Week 5: Part One, Chapter 4 — "Profile: What Would Jesus Have Looked Like?"

1.Yancey surveys the wildly different artistic portraits of Jesus across the centuries — the Byzantine Pantocrator, the blond European Christ, the African Jesus, the revolutionary icon of liberation theology. Why do so many cultures remake Jesus in their own image? What does this impulse reveal about us — and what does it risk doing to our understanding of him?

2.Drawing on Isaiah 53:2 ("He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him"), Yancey suggests Jesus was probably not the handsome, luminous figure of Western religious art. How does the idea of an unremarkable physical appearance change the way you think about how people responded to him — and how you might have responded?

3.Yancey catalogs the kinds of people who were actually drawn to Jesus: prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, children, the demon-possessed, Gentiles, women of ill repute, working-class fishermen. And the kinds of people who were repelled: the respectable, the educated, the religiously successful. What does this pattern tell you about Jesus — and what does it say to you personally?