Biblical history Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

What Did Jesus Really Look Like?

One of the greatest mysteries of ancient history is the true appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Most people today have an image that immediately pops into their head when they hear the name “Jesus” of a tall, handsome white man with long, flowing hair and a beard and maybe a halo. This is certainly not what the historical Jesus really looked like. In fact, the image we all have of Jesus actually has a quite fascinating origin. In ancient times, Jesus was represented in a wide variety of different ways, some of them downright bizarre, but the standard image we all know and recognize eventually became the canonical one.

We don’t know much about what the historical Jesus looked like, but the gospels and other ancient sources do provide some details that can allow us to reconstruct a very general sense of his possible appearance.

Is Donald Trump the Second Coming of Cyrus the Great?

As strange as it may sound, Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States of America, has been repeatedly likened to Cyrus the Great (lived c. 600 – c. 530 BC), the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The comparison between Trump and Cyrus the Great is especially popular among evangelical Christian Trump-supporters in the United States, but it also has some prominence among Israeli Jews. Let’s take a look at who Cyrus the Great was, why Donald Trump is being compared to him, and why these comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Was King David a Historical Figure?

As many of my readers are probably already aware, an article that I published on this website back in March 2018 about the historicity of Jesus recently stirred up quite a bit of controversy and criticism—some of it constructive, some of it not so much. As I noted in one of my comments under that article, the historicity of Jesus seems to be perhaps the one subject in the entire field of ancient history that is the most capable of consistently inciting outrage and controversy. The historicity of King David, on the other hand, is a bit less contentious, since David is not nearly as important a figure in Christianity as Jesus is. I certainly hope that this article does not provoke quite so much outrage as my Jesus article, but I suspect it will probably just lead to more nasty comments telling me how everything I write is rubbish and how I will never be a real scholar. In any case, here we go.