What Did Jesus Wear?

We’ve all seen paintings of Jesus. He always looks pretty much the same—long hair that hangs to his shoulders, parted in the middle, with a neatly trimmed beard. He normally gets a bleached white flowing robe that reaches his ankles, although sometimes it’s blue and sometimes it’s red. Often, he also gets some sort of mantle or whatever that hangs over one shoulder or drapes over his head.

There are a lot of minor variations, but there’s one basic theme. If you went to a costume shop and asked for a Jesus costume, you’d be pretty sure what you were going to get. And you could be very sure that anyone who saw you wearing it would instantly recognize it as a Jesus costume.

But Is That Real?

The obvious question to ask is whether that Jesus costume would look anything like the real Jesus who walked around on real roads in Galilee and Judea in the early part of the first century. 

And since we don’t have any paintings or statues of Jesus, how would we know?

There’s a recent book titled What Did Jesus Look Like? that I’ve found very helpful in nailing these questions down. The author is Prof. Joan Taylor, and she does a very nice job of pulling together all the info we have. The main sources of info from the middle east in the first couple of centuries are these:

1. Paintings and statues of various people. 
2. Documents describing or mentioning clothes.  
3. Actual clothes found in archaeological digs. 

As usual, we don’t have as much info as we’d like, but we have enough to get a fairly clear idea.

Jesus most likely wore the same clothes as other poor people of his time—a tunic, a belt, a pair of sandals, a light cloak (in cool weather), and a heavy cloak (in cold weather). Let’s talk about all these in more detail. First, the basics …

Basic Clothes

A man’s tunic was made of wool and hung down to just below his knees. It could be unbleached wool, or it could be dyed in various colors—yellow, red, green, blue, purple, and even orange. Purple and red were generally colors worn by rich people. But a poor man could wear any of the other bright colors, if he wanted. 

A woman’s tunic was similar, but it hung down further, reaching her ankles. 

But these tunics were not bleached white, as they are in all the modern pictures. (Essenes wore white clothes, made of linen, but Jesus was not an Essene.)

For both men and women, the tunic was terribly unstylish. Imagine a rectangle made of wool, almost a yard wide and three yards long. Cut a hole in the exact center for your head to poke through. Put your head through the hole and drape the rest over your body so that half hangs down in front and half in back. Now sew the front and back together to make seams running most of the way up both sides, leaving room for your arms to hang out. That’s very roughly how a tunic was made. 

The belt could be a rope or leather string or a broad strip of cloth. You just wrapped it around your waist and then tied it loosely to keep your tunic from billowing out. If it was a strip of cloth, you could fold it a couple of times lengthwise and it would hold a few coins or a short knife or whatever other small things you might want to carry. (Your tunic didn’t have pockets, so you needed somewhere to put your car keys, right?)

Sandals were made of flat soles of leather cut to the shape of your foot, with leather cords that looped around the back of your ankle and fastened to the sole at three points—one on each side of your ankle, and one between your toes. Archaeologists have found sandals at Masada and Qumran that look surprisingly modern.

During the summer, Israel can be very hot, and the tunic with belt and sandals would be all you’d need. (It appears that people didn’t wear any sort of headgear.) But when the temperature dropped a bit, you’d need another layer, or more than one …

Optional Clothes

In cooler weather, you could add a light cloak on top, which was basically just a rectangle of wool. By tradition, this had blue and white tassels at each of the four corners. (The tassels were called tsitsit in Hebrew. In the story where a woman touched the “fringes” of Jesus’s cloak to be healed, those fringes are exactly these tsitsit.)

It can get cold in Israel in the winter. It rains either a little or a lot, depending on where you are. It can even snow occasionally at the higher elevations. (Jerusalem is a couple of thousand feet above sea level, and it snows there sometimes.) When it’s cold, you need something more than a tunic and a light cloak. You need a heavy cloak.

The heavy cloak was quite large. It was rectangular in shape and was maybe a yard and a half wide, and two and a half to three yards long. You could wrap it around yourself and get reasonably warm. And it made a primitive sleeping bag when you were traveling. You could just roll yourself up in your heavy cloak and sleep on the ground. That’s exactly what poor people did. 

And … what about underwear? I emailed Prof. Taylor to ask about that, since her book didn’t mention underwear. In paintings of the crucifixion, Jesus usually gets a loincloth, so I asked whether Jewish people in the first century wore loincloths. She wrote back to say no, it doesn’t look like they did. It’s possible, of course, and we can’t be absolutely sure, but some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have a discussion about the fact that if your tunic is poorly made, it’ll expose your nakedness. And that’s only possible if you’re not wearing a loincloth. (In any event, when Romans crucified a man, they stripped him completely naked, so the loincloths in the paintings are not accurate. Crucifixions were all about total humiliation.)

Hair and Beards

And what about hair? Did Jesus wear his hear long, like in all the modern paintings? 

We have a number of paintings of people in Egypt from the time of Jesus. Men wore their hair short, and they trimmed their beards fairly short also. The main exception we know of was quite rare—people who had taken a lifelong Nazirite vow never cut their hair. John the Baptist is the most obvious example from the first centry. But Jesus was not a Nazirite, so there’s no reason to think he wore his hair long. 

It would be nice to have a few photos of Jesus and his family and his disciples. But we don’t have that. 

When you’re doing ancient history, you put together fragments of information from a lot of different sources. You can’t be sure you get it 100% right. All you can do is your best.

For now, this is the best I’ve been able to find.