'There is a Christ for every age," wrote the art historian and director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor. Now, with computer reconstructions from 1st-century Jewish skulls, the BBC claims to have come up with the best possible Messianic likeness for the third millennium.
While Christian artists have liked to depict Jesus Christ in images that are far removed from his Middle Eastern Jewish origins - fair-skinned, long-haired, even blue-eyed - today's image shows him as dark, swarthy and sporting a closely shaven beard.
The image is the centrepiece of a new BBC series, the Son of God, which begins this Sunday. The three-part film cost £1.5m to make and is likely to prove highly contentious.
Analysis of excavated skulls of 1st-century Jews and images from ancient Syrian frescos reveals that the traditional image - from that depicted on the Turin Shroud to Willem Dafoe's blond-haired portrayal in the Last Temptation of Christ - is a fictitious construct based on centuries of erroneous impressions.
By combining computer images of ancient skulls with 6th century images of Christ, the series producers believe they have come up with a far closer likeness.
"It's not the face of Jesus, but how he is likely to have looked given the scientific information we've got," said Lorraine Heggessey, controller of BBC1. "That's what people from that area of the world looked like at that time."
Jean-Claude Bragard, the producer of the series, a co-production with Discovery and France 3, said he hoped the image would be a point of debate for all. "If you look at the programme, we are going to be challenging the perceptions of agnostics, atheists and believers."
The peak-time series, which Ms Heggessey described as a "landmark" project for BBC1 and should answer criticism that the corporation has marginalised religious debate, also provides explanations for gospel stories which many rationalists believe to have been mythical. There is evidence, for instance, to support the story that Christ sweated blood on the cross. Evidence from the US shows it could have been a medical condition.
"There are more than 100 reported cases of people under extreme pressure who know they're going to die, on their way to the gallows or the gas chamber, they're sweating blood," Mr Bragard said. "We looked at the scientific and archaeological evidence for the stories in the gospels."
While the miracles told in the gospels were not explored ("They are a matter of faith, you either believe them or you don't," said Mr Bragard), the series tackles a number of thorny issues. It suggests, for example, that Judas may not deserve the reputation conferred upon him by history. A re-examination of the original Greek versions of the gospels reveals that the expression translated as "betrayed" actually has a more anodyne meaning: Jesus was "handed over" to the authorities rather than "turned in".
Judas Iscariot, for his 30 pieces of silver, may simply have believed he was arranging a meeting between Pontius Pilate and Christ - whose natural instinct was to confront authority. "History has recorded Judas as the betrayer, and history may have got it wrong," Mr Bragard said.
The series uses intricate computer graphics to reconstruct the buildings of Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth, showing the cities as they would have looked to contemporaries of Christ. The programme also attempts to give an impression of Christ's youth: a period almost totally ignored by the gospels.
The series presenter, the BBC's former Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen, hopes the series will challenge traditional beliefs on all sides of the debate. "I'm not a religious person, but this series is not about belief, it's about fact," he said. Before embarking upon the project, he said, he had never conceived that it could be possible to understand the existence of Jesus as an activist and hero without believing in God.
"I'm very sceptical about religion and my instinct was to disprove a lot of this stuff. But it simply can't be dismissed. I don't think you can deny that there was this person called Jesus - he was a hero, he did have a following."
He said the computer-generated image of Christ was impressive: "He was a Middle Eastern Jew. If you go to Jerusalem today, a lot of people look like that."
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