Regarding
Question 2 (what do you think of the depictions of Jesus as unattractive?), Rev. Archimandrite Nektarios Serfes makes it sound as if Jesus was physically attractive. For example, he quotes an apocryphal letter allegedly by a Roman pagan, Lentulus, which says:
The youth is tall but well proportioned. The countenance of His face is both serious and active, so that those who look at Him love Him, and yet in another ways, they are afraid of Him. The hair on His head is the color of wine down to the beginning of His ears, lacking brilliance. It is smooth from the beginning of His ears to His shoulders, then twisted and brilliant from the shoulders down, where it hangs divided according to the customs of the Nazarenes. His forehead is smooth and clean, His face without blemish decorated with a light pink color. His appearance is polite and joyful, His nose and mouth are altogether blameless. His beard is thick being of the same color of His hair, and is also divided in two, while His eyes are blue and filled with extreme brilliance.
Unfortunately, this letter is considered to be a fraud written long after the First century when it was supposedly written.
Typically the Orthodox ikonography makes Jesus look physically pleasant.
Alexander Golubtzov in the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia (
Иисус Христос по внешнему виду - Православная Богословская Энциклопедия), proposes that the early Christians would have kept pictures of Jesus as well as remembered how he looked and would have passed these pictures down over the centuries, even though the earliest remaining decent portraits of Jesus are from the 4th century-5th century. He notes that the Carpocratian Gnostics, according to St Irenaeus (late 2nd century), had images of Christ that they claimed (probably mistakenly) were made by order of Pilate. Lampridius, a later Roman biographer of emperor Alexander Severus (early 3rd century), claimed that this emperor had a figure of Christ that he kept with other religious figures. Eusebius notes that Constantine's sister Constantia wanted a statue of Christ, a desire that Eusebius rejected, but Eusebius nonetheless noted that some other Christians had figures of Christ in their homes.
However, Golubtsev also notes that the Gnostics' depictions are unreliable because in the 2nd century and later there arose a debate over whether Christ was attractive or unattractive looking. He noted that some Church fathers, relying on theological statements like Isaiah 52-53 about the Servant's comeliness, decided that Christ must have literally looked physically unappealing. He says that this opinion was held for about 3-4 centuries. Clement of Alexandria shared this opinion, bsing it on Isaiah 52-53. He also notes that Celsus didn't have difficulty in announcing that Christ was physically unappealing, as if this were well known. Celsus made the argument that if Christ had God's Spirit in Him, then He would look better than others in outward appearance, but that Christians "are aware that He was of small growth and not beautiful in his face."
Alternately, Golubtsev notes, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory Nissky believed that He looked good physically. Jerome opined that if He didn't have something heavenly in his countenance, the apostles wouldn't have followed Him. St John Chrysostom cited Psalm 44, verse 3, which said "beautiful with goodness more than the sons of men", and he considered the words in Isaiah about the Servant's comeliness to refer to His suffering in the Passion. For me, it's notable that after telling the story of Jesus as a boy in the Temple, one Gospel writer says that Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature, which implies to me that Jesus was tall physically. However, I am speaking for my own perception of the text, not the position of the fathers.
Golubtsev theorizes that these two opposite opinions about His appearance led to the concept of the two statuses of Christ: His humility and His glorification. He also notes that in Augustine's time there was no single drawing of Christ, but rather some quite different images. Golubtsev theorizes that the Jewish Christians were not inclined to draw potraits of Christ because of the ban in the Torah and in Jewish tradition against making images of God.
