Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaneajanderson
For what it's worth, nowhere in the bible are Moses or Jesus described as having long hair, that's a recent invention, and I'm not too sure where it came from or why. The only biblical man that is noted to have had long hair is actually Samson, as part of his Nazarite vow, but that is a unique situation.
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Not many figures get a physical description in the Bible; you have to remember that it's a collection of stories from hundreds if not thousands of authors, most of them unknown, many of which were likely handed down as oral traditions long before anyone wrote them down. They aren't newspaper reports.
Depictions of biblical figures with long hair dates back several centuries. Michelangelo was the first Western artist to depict God; prior to his paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, God was considered too sacred to illustrate in full, and he was usually represented by a hand emerging from a cloud if he was painted at all. One of the reasons Michelangelo is considered such a revolutionary artist is this:
God depicted as a human, with long, flowing hair. Of course, this has no bearing on how biblical characters actually wore their hair (if they existed at all), which would have been dictated by local culture at the time.
The bigger problem with representations of biblical figures is the fact that they are almost exclusively white. In the Renaissance, this was because artists like Michelangelo had no conception of cultural appropriation, and painted figures like the people he saw; indeed, it was common to model historical figures in art after specific living people, such as the sculpture of Moses with horns based on Pope Julius II, and Rembrandt's "Self Portrait as the Apostle Paul":
That's understandable for that time period and culture, but the fact that Christian churches still plaster their walls with pictures of white Jesus when we absolutely know better today is nothing short of deliberate whitewashing.