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#7361
Gabe
Participant

The way in which early Christian depictions of Jesus emulated first the youthful Roman ideal and then the bearded Greek Philosophers is a perfect example of Syncretism. Since Jesus is literally the Son of God, it makes sense that he would take on whatever qualities were viewed as the most ‘potent’ or ‘cool’ at the time. This would probably make him appeal to most people, but I think it probably wasn’t as much a conscious propaganda-type decision as it was people using the imagistic language that they knew to communicated about Jesus. It’s true however that since Christians were persecuted, the artwork had to ‘pass’ as Roman-enough to avoid persecution. Still it’s interesting that our culture still portrays Jesus in a certain way that probably has very little to do with how he actually looked. The images convey the ideas of wisdom and kindness, and honestly at this point ‘Jesus’ is so associated with those images that any new artistic carries of the style is not syncretistically ‘Jesus-like’.