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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 8099187, member: 72790&quot;]Absolutely fascinating discussion and I would suggest that anyone who agrees take a look at their ancient coinage at the divinities one finds on their coins. Gods and goddesses are ubiquitous on those artifacts and they have something in common. Whether it be Zeus/Jove or Athena/ Minerva they show us what those of the Ancient World wanted their divinities to look like-themselves. The people of the Classical Ancient World (even horses sometimes) created deities in their own image and likeness. It&#039;s not surprising that we would want our deities to resemble ourselves. It&#039;s flattering to associate those powerful beings with ourselves and us with them Would you not want to look as powerful as Jupiter, as beautiful as Aphrodite? Now that is not true of all civilizations where coming off as Quetzalcoatl or Siva is just fine.&nbsp; Some cultures have deities with unusual, sometimes frightening visages, [ATTACH=full]1408121[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1408121[/ATTACH] but in the Western World, good looking gods (ones that look like us) are what we want. When&nbsp; it comes to Jesus of Nazareth being imaged, we do the same thing. We make him look what we think is a good version of ourselves, hence Jesus being imaged as the ideal, well, us, is the way to go. Some non-Western cultures today even picture Jesus looking like a person who would have been unusual in the First Century Levant, but remarkably like themselves. So, when we see images of Jesus pictured in Fourth Century Rome, Ninth Century Byzantium, Renaissance Europe or Twenty-first Century Samoa what we are looking at is a mirror of the &quot;fairest of them all&quot;.</p><p>From upper left, Athena as Velia saw her, didrachma of ca. 300 BC , 7.4 grams. Diana Artemis as Macedonians saw her, ca. 150 BC, tetradrachma of 16.7 grams. Apollo as Romans saw him. Denarius of ca. 84 BC, 3.9 grams. Jesus of Nazareth as Byzantines saw him, ca, 1,000 AD. An anonymous follis of 19 grams. A Venetian grosso of ca. 1285 with a seated image of Jesus seated on a throne. A delight to the medieval eye, just like our doge.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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