What Did Jesus Look Like?

I heard about a corn flake for sale on E-bay that is shaped like the state of Illinois. From what I understand, it is currently going for fifty dollars. Correction: I just checked with E-bay it’s going for way more than fifty bucks now. I understand that the girls selling it just wanted to by more frosted flakes, it looks like they may be able to pay their college tuition…
I’m just glad that it’s not a corn flake that looks like Jesus or Mother Mary. Pardon me if I sound cynical, but I get tired of people seeing a face or an image in a stain or something, and they are just convinced that they are seeing Jesus’ face (or His mother’s). Can I ask a question? How do you know what Jesus looked like? There weren’t any cameras then. The only paintings that we have were painted many generations later. The Bible never really describes Jesus’ appearance, except to say that He was not a handsome man (that, in and of itself, proves that every painting or image I have ever seen of Jesus is somewhat less than accurate).
The traditional image of Jesus shows Him with light-brown hair and blue eyes, neither attribute was common in the area at the time. I don’t think that Jesus came to Israel looking like an outsider. He would have had dark hair and eyes, and a somewhat dark complection, as well. I don’t mean dark as in He looked African, I mean dark as in Middle-Eastern.
To some extent, that’s speculation, but I think it has a logical basis. Generally the paintings that have been done of Jesus are based simply on the artist’s aesthetics. Well, I think Jesus looked like because that’s what I think looks good. Except Jesus isn’t supposed to look good… Traditionally, Jesus has been painted to look like the same ethic group as the artist. In more recent years, Jesus has been painted as a white man by artists of color simply because that’s the image of Jesus that they had been taught. Voltaire was right about the way we see God: “If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.”
I had one young man tell me once that he knew Jesus was black, because the Bible said He had hair like wool, and you don’t see white people with kinky hair. There are two basic problems with that: 1) it doesn’t say that Jesus hair was kinky like wool, it says Jesus’ hair was white like wool (is that where the idea of a blonde Jesus came from? I don't think it means that He was blonde, either), and, 2) many Middle-Easterners (and, truthfully, even some white people—it’s just not nearly as common) have kinky hair. I can’t argue that Jesus was white, I’m quite certain that he wasn’t. I do think that part of the reason that Jesus’ ethnicity isn’t expressly mentioned in Scripture is that God didn’t want us to feel that Jesus was only sent to one ethnic group. For God so loved the world, remember? We sing the song, “Red, brown, yellow, black, and white / They are precious in His sight; / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” We are all God’s children, no matter how different we may seem.