What Color Are Jesus’ Eyes?

By George “Chip” Hammond
What color are Jesus’ eyes? I say “are” because Jesus is not dead but is alive risen in body, physical and substantial (see John 20:25-27). He is not a spirit or a ghost (Luke 24:38-40). Although the qualities of Jesus’ body changed in his resurrection, he is the same Jesus (Acts 1:11). His disciples were not confused or unsure of who he was when they saw him after the resurrection (John 20:14-16, 18, 25).

So Jesus has an eye color. What is it?

To answer that question, we must understand the words “I know.” “Knowing,” for the purpose of our discussion, has two meanings. We may know something through investigation of the natural world. For example, we know that the Andromeda galaxy is 2,537,000 light years from our own Milky Way.

The other way of knowing is through the certainty of faith. I know that Jesus rose from the dead.

Of these two, knowledge by the certainty of faith is the stronger. This will sound upside down to most readers, but the grounds for it are clear if you think about it for a moment. All knowledge is based on faith. The knowledge that Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away is based on faith in the accuracy of our instruments and the correctness of our calculations. (More than one generally accepted astronomical truth has been adjusted because a later mathematician found a simple error in calculation.) The knowledge that Jesus rose from the dead is based on faith in the declaration of God himself in his Word.

It is true that people often misunderstand statements in the Bible, but when you have plain statements made about the physical resurrection of Jesus in multiple places in the gospels and the New Testament epistles, and when the concerted, unified testimony of the church throughout the ages affirms it, as it has and does in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, we have an assurance of faith.

Truths known in this way are de fide, that is “of the Faith.” They are certain and must be believed in order to be in right relationship with God who has declared them. Truths known by observation are always at least potentially provisional. They are open to change and adjustment as new data become available.

When we speak of de fide truths, it’s important to understand that these are the truths recognized by the whole church throughout the world and throughout the ages. There are things that I believe as a Presbyterian (I should clarify here I am a Presbyterian because I believe them, I do not believe them because I am a Presbyterian) which are not the confession of the whole church but are the conclusions of all Presbyterians. Although based on statements in the Bible and belief in the truth of God’s Word, these are more akin to knowledge by investigation (the investigation of the Bible in this case) than they are de fide knowledge.

Likewise, there are things I hold to be true from my reading of the Bible that not all Presbyterians agree on. These are not de fide truths. It would be wrong of me to insist that people cannot be Christians, or even faithful Christians, or even Presbyterians unless they acquiesce to my understanding.

So what color are Jesus’ eyes? There are two ways we might go about answering the question, one from investigation and one from the Bible.

If we go the route of answering the question by investigation, we are going the route of knowing from genetics and the probability of history. From Jesus’ genealogies in Matthew and Luke we know that Jesus was a Middle Eastern man, specifically a Jewish man.

In 1903 Maurice Fishberg published an article in The American Anthropologist entitled “Physical Anthropology of the Jews” in which he counted and categorized Jewish eye color from a large sample. Trying to control for outside streams of genetic information, if you wade through the long article and apply it our question, it would be reasonable to conclude that Jesus’ eyes are most likely brown.

If someone asked me, “What color are Jesus’ eyes?” I might reply, “I believe they are brown.” The “I believe” here is not a statement of faith but is based on a conclusion from the data and the valid use of reason.

Another way we might try to answer the question is to ask, “What does the Bible say about Jesus’ eye color?” I once heard a man preaching who confidently assured his congregation that Jesus’ eyes are red, and that anyone who did not think so “disbelieved the Bible” and was “denying the plain truth of the Bible.”

He based these audacious statements on two passages, Genesis 49:12 and Revelation 1:14 (also 2:18 and 19:12). The Genesis passage is prophecy about a descendant of Judah, universally understood by Christians to be a reference to Christ. The KJV renders this passage, “His eyes shall be red with wine,” which may sound like drunkenness, but Jesus was not given to drunkenness. The NIV says, “His eyes will be darker than wine.” Combining these two translations, he concluded that the Messiah’s eyes would be “redder than wine.” This was further corroborated by John’s vision. The passages alluded to say that his eyes “are like fire,” supporting that they are red in color.

We have two different conclusions drawn from two different ways of knowing, one from observation and the study of genetic features and history, and one from the Bible. Of course, we should go with the conclusion drawn from the Bible, right?

C.S. Lewis defined “chronological snobbery” as thinking that all other periods in history are ignorant and contain errors in their assumptions, but our own era is without assumption and without error. Lewis realized that within a hundred years many of our assumptions which we are unaware of will be met with a skeptical “how could they have ever thought that?”

The 1500s were a watershed time for Western civilization. The Renaissance (“rebirth”) of culture and learning and exploration was under way, laying a seedbed out of which grew both the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Although the early great scientists were Christians, there was almost from the beginning an uneasiness between the Catholic Church and science because the church drew its conclusions abstractly from reason in the light of revelation and tradition, and science drew its conclusions concretely from observations of the actual things.

The new and largely unexamined assumption of the time, however, was that science was precise, and therefore was “the language of truth.” This was accepted uncritically by Renaissance culture and led to a way of thinking that we can express in the following syllogism: Science is the language of truth. The Bible is true. Therefore, the Bible is written in scientific language.

It did not occur to the people of that culture as a whole that science as a discipline was new and could therefore not be the language of Moses or Paul for they were writing to be understood in their own day. It also tacitly assumed that earlier understandings of how truth was conveyed – for example through the poetry of Job, or the parables of Jesus – was less true, and now had to be adjusted to fit the new scientific understanding. The language of science became a veritable idolatry which the Bible now had to fit or be jettisoned. What observation said about the movement of the planets and what the Bible says about the movement of the planets were set in competition with one another as competing scientific theories, leading to the condemnation of Copernicus and Galileo by the Catholic Church.

The brilliance of Galileo was seen not only in his technological innovations (his telescope which allowed him to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter), and in his calculations and observations of natural phenomena, but in his understanding that the burgeoning discipline of science was knowledge gained by observation of the material world. It was true as far as it went when the observations and calculations were accurate, but science was not the all-encompassing language of truth, as the Western world had come to believe. Perhaps because he actually did science and understood its limitations, Galileo avoided the science idolatry that his inquisitors had fallen into by looking at what the Bible was actually addressing. Rather than an encyclopedia for answering our questions, the Bible was given to tell us what questions were spiritually important to ask. As Galileo perceptively is reported to have said to his inquisitors, “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

As children of the Scientific Revolution and the later Enlightenment, we are so used to formulating questions and going to the natural world with experimentation, observation, and calculation to find the answers that we want. We think we can do the same with God. In the chronological snobbery of our science idolatry, we assume that science is the language of truth, and scientific inquiry which answers our questions is the “correct method” for discovering truth, so we come to the Bible assuming scientific statements.

A quantum leap in my own spiritual growth came when I stopped doing this and realized that the Bible was not given to answer all my questions, but rather was given to tell me which questions were ultimately worth asking. To do this, I need to understand the context of the worlds, cultures, languages, and literatures into which God gave the various books of the Bible.

The Bible is not concerned with the color of Jesus’ eyes. If I bring that question to it, it refuses to answer me. If I force it to answer (like the preacher mentioned earlier) I simply make myself look sophomoric. (The word means “a clever fool.”) The answer to the question is ultimately unimportant. If I’m curious about the question, I’ll have to look for knowledge from observations about human genetics. The Bible has no answer for me.

You’ll never hear a sermon from me on the color of Jesus’ eyes. Whatever conclusion I come to about it, it is not a matter de fide. It is not really even properly a matter for theological discussion. Pressed for an answer in a private conversation, I’d tell you that Jesus’ eyes are (probably) brown.