What did Jesus look like? The evidence, in color

No eyewitness description survives. Working from skeletons, ancient texts and textiles, historians reconstruct a Galilean Jewish man about 5 ft 5 in (166 cm) tall, with olive-brown skin, dark brown eyes, dark hair kept fairly short and a beard, dressed in an undyed wool tunic, a mantle with tassels and leather sandals.

Each line is a probability, not a portrait. Together they describe someone who disappeared into a crowd in Capernaum, which is exactly how the Gospels describe him: Judas has to kiss him so the arresting party knows which man to seize (Mark 14:44).

Because they were not written as portraits. The Gospels proclaim what Jesus said and did, they come from a Jewish culture wary of images, and ancient biographers rarely lingered on looks unless they were remarkable. The silence itself suggests there was nothing unusual to report.

The closest thing to a description is a prophecy Christians applied to him: “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him” (Isaiah 53:2). The white hair and bronze feet of Revelation 1:14–15 belong to a vision, not to a memory of a man in Galilee.

Later writers filled the gap anyway. A letter in the name of a Roman official, Publius Lentulus, describing hazelnut-colored hair parted in the middle, surfaced in the late Middle Ages and is a forgery. The Shroud of Turin was radiocarbon-dated in 1988 to between 1260 and 1390.

Line art fixes shapes, not skin tones. On every page of a Jesus coloring book the color is your decision, which makes it the place where history comes back in: warm olive skin, near-black hair and beard, cream and oatmeal wool, a darker mantle and a single thread of blue.

Our own illustrations draw Jesus the way most readers recognize him from centuries of Christian art: the beard, the long hair, the flowing robe and the mantle over one shoulder. That is a deliberate choice for recognition, the same reason a cover of Cleopatra shows the Cleopatra people expect.

The book doesn’t stop there. One page sets Jesus among Galilean farmers and stonemasons, and its caption describes knee-length wool tunics, leather sandals, short beards and sun-weathered olive skin. Another puts his plain seamless tunic beside the gold and fine linen of the Temple priests.

Save pure white for the one scene where the Gospel asks for it. On the mountain of the Transfiguration his clothes become “dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them” (Mark 9:3), a line that only works if they were not normally white.

It arrives as an instant PDF, so you can print the same page twice and color it both ways, traditional and historical, side by side. If you are buying it for someone else, our guide to Christian gifts that aren’t cheesy covers who it suits.

Jesus was a Galilean Jew, so he most likely looked like other Jewish men of the region: olive to light-brown skin, dark eyes and dark hair. Skeletons from first-century Judea put the average man at about 5 ft 5 in (166 cm), lean from walking and physical work.

In 2001 the medical artist Richard Neave, working for the BBC documentary Son of God, modeled a face from first-century Jewish skulls excavated in Israel: broad, dark-eyed, with short curly hair and a weathered olive complexion. It is not Jesus’s face, and Neave never claimed it was. It is a typical face of his time and place.

Hair is the biggest break with tradition. Paul, writing about twenty years after the crucifixion, calls long hair a disgrace for a man (1 Corinthians 11:14), an odd thing to write if Jesus had worn it long. The exception was a Nazirite vow, and the Gospels show Jesus drinking wine, which the vow forbids.

The beard is safer ground. Observant Jewish men generally wore one while Romans of the period shaved, so a beard marked you as a Judean. Joan Taylor, emerita professor of Christian origins at King’s College London, argues that both his hair and his beard were most likely kept short.

On your page: sun-weathered skin takes layering far better than a single flat peach, so build it in two or three passes. Slowing down like this is also why the scene sticks, as we explain in learning history through coloring.

Jesus most likely wore a knee-length tunic of undyed wool, belted at the waist, a woolen mantle over it with tassels at the corners, and leather sandals. Nothing in it signaled wealth: no purple, no fine linen, no embroidery. It was the everyday dress of a Galilean working man.

The Gospels confirm the pieces. A sick woman touches the fringe of his cloak (Matthew 9:20), John the Baptist feels unworthy to untie his sandals (Mark 1:7), and at the cross the soldiers gamble for a tunic “woven in one piece from top to bottom” (John 19:23).

Color mattered socially. Purple came from murex shellfish and cost a fortune, so it marked the rich man “dressed in purple and fine linen” (Luke 16:19). Ordinary people wore wool in its natural cream, beige, brown or gray, and Jewish law asked for a cord of blue in each tassel (Numbers 15:38).

The ankle-length robe of later art is, ironically, the garment Jesus mocks: “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes” (Mark 12:38). Taylor’s study compares the Gospels with textiles recovered from caves in the Judean desert, and the short tunic is what the evidence supports.

On your page: the book’s Temple-courts scene sets his single seamless tunic against the priests’ gold breastplates and fine Egyptian linen. Color the contrast hard, plain wool against everything else, and the scene tells its own story.

The Gospels name very few colors, which makes each one worth noticing. Dazzling white appears at the Transfiguration and at the empty tomb, green grass at the feeding of the five thousand, and darkness at noon at the crucifixion. Treat them as the fixed points of your palette.

One color appears only in mockery. The soldiers drape him in scarlet (Matthew 27:28) or purple (Mark 15:17), the colors of power, to ridicule a king who wore undyed wool.

Every scene in that table is a page in the book. Color them with the text in mind and the whole story picks up a quiet logic: plain wool all the way through, and white only where the Gospels say heaven breaks in.

The long-haired, bearded Jesus took shape between the fourth and sixth centuries. The earliest surviving images, from around AD 235, show a short-haired, beardless young man in a tunic. As Christianity became the religion of the empire, artists borrowed the majesty of emperors and enthroned gods, and the bearded face took hold.

Every culture has also painted Jesus as one of its own, from Ethiopian icons to Chinese ink paintings to Andean colonial canvases. That is less an error than a statement of belonging. It just isn’t history.

Here is the twist for a colorist: the Dura-Europos painting shows the healing of the paralytic, and that scene is in the book too, a man lowered through a Capernaum roof. The line art keeps the familiar silhouette, but your colors can take it back toward Galilee: dark hair, weathered skin, plain wool. To see where it falls in the story, follow the life of Jesus in chronological order.

Three sources do most of the work. Joan Taylor’s book lays out the full evidence, the Yale University Art Gallery holds the earliest known images, and the BBC’s reconstruction shows what a Galilean man of the period typically looked like. Start with Taylor if you only read one.

The questions people ask most about his appearance, answered straight.

The face on the wall and the man in Capernaum are both real in their way. One is two thousand years of devotion, the other is history, and you don’t have to choose between them to enjoy the story. Both can sit on the same page.

But the next time you sit down with a page, try the evidence: warm olive skin, a short dark beard, cream wool and one thread of blue. Print the Galilee scenes from the Jesus Christ coloring book tonight and see how different the same story looks.