Image Details

Collection Alte Pinakothek, Munich/Photo by Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

With long brown hair and soulful eyes, German artist Albrecht Dürer shows that he is truly created in God’s image, in this self-portrait as Christ, painted in 1500, when the artist was 28 years old.

Throughout history, the existence of a historical Jesus has been a given, and from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century, scholars around the world struggled to understand just what kind of man he was. By the 1970s, however, the scholarly pursuit of the historical Jesus had fallen by the wayside. Today, Jesus is back in the books, with more scholars and theologians filling the void with new approaches and views. In the accompanying article, Stephen J. Patterson explores this new wave of Jesus scholarship. He finds that modern scholars, like Dürer before, tend to paint Christ in a way that looks rather like themselves.