I went to Sunday school as a child, and the pictures of Jesus were straight out of Hollywood -- put him in tights and he could have played Robin Hood or one of the Three Musketeers (Zorro was too "ethnic").
Which makes some sense; if you run a church selling a savior, why do anything to slow down sales? It's a given that a pleasing face on a magazine cover sells more copies than a face with "character," no matter how saintly a person it's attached to.
So I wondered: how many people would "accept Jesus in their heart" if he was ugly? And after reading a headline about the BBC getting some forensics people to reconstruct what Jesus might have looked like, I had my picture.
I just took the BBC face -- already demoted from blue-eyed Hollywood ideal to some "average Jewish man" from Jerusalem circa 10 BC, done with all the charm of a natural history museum caveman -- then moved the eyes closer together and made his face a little more crooked, like he's ready to sneer, sniffle or cry.
Would you follow this man?