A sixth-century image discovered in Israel depicts Jesus with short, curly hair.
The face of Christ, with proposed reconstruction, found in the Baptistery chamber beside an ancient Israeli church.
In an extremely rare early painting found in an ancient Israeli church, Jesus looks completely different from the long-haired, bearded Western image of him.
Archaeologists from the University of Haifa in Israel discovered the previously unknown 1,500-year-old painting of Jesus in the ruins of a Byzantine-era farming village in the Negev desert of southern Israel.
"I was there at the right time, at the right place with the right angle of light and, suddenly, I saw eyes," art historian Emma Maayan-Fanar, who first noticed the image on the wall of a church, recounted to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "It was the face of Jesus at his baptism, looking at us."
The Baptistery chamber beside the Northern Church in Shivta.
Though Christianity was born in the Holy Land, very little early Christian art survives there from this particular period. Beginning in the eighth century A.D., during the so-called "Iconoclastic Controversy," many Christians in the Byzantine Empire considered creating religious images to be the equivalent of worshipping icons, which were outlawed by Emperor Leo III in 726 A.D. and remained so until the middle of the 9th century.