My Face

Richard Neave had spent his career at the University of Manchester rebuilding faces from skulls for archaeologists and for the police, and a television company asked him to do the same for a man of my time and place.

Here is the method itself. A skull decides most of a face: the width of the cheekbones, the shape of the jaw, the set of the eye sockets, the line of the brow. Small markers get fixed to it at measured points, each cut to the average thickness of flesh at that spot for people of that population, and muscle and skin are laid over them to the depth the markers allow. What comes out is not a portrait of one man. It is the shape of an ordinary head from that place and that century.

A skull cannot store skin color, eye color, hair or expression on its own. Those details come from elsewhere entirely, from the region, from the ordinary appearance of the population, from what other skeletons say about height and diet.

The law I was raised under did not merely say that beards were customary; it specifically told a man not to shave off the edges of his beard.

Romans of the early empire were mostly clean-shaven, and a full beard on a man in that world read as Greek, or eastern, or a philosopher, or simply foreign.

Now let me take away two arguments you may have been handed against the traditional picture, because they are bad ones and the person you use them on will know it.

The first is Paul’s line that it is a disgrace for a man to wear long hair (1 Corinthians 11:14).

That is not a description of me. Paul is not talking about me at all. He is regulating what goes on in one congregation’s meetings, in Corinth, over what men and women do with their heads while praying and prophesying. It is a rule about a room.

And there are two things sitting right next to it that break the argument. In the law I was raised on, a man under a Nazirite vow let his hair grow uncut for the whole term of it (Numbers 6:5), so long hair in my tradition could be a mark of devotion, not of disgrace. And Paul himself cut his hair at Cenchreae because he had taken a vow (Acts 18:18), which tells you the practice was live in his own circle.

So the verse proves nothing about my hair. Put it down.

The second is the kiss in the garden.

When they came to arrest me, a friend walked up and kissed me so the arresting party would know which one I was (Mark 14:44–45). People say: see, he must have looked ordinary, because nobody needs a signal to pick out the glowing man.

I like that argument and it is still not good enough. It was night. It was a dark olive grove outside the city. And John says the party arrived carrying lanterns and torches (John 18:3). Men who need lamps to see are going to need a signal no matter what anybody’s face looks like.

Put that one down too.

I am taking away my own arguments on purpose. What is left does not need them.

From those first two hundred years there is nothing: no portrait, no statue, no agreed face, nothing in the letters, nothing in the gospels themselves.

The graffito itself includes a detail rarely mentioned: a man stands beside the crucified, donkey-headed figure with his hand raised.

Even my enemies had to invent a donkey rather than mock a face everyone already recognized.

These earliest images come from the painted room of a converted house at Dura-Europos, on the Euphrates, the oldest Christian meeting-room ever found, drawn by people three or four generations closer to me than the man in your head is.

The Greeks had been carving a young man carrying a sheep on his shoulders for centuries before any Christian touched it. They called the type the kriophoros, the ram-bearer, and Romans used it on tombs and in decoration as a stock image meaning something like kindness, piety, or the quiet life. It was wallpaper.

An official walking past a burial niche painted with that figure saw the same pastoral scene he had seen on a hundred pagan tombs, an innocent explanation ready-made.

But your own people, standing in that same room, knew I had also said the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, and told a story about a man who left ninety-nine sheep to go and find the one that was lost (Luke 15:3–7).

The outside reading kept a family alive. The inside reading was the one they meant, and that is the most human thing in the history of Christian art.

Lesson 18 covered what that favor cost the church; here is what it did to the picture on the wall.

Before 313, Christians met in converted houses, like the one at Dura-Europos, with walls the size of a bedroom wall. After 313, the emperor began building for them at public expense, on a scale the movement had never seen, and what he gave them was the basilica, already used for law courts, for business, and for imperial audiences. The Lateran church in Rome and the first St Peter's went up on that same plan within a generation.

In a Roman civil basilica, the half-domed apse was the business end. It held the seat of the presiding magistrate, and above and behind that seat, where every person in the hall was already looking, hung the image of the emperor, because he was the authority the magistrate was borrowing.

Putting a congregation into that building handed them an architectural problem and an architectural answer in the same package. A boy with a sheep on his shoulders is a small, private, sideways image made for a burial niche; enlarge him to fill an apse and he looks like nothing at all. The empire had been drawing a different kind of figure for that spot for three hundred years already.

• The frontal, enthroned pose meant seated, square to the viewer, motionless, looking straight out, never in profile or turned toward anyone else in the scene. That is how the empire showed an emperor receiving his court.
• The raised right hand comes from a specific Roman scene with its own Latin name, adlocutio, the address: an emperor addressing his troops with the right arm out and up. The gesture on the great statues of Augustus is the same gesture you see on a church apse.
• The ring of light, the nimbus, was already in use for gods, for personified powers, for the sun-god Sol Invictus, and for emperors, as a way of marking that this one was not an ordinary man. Christians simply took the convention whole.
• The color purple was restricted by law to the emperor and ruinously expensive because of how the dye was made. It turns up on me, and on my mother, in late Roman and Byzantine images, though nobody in Nazareth ever owned any.
• The handing over of the scroll is a composition art historians call by its Latin name, traditio legis, the handing over of the law: I stand or sit at the center and hand a scroll to Peter, with Paul on the other side. Its model was an actual imperial ceremony, an emperor handing a written commission to an official in front of witnesses, which is how authority was seen to be transferred in that world.
• The place itself was the apse, the exact spot where a portrait of the emperor used to hang.

Not one of those six came from anything I said or did. All six came from the visual language of the government that killed me.

Serapis was not built from nothing. Older Egyptian gods sat underneath him, but his face itself was assembled deliberately, Greek in appearance and Egyptian in job, so that two peoples in one kingdom would accept the same god. A state built a deity a face for a political reason, to hold a country together, and that face, with hair falling to the shoulders, became the most familiar divine face in the Roman world.

The fourth-century Christian version was drawn by the same workshops, in the same cities, for a religion the emperor had just taken up.

A man commissioned to paint a supreme god in the year 380 reached for conventions that were already sitting on the shelf, which is exactly what conventions are there to do. The empire designed a face once and admitted it. The second time, no one had to design a thing.

Pictures usually drift with fashion. This one held its exact shape for sixteen hundred years, and four separate events explain why.

First, the legends of images no human hand made, called in Greek acheiropoieta. The Image of Edessa held that I pressed a cloth to my face and sent the print of it to a king named Abgar; a cloth bearing an image is reported from that city by the sixth century, and the Byzantine army carried it through Constantinople in procession in 944. In the West, the Veronica told of a woman who wiped my face on the way to execution and kept the print, her name close to the Latin for true image; a relic of that kind is documented at St Peter's from the twelfth century, and by the jubilee year of 1300 it was one of the great objects pilgrims came to Rome to see. A story like that converts a picture from somebody's painting, which can be corrected, into a photograph, which cannot, so every later painter's job becomes copying it rather than thinking about it.

Second, the council that met at Constantinople in 692, which your books call the Quinisext, ruled in canon 82 that I be depicted in human form rather than as a lamb, because the lamb was a symbol and the reality had come.

Third, Christians then spent roughly a hundred and twenty years fighting a war over images: emperors banned and destroyed them from about 730, painters were persecuted, and the argument tore the eastern church apart for two generations before the Second Council of Nicaea reversed the ban in 787. The fight flared again in 815 and was finally settled the same way in 843, a day the Eastern churches still celebrate. Once images were doctrine rather than practice, defended by two councils and a great deal of blood, changing the picture stopped being a stylistic choice. It became heresy.

Fourth, the picture was copied rather than drawn. Eastern workshops trained apprentices to reproduce the type exactly, down to the shape of the nose and the fall of the hair, and the best-known of the manuals that eventually wrote those formulas down was compiled on Mount Athos in the early 1700s by a monk named Dionysius of Fourna, recording a practice already centuries old. That is why an icon painted in Russia in 1600 and one painted in Greece in 900 are recognizably the same man.

The forged letter survives in manuscripts from around the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries before the printing press picked it up and spread it further.

Beyond the hair parted in the middle, it says that hair falls straight to the ears and then curls to the shoulders, the color of a ripe hazelnut. It says his forehead was smooth and serene, his face without a wrinkle or a blemish, and calls him the fairest of the children of men.

None of that came from memory. It came from a forger who wanted details that sounded like an eyewitness.

For the next six hundred years, painters copied that description as though it were a physical record.

I went to weddings, and your own Bible keeps the actual complaint my critics made.

Somebody wrote the enjoyment out of me with a single clause, and it stuck so hard that you have probably never once seen a picture of me laughing.

Printing carried the face outward long before Sallman: woodcuts and engravings from the fifteenth century, then cheap colored lithographs in the nineteenth, poured the image into ordinary houses for the first time in history.

Sallman himself was a Chicago illustrator who worked in advertising, and he had already drawn a charcoal version of the same face back in 1924, for the cover of a small church magazine. He repainted it in oils in 1940 for a religious publisher, who put it on the market as a print.

The image traveled through an entire distribution system: a wallet card a frightened young serviceman carried through the war and brought home afterward, copies mailed to Sunday schools, and reproductions printed on church bulletins, funeral-home fans, calendars, bookmarks, and the little cards handed out at Vacation Bible School.

Notice what Sallman actually explains, item by item. The pale skin comes from a Swedish-American commercial artist in Chicago painting the people around him. The slim, clean, gentle look comes from the American religious illustration style of that decade, nothing more. The tallness comes from centuries before him: Byzantine and then Gothic painters had stretched holy figures taller and narrower than real people, on purpose, to signal that they were not ordinary, and Sallman only paints the head; your own imagination supplied the missing body, borrowed straight from the stained glass. And the glow behind the head is no longer even a drawn halo, just lighting, which persuades more effectively, because a halo announces itself as a symbol while a light source does not.

Europe made me European, and others made me look like themselves: there are images of me in Ethiopia that are unmistakably Ethiopian, and images in Mexico, Korea, the Philippines, and the Congo that are unmistakably of those places too.

There is something genuinely right in that. The whole point was that God entered a body in one particular place, and a Congolese painter insisting the body could have been Congolese has understood the doctrine better than a European who thinks the question never even arises.

The movement called itself Deutsche Christen, the German Christians, and it was never a sect outside the church. It organized in 1932 as a party inside the ordinary Protestant state churches, the ones that baptized and buried everybody, and simply ran for office within them.

In the church elections of July 1933, with the Nazi state campaigning openly on their behalf and Hitler himself making a radio appeal the night before the vote, they won control of most of the German Protestant church bodies. That September they installed Ludwig Müller, an army chaplain and Hitler's own adviser on church affairs, as Reich Bishop.

They did not invent the racial argument behind this; they inherited it. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was an Englishman who became a German citizen and married Wagner's daughter, and his book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, argued at length in 1899 that I could not have been racially Jewish because Galilee, he claimed, was ethnically mixed. It was a bad argument from a man with no real standing in the subject, and it still sold enormously and was read at the top of the German state.

The institute they founded at Eisenach in 1939 sat below the very castle where Luther had translated the New Testament into German, and its stated purpose was removing Jewish influence from German church life entirely. It published its de-Judaized New Testament in 1940 and a purged hymnal in 1941, threw out the Hebrew scriptures altogether, and had its own bishops.

All of that happened in living memory, in a highly educated Christian country, and one thing made it easier to accept: a face on the wall that did not look Jewish.

In the autumn of 1933, a pastor named Martin Niemöller organized the Pastors' Emergency League against the racial requirements being pushed into church law, and thousands of ministers put their names to it.

In May 1934 that opposition issued its declaration at Barmen, largely drafted by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. It became the founding document of what grew into the Confessing Church.

Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and spent the rest of the Nazi period in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, weeks before the war ended.

But the Barmen Declaration defended the church's independence from the state; on the actual murder of actual people it stayed silent. Bonhoeffer himself had already written about that directly in 1933, ahead of most of his colleagues.

The Confessing Church, in the end, was a minority. Most German clergy stood in neither camp and simply went along. But the minority who resisted proves that people inside the same church, reading the same book, at the same moment, could see what was happening, and that removes any excuse that nobody could have known.

It is only four words long, spoken while talking with a Samaritan woman about whose worship was actually correct.

There is no reading of that sentence that survives a de-Judaized version of me. I read the Hebrew scriptures as my own, and every word I ever taught came out of them. Stripping the Jews out does not purify me. It replaces me with someone else who happens to share my name.

Charles Colcock Jones was a Presbyterian minister in Liberty County, Georgia, who owned slaves himself, and who published both a book making his case in 1842 and the catechism itself in 1837.

His actual argument to the planters was not really about souls at all. He argued that religious instruction would produce more obedient and less dangerous laborers, an argument that got much easier to make after 1831, when Nat Turner's rising in Virginia frightened the entire region.

The teaching rested on two verses side by side, Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22, both telling servants to obey their masters.

The whole system was fenced in further. Black preachers had to be licensed, and after 1831 several states forbade them to preach at all without a white person present. Teaching an enslaved person to read became a crime state by state: North Carolina and Louisiana in 1830, Virginia in 1831, Alabama in 1832.

Even the Bible itself was edited for the purpose. Lesson 30 covers the 1807 edition printed in London for enslaved people in the West Indies, with the exodus cut out and the obedience passages kept.

A European face, a verse about obedience, a licensed preacher, an edited Bible, and a law against learning to read: that is not a picture doing harm on its own. That is a picture working as one part of a designed apparatus, and the men who built it wrote down why.

This may be the single most useful exercise in the whole book.

Does that man look like the people I actually came to reach? Does he look like the men standing in your own town's parking lot at six in the morning, waiting to be picked up for a day's work? I spent my days among people just like that.