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What if I told you nearly everything you think you know about Jesus Christ is wrong? From his real name to his looks, there’s a lot that may have been lost in translation.
For instance, the Bible says he probably wasn’t a carpenter, that he had many more than 12 disciples – and a significant number of them were women.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying not just modern translations of the Bible but its original and contemporary writings, and these are just some of the things I can prove we’ve slipped up on.
Jesus’ real name
Jesus’s real name was likely Yehoshua.
It’s no big conspiracy theory as to how he ended up with the name Jesus: The Hebrew name Yehoshua gets transliterated into Aramaic as Yeshua, which gets transliterated into Greek as Iesous, which gets transliterated into Latin as Iesus, from which we get the English Jesus.
Mary and Joseph’s everyday tongue would have been Aramaic as they lived in Nazareth, so there’s a good chance they called him Yeshua around the house.
His earthly father’s name was Joseph, in English, and Yehoseph, in Hebrew, according to the Bible. That means Jesus would have been known as Yehoshua ben Yehoseph (meaning son of Yehoseph).
When most people picture Jesus, they imagine a light-skinned thirtysomething with soft eyes (left), but he likely had short black hair, brown eyes, and darker skin (right)
Willem Dafoe portrayed Jesus as light-skinned in 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, confirming the myth
We also know that Joseph’s father’s name was Jacob. So, if Jesus were born today in the West, he might have introduced himself as a more contemporary Josh Jacobson.
What Jesus looked like
When most people picture Jesus, they’re probably envisioning commercial advertiser Warner Sallman’s 1941 Head of Christ painting.
In the painting, Jesus is depicted as a handsome, light-skinned thirtysomething with soft eyes, a forked beard, long brown hair parted in the middle and wearing a robe.
Because that indelible image sold more than a half-billion prints and spawned a whole series of sequels, it may therefore come as a shock to many that Jesus likely had short black hair, brown eyes and dark skin.
Based on skeletons recovered from the time and place, the average male was a mere 5-feet-5 inches tall. This aligns well with the writings by the Roman historian Suetonius, who considers 5-feet-7 inches to be respectably tall.
So if Jesus was neither tall nor short, he would have been somewhere between 5-foot-4 and 5-foot-6 inches.
Biologically, the people group that best approximates Jesus’ skin tone are today’s Iraqi Jews – the descendants of the Jews forced into Babylonian exile in 586 BC. Many Iraqi Jews have beautiful honey-colored or olive-brown skin, brown eyes and black hair.
If he kept his hair in the style of the surviving portraits of other men from his era, then his hair was clipped short and wasn’t the flowing mane we see in the paintings.
Long hair was actually considered culturally unmanly – Roman coins from the era support this. Coins depicting Jewish men of the era also display short to shaggy hair and moderate-length beards, sort of a Middle Eastern take on the Greek philosopher look.
Jesus wasn’t a carpenter
The Bible never says Jesus worked specifically with wood. In fact, Galilee was so lacking in trees that it had to import wood from elsewhere.
Most houses in Jesus’ day were built of stone, and, as told in the Bible, King Solomon had to hire Sidonian carpenters to teach his Israelite workforce how to work with timber because they simply didn’t know how.
Jesus refers to wood only twice in the Gospels: once in his famous log-in-the-eye parable, the other a passing mention of dried-out wood in the book of Luke. Not a single one of his 48 parables is about carpentry.
On the other hand, he references rocks constantly, speaking of cornerstones, towers, walls, building on rocks, stones, winepresses, millstones and foundations.
When the English translators arrived at the Greek word tektón, from which we get the beautiful English word architect (chief builder), they translated it as carpenter. And it makes sense – Greece was a nation covered in trees, and, at least in 1611 when the King James version of the Bible was published, England was a well-forested nation.
Plus, isn’t there something evocative and poetic about a humble man hammering nails into wood, only later to be nailed to a wooden cross himself?
Female disciples played a central and financially sustaining role in Jesus’ ministry, including Mary of Magdala (portrayed by Rooney Mara in 2018’s Mary Magdelene)
The Bible never says Jesus worked specifically with wood. In fact, Galilee was so lacking in trees that it had to import wood from elsewhere
Most people believe Jesus had 12 disciples, but that number was more in the neighborhood of 70 – and they were not all men
But Jesus wasn’t Greek or English. His daily tongue was Aramaic, which means he would have called himself a haras/kharash – a builder-craftsman.
There is a Greek term specifically for wood craftsmen, but Jesus is always given the more general term. When we consider this, we can conclude that he was probably a stone builder.
Jesus had more than 12 disciples
Most people believe Jesus had 12 disciples, but they’re actually referring to the 12 apostles.
The Bible says Jesus had somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 72 disciples, and they weren’t all men.
Female disciples played a central and financially sustaining role in Jesus’ ministry. Here are the names we know: Mary of Magdala, Joanna wife of Chuza, Susanna, Aunt Salome (mother of thunder cousins James and John) and Aunt Mary (mother of Little James).
Adding the two sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, makes seven.
Unbelievably, we know more about some of the female disciples than we do about several of the inner 12 apostles.
For instance, we know almost nothing about Thaddaeus, but we know from accounts in the book of Luke that a bunch of women, including Mary of Magdala, Joanna wife of Chuza, Susanna and Salome, followed Jesus since the early days in Galilee and financially bankrolled his entire ministry.
In the original Greek, the Bible tells us: ‘These women were providing for [Jesus and his followers] out of their own means.’
Was Jesus a drinker?
Nowhere in the Bible does it say Jesus drank alcohol of any kind.
But considering he played bartender at a wedding in Cana, contrasted himself to his non-drinking kinsman John in the book of Luke and, in the book of Mark, served Passover wine while telling his disciples he wouldn’t drink again until after his resurrection, it is presumed he enjoyed a wee tipple every now and then.
How did Jesus dress?
As for what he wore, it’s ironic that artists have dressed Jesus in voluminous robes for the past 16 centuries, considering the Bible describes him as wearing the opposite.
The book of Mark says he actually mocked people for wearing fancy religious robes.
Instead of swishing around in a sartorial status symbol, Jesus was thought to have worn the commoner’s covering: a chiton, a knee-length bit of wool leaving the arms uncovered for hard labor.
Jesus wasn’t killed by ‘the Jews’
There’s a pervasive anti-Semitic myth that ‘the Jews’ killed Jesus.
Scripture makes it clear that Jesus wasn’t killed by Jews. He was killed by the Romans, and not for his ‘errant’ theology, but for political reasons.
The book of Luke says there was a chess master behind the scenes, a man of political cunning and unfathomable violence who wore the disguise of a faithful Jew. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, yet was seen by the public as a holy and righteous man.
Mary Magdelene – one of Christ’s many women disciples – as portrayed by Barbara Hershey in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ
During Jesus’ lifetime, Annas’s son-in-law Joseph Caiaphas is the high priest. Their house is the largest private residence ever excavated in the entire nation of Israel (photo: Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ)
When Jesus overturns the tables of their corrupt moneychangers, the House of Annas immediately starts plotting his assassination
His name was Annas ben Sethi, High Priest Emeritus of the temple, and he was thought by some to have been the most powerful Jew in the world at the time.
Well-versed in nation-state diplomacy and industrial-scale bribery, the book of Luke states that his family controlled the Jerusalem temple and its revenues for six decades.
During Jesus’ lifetime, Annas promoted his son-in-law, Joseph Caiaphas (along with various other family members), to the high priesthood.
Jesus is said to have told at least two thinly veiled and highly critical tales about the House of Annas. After hearing one of them, the House of Annas actually realized he was talking about them.
Then, when Jesus famously overturned the tables of their corrupt moneychangers outside the temple in Jerusalem, the House of Annas immediately started to plot his assassination.
The Bible tells us Jesus was soon arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by treasury temple guards and taken first to see Annas, then Caiaphas.
When he was then tried before Roman official Pontius Pilate, it was the House of Annas that delivered the indictment and demanded crucifixion.
Despite being executed nearly 2,000 years ago, his influence continues to grow – with more than 2.6 billion followers who identify as Christians today.
A God Named Josh – Uncovering the Human Life of Jesus Christ by Jared Brock is published by Bethany House Publishers
