How Little We Know About Jesus

We don’t know in what year Jesus was born, except that it almost certainly was not 0 AD and unlikely to have been anywhere near Christmas time.

We know almost nothing about his first thirty years. That’s ninety percent of his life!

The Bible provides not even the vaguest clue as to what he looked like. For all we know, he could have been a short, balding, short-haired, clean-shaven redhead. (Early depictions of Jesus were of him clean-shaven and short-haired, and it is claimed that artistic representations of him having long hair and a beard were originally influenced by depictions of the Greek god Zeus.) Jesus almost certainly was not nearly as white as he is often portrayed, but we don’t know how dark he was.

Consider this:

Matthew 11:20-21 Then he began to denounce the cities in which most of his mighty works had been done, because they didn’t repent. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon which were done in you, they would have repented long ago . . .

We know so little about Jesus’ ministry in these cities that Chorazin is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible except in the identical passage in Luke 10:13.

John 21:25 There are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they would all be written, I suppose that even the world itself wouldn’t have room for the books that would be written.