Vatican City Rome.

The True Cross is said to be the real cross that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on, according to Christian tradition.

The Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church, and the Church of the East all claim to possess relics of the True Cross as objects of veneration. Historians generally dispute the authenticity of the relics, as do Protestant and other Christian churches, who do not hold them in high regard.

The New Testament includes no descriptions of Jesus's appearance before his death, and the gospel narratives are generally indifferent to people's racial appearance or features.

For centuries, the most common image of Jesus Christ, at least in Western cultures, has been that of a bearded, white-skinned man with long, wavy, light brown or blond hair and (often) blue eyes. But the Bible doesn’t describe Jesus physically, and all the evidence we do have indicates he probably looked very different from how he has long been portrayed.

Many scholars and Archeologists now agree that Jesus was most likely a dark brown-skinned, brown-eyed man — more akin to a “Middle Eastern Jewish” or an Arab man. A commentator once said that if Jesus was taking a flight today “he might be profiled for additional security screening”

In tracing Christ’s genealogy, we also discover that Jesus was a multi-ethnic Jew. His bloodline contained traits from various races and cultural lines, including Moabite through Ruth and Canaanite through Rahab.

The earliest images of Jesus correctly depict Him with a dark complexion. But by the early Middle Ages, artists began painting Him with European features such as white skin, a beard, and long, light brown hair. Nevertheless, as a Middle Easterner, Jesus almost certainly would have been dark-haired, with dark olive skin and Jewish traits. And, as the son of a carpenter, He was probably deeply tanned by the sun.

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In much of Western art, Jesus is portrayed as having white skin and light hair. Is that what Jesus really looked like? If not, why is He so often portrayed that way?

In the 2018 book "What Did Jesus Look Like?", Archaeological remains, historical texts and ancient Egyptian funerary art to conclude that, like most people in Judea and Egypt around the time, Jesus most likely had brown eyes, dark brown to black hair and olive-brown skin or so . He may have stood about 5-ft.

What Does the Bible Say?

The Bible offers few clues about Christ’s physical appearance. Most of what we know about Jesus comes from the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. According to the Gospels, Jesus was a Jewish man born in Bethlehem and raised in the town of Nazareth, in Galilee (formerly Palestine, now northern Israel) during the first century.

Biblically, Jesus would have been able to disappear quite easily in a crowd, and was not good looking enough to measure compliment or memory of it. He was also not ugly enough to make note of it.

So, by logical reasoning, we can deduce that he was average.

We know Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23), but the Bible tells us virtually nothing about what he looked like―except that he didn’t stand out in any particular way. When Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane before the Crucifixion (Matthew 26:47-56) Judas Iscariot had to point Jesus out to his soldiers among the disciples―presumably because they all appeared similar to one another.

For many scholars, Revelation 1:14-15 offers a clue that Jesus's skin was a darker hue and that his hair was woolly in texture . The hairs of his head, it says, "were white as white wool, white as snow "meaning extreme age or so called ancient of days". His eyes were like a flame of fire " meaning all seeing", his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace meaning" glory.”

“We don't know what [Jesus] looked like, but if all of the things that we do know about him are true,” says Robert Cargill, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa and editor of Biblical Archaeology Review. “He would have looked like a Jewish Galilean.”

Some of the earliest known artistic representations of Jesus date to the mid-third century A.D., more than two centuries after his death. These are the paintings in the ancient catacombs of St. Domitilla in Rome, first discovered some 400 years ago. Reflecting one of the most common images of Jesus at the time, the paintings depict Jesus as the Good Shepherd, a young, short-haired, beardless man with a lamb around his shoulders.

Another rare early portrait of Jesus was discovered in 2018 on the walls of a ruined church in southern Israel. Painted in the sixth century A.D., it is the earliest known image of Christ found in Israel, and portrays him with shorter, curly hair, a depiction that was common to the eastern region of the Byzantine empire―especially in Egypt and the Syria-Palestine region―but disappeared from later Byzantine art.

The long-haired, bearded image of Jesus that emerged beginning in the fourth century was influenced heavily by representations of Greek and Roman gods, particularly the all-powerful Greek god Zeus. At that point, Jesus started to appear in a long robe, seated on a throne (such as in the fifth-century mosaic on the altar of the Santa Pudenziana church in Rome), sometimes with a halo surrounding his head.

According to the Bible, Jesus was a Jew, a.k.a., a Hebrew or Israelite. Jesus lived in the Middle East and was of Semitic descent. As a result, He very likely would have had dark-brown skin, brown eyes, and dark-brown to black hair. While Middle Easterners occasionally have light skin, comparable to that of Europeans, such skin tones are rare in that part of the world. Was Jesus white? The answer is that He was very likely not white.

So, if Jesus likely was not white, why is He so often portrayed that way? If you examine artists’ portrayals of Jesus from around the world, you find that they often portray Jesus in a way similar to what people look like in that particular culture. Europeans portray Jesus as a European . Or at least like people they are familiar with.

The image we have today is said to come from leonardo davinci using Cesare Borgia.

Yeshua Hamashiach was from the Levant area that is modern day Israel. The native people in this area are various shades of brown. Jesus was not white or black as in race. He was what we today call middle eastern or semitic.

We only get one clue to what Jesus might have looked like in the Gospels.

Matt. 26:48–49:

Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.” Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him.

Jesus obviously looked so ordinary that he couldn’t be picked out from the crowd by a description, but they had to bring someone who knew him well by sight. If he’d been unusually pale, that would have set him apart.

At the time and place, “ordinary” would have meant sort of brown-ish, with brown eyes.

Really his race doesn't matter. He came for all mankind of every race. He came for the human race. That we might be saved and have everlasting life.

Is it wrong to do this? Yes! . As long as we do not allow our preferred image of Jesus to become an idol, there is nothing in the Bible that speaks against imagining Jesus looking a certain way. Jesus is the Savior for “all nations” (Matthew 28:19; Galatians 3:8).

No matter a person’s skin color, race, ethnicity, or nationality, he or she can experience forgiveness of sin and reconciliation with God through the crucified and risen Christ. The love of Jesus transcends skin color. Having no physical description of Jesus, people naturally imagine the Son of Man to be like themselves.