ. The bishop, of course, declined, insisting that there could be no true image, only an inadequate rendering of his brief time on earth “in the form of a slave.”
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Constantia, however, might be forgiven for expressing a common yearning to come into the presence of the human Christ. The doctrines of the church, after all, affirmed that he had been a man in the fullest sense. Was it not right to imagine him that way in art?

For the first five centuries of Christian art, Jesus was more likely than not to be beardless because this image best suited Roman sensibilities. Early Christians worked from what they knew, and this was representations
of pagan gods such as Apollo, Hermes, or Sol Invictus. In classical art, these gods were depicted with long, loose locks, and smooth, youthful faces that indicated their freedom from aging and death. It made perfect sense to think of Jesus in the same way. One of the most popular early representations of Christ was as the good shepherd, usually a curly-haired young man carrying a lamb to safety across his shoulders (
figure 4.1
). The Gospel of St. John has Jesus say, “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10:11). With this image in mind, Christians quite naturally pictured Christ looking like Hermes, the messenger god, a frequent emissary between mortals and gods who was also a patron of travelers and herdsmen.
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Artists often showed Hermes lovingly carrying a lamb on his shoulders, and Christians followed suit. The parallels between Hermes and Christ were irresistible: both were divine messengers and shepherds of souls. Ancient Christians also drew a connection between Christ and Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic experiences. Jesus’s first miracle, after all, had been turning water into wine.
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According to legend, both Hermes and Dionysus had, like Christ, passed into the underworld and returned again to the living. In art both gods were rendered in classical fashion as immortal youths, impervious to aging and death. Their long, flowing hair was another late classical convention intended to suggest abundance of life and vitality. It made perfect sense to early Christians that Christ would look like these gods.

Still another association was with the god Sol Invictus (Invincible Sun) whose worship was instituted by the Roman emperor in 228. As in the case of Hermes and Dionysus, biblical and theological formulas helped make this connection, for Christ was said to be “the light of the world” (Matthew 4:16) and the “sun of justice” (Matthew 5:45; also John 1:4–5, 9). A mosaic dating from the late third century, found under the Vatican, shows Christ in the image of the Sun-God, with the characteristic rays emanating from his head. Sol was often equated with Apollo, the god of youth, wisdom, and light, and so it was natural for Sol to be represented, once again, as a long-haired, beardless youth. Whether Christ was compared to the shepherd god, the god of wine, or the sun god, it made sense to see Christ as youthful and beardless.

By 300, as we have seen, Roman emperors were shaving again, in imitation of the early emperor-gods Julius Caesar and Augustus. A beardless Christ would therefore look like an emperor as well as a god.
This would fit particularly well with the overarching theme of St. Luke’s gospel, which presented Christ as the true king who has come into the world to supplant mortal rulers.

Beyond their evocation of imperial and cultic images, Christian artists had a practical use for the youthful Christ figure. When they depicted scenes from the gospels, a smooth-faced Christ would appear godlike in contrast to ordinary bearded men.
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A striking example of this effect is seen in the carvings on a sarcophagus created in the year 353 (
figure 4.2
). This stone burial box served as both tomb and memorial to Junius Bassus, a Roman official and Christian convert, and was decorated with richly carved scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Though the stories and characters in these scenes are biblical, the visual language is distinctly Roman. The figures appear in Roman garb, and each scene is set in a framework of classical Roman architecture. In the center, Christ appears as ruler of the world, seated on the vault of heaven (held up by the sky god Caelus), looking like an emperor-god, with the written law or Gospels in one hand. At his side are two apostles, who are differentiated from their master by their ordinary short hair and curly beards. Christ, with his rounded cheeks appears, in fact, to be little more than a teenager. The designer was clearly more worried about making him appear too old than too young. Though strange to the modern eye, it was sensible to the Roman audience, because Christ looked more like a god than those around him.

Of course, long hair and beardlessness were not the only ways ancient artists indicated divinity. The nimbus, or halo, had been used to mark the divine status of emperors, and in Christian painting it was now assigned to Christ and the saints. Some images had Jesus surrounded by an aureola, a sort of halo around the entire body, which was borrowed from very ancient traditions originating beyond Europe. Beardlessness complemented these symbols. It was like a halo in that it distinguished the extraordinary from the ordinary face.

This is not to say that Jesus never appeared with a beard in these early centuries. Bishop Eusebius, as we recall, confiscated a picture of Jesus with a long beard. Some images were modeled on Zeus, the chief god of Greek mythology, or Asclepius, the god of healing, both of whom were customarily portrayed wearing thick, dark beards. These
were, however, the exceptions rather than the rule, until the sixth century. By the seventh century a single, consistent image prevailed, featuring long, typically brown hair and a moderate-length beard. This was the medieval, as opposed to classical, Jesus. Why and how did this metamorphosis occur? And what does this transformation say about
facial hair and manliness in Christian culture? The answers to these questions are to be found in the transitional centuries between classical and medieval art, during which both types of Christ images appeared side by side, sometimes even in the same work of art. This juxtaposition helps to explain the thinking that led Christian art in a new direction.

Though the youthful-heroic look predominated in early Christian art, there really was no official, standard image, and early Christians felt no compulsion to be consistent. Christ figures with quite different looks were often present in the same churches, or even in the same work of art. Facial hair in these images indicated an intentional choice to convey something about Jesus. A notable example of this is in the dazzling mosaics that decorate the sixth-century church of Saint Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. On one side of the sanctuary, among other images, is a series of scenes illustrating the teaching and miracles of Christ. On the opposite wall is a parallel sequence depicting Christ’s betrayal, passion, death, and resurrection. The clothing is the same in both series, but the teaching and miracle-working Jesus is beardless, while the Jesus on the other side has longer hair and a beard that
seems to get longer as the story progresses.
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In the first sequence, in other words, Jesus appears as he had in countless earlier paintings and carvings, that is, as an eternally youthful figure who stands out from the ordinary, bearded men around him. In the picture illustrating the miracle of the loaves and fishes, for example, his long hair and smooth face give him, from a modern perspective, a rather feminine look (
figure 4.3
). In the trial and death scenes on the opposite side of the nave, Christ is again distinguished from ordinary men, but this time by his longer beard, as one can observe in his procession to the crucifixion (
figure 4.4
). The reason Jesus is portrayed so differently in the same work of art has long puzzled art historians, but it is evident that the designers of the church wished to suggest that Jesus was a different sort of savior in the two main phases of his earthly life.
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In the first phase, he is a god among men; in the second, he is not immortal in the same sense. Instead, he is the suffering Son of Man who triumphs over death in the resurrection.

To make better sense of this contrasting symbolism, it is helpful to examine other artworks that include both a bearded and a nonbearded Jesus. One of these is the Antioch Chalice, an elaborately decorated
silver cup created in Constantinople in the late fifth or early sixth century. On one side is a seated, smooth-faced Christ stretching his hand in the gesture of speech. On the opposite side is a bearded Christ in an identical position, but holding a scroll. These symbols indicate that the beardless Christ is teaching, while the bearded Christ is in heaven, possibly at the last judgment.
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Still another example can be found in Rome, in the fifth-century ceiling mosaics of the Church of Santa Costanza. In one area of the ceiling, a youthful, almost beardless Christ is seen delivering the law to the bearded saints Peter and Paul before ascending to heaven; sheep in the foreground represent the Christian faithful who will look to the apostles for guidance and protection. In another vault nearby, executed at the same time and in the same style, a heavily bearded Christ sits enthroned on the globe as ruler of the world, attended by a beardless saint or angel. These two images are inverses of each other, reflecting their contrasting settings: one on earth, one in heaven.

These three examples, from Ravenna, Constantinople, and Rome, all follow a similar pattern. The Christ of the passion and ressurrection is bearded; the teaching and miracle-working Jesus is not. In each case, his hair contrasts with those around him, reinforcing his uniqueness. On earth, a smooth-faced Christ is the divine man among bearded mortals. In the world above, he is the bearded Son of Man, in striking contrast to the smooth-faced angels who populate heaven. Christian art was quite consistent on this last point: angels (always male) have the long-haired, youthful look of eternal life. In their heavenly company, Christ needed to look different, more human. In the final analysis, contrasting hair was a valuable method to indicate that Christ was neither a man nor an angel, that wherever he might be, and whatever he might be doing, he is like no other.