Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 15, 1993 TAG: 9304140240
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO WHY THINGS ARE
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ARTISTS TEND TO CREATE JESUS IN THEIR OWN IMAGE
Q: Why is Jesus traditionally depicted as a skinny guy with long hair?A: The Gospels don't describe what Jesus looked like, and Jewish law prohibited the making of graven images, so there are no contemporaneous paintings, no statues, no Polaroids.
Lacking textual or graven evidence, religious iconographers have had no choice but to make stuff up. Western civilization is filled with images of a thin, white-skinned, long-haired Jesus, because, according to Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, "he was painted by slender white men with long hair."
If you survey different cultures, though, Jesus comes off as the man of a thousand faces. He's white, black, lanky, burly, effeminate, brutish. He's what every culture wants him to be.
The long hair may be the one feature that is historically accurate. Romans cut their hair short. Biblical scholars say the Jews may have let their hair grow as a way of distinguishing themselves, as an act of defiance.
Was Jesus skinny? He did fast for 40 days in the desert, according to the Gospels, and he may have come from an ascetic tradition that emphasized self-denial. It's a fair guess that he wasn't overweight.
Whether he was "white" or "black" or something in between is an issue contaminated by our own rather bizarre conceptions of what such terms mean. "He probably was a person of color, just because of the ethnic and racial mixes in the ancient Near East," says Marcus Borg, a biblical scholar at Oregon State University. Of course, "person of color" is a modern term; Jesus and his followers, as far as we know, had no interest in racial labels.
In any case, Jesus was probably short by our standards. He was even shorter than Robert Redford. "He was about 5 feet tall," postulates Borg. "That was the average height of a man in the Near East in the first century."
For all the preceding, skepticism is surely in order. Guesswork should never be treated as the Gospel truth.
Q: Why do they burn natural gas off the top of oil wells rather than using it for commercial purposes?
A: Because it's a gas, gas, gas.
You see, a gas has the unfortunate attribute of being . . . well, gaseous. It has a volume problem, there's just not very much energy density, and so it doesn't make economic sense to transport it a long distance. There are massive quantities of methane in places like Alaska, but it would take more energy to get it to Los Angeles than is contained within the gas.
Of course, there is a solution: You can turn the gas into a liquid, which is many thousands of times denser. The problem is, this takes refrigeration or some other kind of intervention, and that takes energy, and you still have your problem of putting more energy in than you get out.
New techniques may make it possible to chemically transform methane into liquid methanol at the site of the well, which would open up massive supplies of remote natural gas to commercial production. Right now we'll run out of oil in the middle of the next century. If we can harvest the natural gas, we'll postpone the collapse of civilization - or at least suburbia - for another generation or two. Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post. Richard Thompson, a regular contributor to the Washington Post, has illustrated "Why Things Are" since 1990.