In the earliest centuries of the Church, artistic portrayals of Christ did not begin with portraits but with symbols—profound, poetic images that pointed to the mystery of the Incarnate Word. Because the Gospels are silent on Christ’s appearance, and early Christians hesitated before rendering the ineffable in visual form, they chose instead the language of allegory. Thus the Lamb, the Shepherd, and the Fisherman spoke more powerfully than paint or stone. These allegories reflected both reverence and restraint, born of the conviction that no earthly image could capture the beauty of Him who was both God and Man.
The Early View of Christ’s Appearance
The Church of the ante-Nicene age hesitated to define Christ’s physical features. The Evangelists, guided by the Spirit, left no description, and this silence became sacred. In their humility, early theologians often interpreted Isaiah’s suffering Servant—“He had no form nor comeliness” (Isa. 53:2)—as a literal depiction of the Lord’s earthly appearance. This interpretation, shared by Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, imagined Christ during His earthly ministry as lacking beauty, even homely or common.
Yet such an image, while emphasizing His suffering, fails to encompass the fullness of Christ’s person. A truer sense—rooted in theology and intuition—suggests that His divine purity and inner harmony must have shone forth even through the veil of flesh, especially in moments of transfiguration or healing. The notion of a disfigured Messiah clashes with the Old Testament priestly ideal, and even more with the messianic hope.
Importantly, the early Fathers distinguished between Christ’s humiliation and His exaltation. Even those who believed Christ’s body bore no physical attraction during His earthly suffering affirmed that the risen and glorified Lord radiated beauty and majesty. Thus, the perceived “ugliness” was temporary and sacrificial, not essential or permanent. Clement rightly perceived a beauty beyond the eye—one rooted in the soul’s moral excellence and divine immortality. Chrysostom later rejected the idea of Christ’s unattractiveness, interpreting Isaiah’s prophecy as pertaining solely to His passion. He, Jerome, and Augustin instead looked to Psalm 45: “Thou art fairer than the sons of men,” to envision Christ’s glorious countenance.
Allegorical Depictions of Christ
Before the rise of portraiture, Christ appeared in Christian art only through allegory. The earliest images portray Him as:
- The Good Shepherd—laying down His life for the sheep or carrying the lost one home (John 10:11; Luke 15:3–7).
- The Lamb—gentle, spotless, bearing the sin of the world (John 1:29; 1 Pet. 1:19).
- The Ram—a subtle nod to the substitutionary victim in Abraham’s sacrifice of Yitsḥaq (Gen. 22:13).
- The Fisher—as Clement of Alexandria sang, “the Fisher of men that are saved,” catching souls from the flood of iniquity (Matt. 4:19).
These images expressed His gentleness, sacrifice, and redemptive mission, with a poetic delicacy far removed from the later realism of crucifixes and portraits.
The Symbol of the Fish
The most beloved symbol of Christ in the early Church was the fish, or Ichthys (ἰχθύς). This single Greek word—used by fishermen and poets—held profound theological depth. It formed an acrostic: Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ—“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” Thus, the fish was both symbol and confession, proclaiming Christ’s divinity and redeeming work.
Early depictions show a fish swimming through waters of judgment and life, bearing a plate of bread and a goblet of wine on its back—an unmistakable reference to the Lord’s Supper. In other images, it symbolized the soul caught in the net of divine mercy. For Tertullian, baptism bound believers to the Ichthys: “We little fishes, born in water after our Fish, Jesus Christ, thrive only by abiding in the water,” a poetic affirmation of the sacramental life.
The Ichthys belonged to the Disciplina Arcani—the discipline of secrecy in Christian symbolism—and appears frequently on ancient Christian graves, rings, lamps, vessels, and frescoes. Its origin likely traces to second-century Alexandria, a center of mystical and symbolic theology, shared by both orthodox and Gnostic Christians. Clement, Origen, and Tertullian all reference it with familiarity.
By the mid-fourth century, the Ichthys had largely disappeared, surviving only as a hallowed memory. But in its time, it expressed the total mystery of Christ—His person, His mission, and the believer’s union with Him.
The Absence of Early Portraits
Before Constantine, no true portrait of Christ is known—apart from possible cases among the Gnostic Carpocratians, who claimed even Pilate commissioned one, or the eclectic emperor Alexander Severus, who filled his private Pantheon with sages and deities from many faiths, including Christ.
Several forces restrained early Christian art from depicting Christ’s face: the Gospels’ silence, the Jewish prohibition of images, and the lingering belief in His unattractive human form. It was only after the Church’s integration into the empire that such portraits emerged—and not without controversy.
Eusebius, the first Church historian, records the oldest known report of a statue of Christ: one said to have been erected by the woman healed of the hemorrhage (Matt. 9:20) outside her home in Caesarea Philippi. Yet Eusebius himself opposed visual representations of the Savior. In a surviving letter to Empress Constantia, he denounced the attempt to depict the now-glorified Lord, whose majesty no human hand could capture. His resistance echoed the reverence that long delayed the development of Christian portraiture: a reverence that feared misrepresentation more than absence.
