To commence to conjure images of the person of Christ after he had ascended, we first allowed our own individual fertile imagination to roam free, to festoon and emblazon the resulting images every which way until they became accepted. This we have done over the centuries, creating differing images to the point of confusion, and even to the point of contention among those who would not accept any other but their own. Jesus of a hundred faces! That is what the world of Christianity has created.
This is when stodgy science crept in an attempt to settle the score and to extricate the bones of contention. So using scientific methods tested and honed through years of studies, it has come out with its own most likely image of Christ, taking into account written data and fossilized figures derived from the same milieu as Christ.
The resultant scientific image of Christ makes Him look just like any Tom, Dick, and Harry, of his own milieu. Looking very ordinary, insignificant, and maybe mediocre in facial features. Somebody one can lose easily in any crowd.
Can we accept this as our reverential representation of the Son of the Almighty God, whose very name the ancient Jews could not even assign and/or name, or worse, write down for fear of displeasing and desecrating Him?
It is ironic but for most significant personages of the ancient world, man has been able to collate enough data, fossil, or representations, to enable him to create passably accurate images of them. Persons like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, even further down the historical holes, like the Neanderthals or the Cro-Magnons. etc.
But for Jesus Christ who lived only over 2000 years ago, we have not been able to till now. One wonders what is behind this unsaid inhibition or reluctance to define the one "official" image of Christ.
Personally, I take ownership of this novel perspective that I will lay out below, just strictly my own.
Before proceeding I consider this caveat.
Over the years, we have read, though mostly heard, that in his sojourn on earth Christ was seen as visiting other faraway places like those in Asia. Scanty though the accounts may be still many stand by their own truths about such events. Though Christ was said to have lived amongst such foreign people one has yet to hear about any physical description of Christ coming from those sources. Somehow, these people must have sensed Christ as nobody any different from them, allowing him to sit amongst them and expound his doctrines.
Many would counter that such incidents are physically improbable given all the circumstances. But the staid practice of Parapsychology, a field of study now generally accepted by pertinent authorities, has given us some insights. It has defined and proved to us the unique concept of bilocation or multilocation, which is power an individual has to be present in more than one location at the same time. In a real way suspending the constraints of time and physics as we humans have learned to believe.
Any Being possessing or predisposed of having such powers must definitely also have other more subtle powers beyond the purview of natural phenomenon.
Thus, Christ in his earthly life when he appeared not only to crowds but to each individual person must have projected himself in ways that the viewer would find as the incarnate manifestation of someone originating from such mystical sphere. Christ after all was not only more than human but he was perceived as the Redeemer of the entire human race that had been seeking deliverance from its earthly vicissitudes. Thus to those who beheld him, he/she saw the human perfection of the Being as materialized in each and every unique individual lens that we possess. Christ as seen not only in the differing grades of vision we each individually are gifted with, but including and not even limited to the prism that we individually perceive our Redeemer to be.
The anonymity of Jesus to his companions who had known him prior, on the road to Emmaus after the resurrection, in a way prods us to think that Jesus dictated how people would view His Person when they saw him. Or to not recognize him at all which the companions on the road to Emmaus did declare.
Thus, a black person sees Christ as the manifestation of perfection in his blackness. A Chinese or Japanese for their parts would be to manifest Christ in their unique visions of perfection. Same with the Middle Eastern. And we could truly say and declare that those are the correct images of Christ, as the latter allowed himself to be seen by them.
To the white person then, Christ is how he is typically depicted in books, magazines, calendars, etc., which we now currently witness around us. And that would be accurate, though as an Asian person with an Asian set of perspectives my representation of Christ is obviously different.
In the final analysis we can only prognosticate about these things, because Christ still is the Final Arbiter. And as the limited representation of paper, we cannot fully understand the existence of the pencil.
