I touched on the betrayal of Jesus before but was looking into it some more and, while doing so, I delved into the appearance of Jesus and even into the name “Jesus”
What Did Jesus Look Like?
We do not, of course, know what Jesus actually looked like. We do know how he is depicted in art and those of us of European heritage are very familiar with handsome, light-skinned, long haired images.
Isaiah chapter 53 is seen by Christians as prophesying the Messiah. I quote here the King James version because I like it so much:
1 Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
3 He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
4 Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He opened not His mouth;
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
And as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
8 He was taken from prison and from judgment,
And who will declare His generation?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.
9 And they made His grave with the wicked—
But with the rich at His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was any deceit in His mouth.
10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him;
He has put Him to grief.
When You make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand.
11 He shall see the labour of His soul, and be satisfied.
By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,
For He shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great,
And He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
Because He poured out His soul unto death,
And He was numbered with the transgressors,
And He bore the sin of many,
And made intercession for the transgressors.
It says about his appearance “he hath no form nor comeliness …. there is no beauty that we might desire him”. In modern English, that means that he looks very ordinary – pretty much like everybody else, in fact.
That may seem blasphemous, but after 2,000 years, we know that the only important things about him are who he is and what he said and what he did. What he looked like is not important, except where his ordinary appearance explains things in the Bible such as his disappearances into the crowd. Some people feel strongly that we should not even make any attempt to create his image in art or anything else, as being too close to idolatry. I don’t feel strongly about this, but neither do I feel a need to seek out images of Jesus as a focus for meditation or prayer, though accept that some people find this helpful.
So that is all we know about Jesus’s appearance. Attempts have been made to assess what a middle-eastern Jew would have looked like in the first century. Here is a link to an article with more information.
The Betrayal of Jesus
Here is something that never made sense to me and was never explained to me – probably because everybody else was in the dark. So here is what I think the most likely explanation.
The religious authorities wanted to arrest and kill Jesus. That much is plain. He frequently appeared in public. So why not just send in a few armed men to arrest him, Making “betrayal” unnecessary? The answer is that in public, he was always surrounded by large crowds, hanging on his every word and in awe of the authority with which he spoke and acted. To try to seize him under such circumstances would encounter huge resistance, possibly a riot. A few armed men would be no match for an angry crowd. It would need an army.
When they wanted to arrest him in Jerusalem was in the days leading up to Passover, when many Jews would gather in Jerusalem, so there were even more people around. No, they had to seize him when there were very few people around him. Not many would know where he was when not in public. So this is part of the need for an informer, to tell the authorities where he was when there were very few people around him.
So the next requirement is to identify him when, as we have established, he looked fairly similar to other people with no particular distinguishing features. Remember that not many people will have seen him up close, especially the lot chosen to arrest him.
So Judas volunteered to locate him and then to identify him, with a kiss, in return for money. There was no other way that they could get away with arresting him. Why would Judas do such a thing? We are led to believe it was his evil and greedy character that caused him to do this. But probably also that Jesus didn’t fill Judas’s expectation of the Messiah, not realising that Jesus was greater than his expectations.
The Name “Jesus”
Why do we use the name “Jesus” when that is not actually the name by which he was known during his lifetime, and does it matter? And what are the origins of that name?
Jesus’s real name, in Aramaic, was something like Yeshua, which is more akin to the anglicised Joshua, and indeed I believe some Jewish Christians call him by the name Yeshua. And some call him by the name Jesus.
So how did we get to Jesus? The first thing to realise is that the New Testament was written in Greek, which was widely written and spoken, including by Jesus. And everywhere in the Greek New Testament, Jesus is called by the name Ιησούς (Iesous). Jesus’s brother James in his epistles in the original Greek refers to him by this name, so it is clearly authentic.
The next step was the creation of a Latin version of his name which was Iesus, basically the same as the Greek, minus the “o”. There is no “J” in Latin and I and J are pretty much interchangeable. It was a very short step from Iesus to Jesus, which is so much easier to say for an English-speaking person.
Does it matter what name we use for our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? I say not for the following reasons: Our Lord perfectly understands what is in our hearts, so words are not relevant. Hellenising his name was perfectly acceptable to the first Christians, including Jesus’s brother, maybe to Jesus himself who spoke Greek, so anglicising our Lord’s name has to be acceptable too.
Had our Lord’s name not come to us via the Greek and Latin languages, we would probably use the name Joshua, derived from Yeshua, which means “God is salvation” or “Yahweh saves”. It was not an uncommon name for Jews in the first century and before, and the anglicised version is not uncommon today.
Jesus is a fairly frequently used given name in some Spanish speaking countries. I have always found that slightly surprising, but that is because I do not understand the motivation of parents who so name their child – Declaration of faith? Honouring our Lord? Aspiration for the child? Simple liking of the name? I rather liked it when I thought that our Lord’s name was unique. I wonder if it has lost its significance through usage.
I am sure that British parents do not see any significance when they name sons Joshua – they probably just have a vague idea that it is a name that appears in the Bible as it certainly does in the Old Testament.
