I am watching a documentary that chronicles Jesus' life as He began his ministry. It is well-balanced, citing a lot of accurate archeological and cultural facts from that time period. What I fail to understand, and have always wondered about is why these shows persist in casting actors to play Jesus that are light skinned, handsome, and tall. Throughout the ages and to the present day, artists have done the same thing. A physical anthropologist would likely be able to accurately describe someone from Galilee at that time in history as someone who was fairly short (by our standards), fairly dark-skinned, and likely to have dark brown eyes and nearly black curly hair. That would be an accurate depiction of a person from that region living at that time. I also believe that I read that Jesus himself was not in any way in possession of remarkable features, meaning that he was plain and looked like the average person of His time. Why go to all the trouble of creating a documentary that carefully attempts to adhere to the facts, and then have Jesus appear as someone of Nordic descent? It's never made much sense to me. Having studied physical anthropology in university, I find this persistence of representing Christ in this manner as a glaring misrepresentation. I realize that it makes no difference what he really looked like, it was WHO He was that matters, but that makes the whole thing of depicting him inaccurately even more puzzling to me. If what He truly looked like doesn't matter, and you are doing a documentary that is as historically factual as possible, then why not try and show Jesus in the most accurate way possible? I know that humans tend to equate physical beauty with perfection and goodness. I wonder if this flawed type of thinking is what has inspired artists through the ages to show Jesus as the most physical ideal that they could imagine, and why this habitual portrayal persists even today.