Silly Drudge Headline: What Did Jesus Look Like?

Matt Drudge has some rather “interesting,” tabloidish headlines. Our all-time favorite was his link to a story, in the Houston Chronicle, about a woman who beat another woman with a frozen armadillo.

But for utter silliness, the headline and picture above take the cake.

It notes that Jesus may have been muscular, “with Middle Eastern appearance.”

Let’s see: he was from Galilee, north of Jerusalem, south of Lebanon. Smack in the middle of the Middle East. How would we expect him to look?

The “muscular” part is less obvious. We really don’t know, but if he helped his dad in his carpentry work, in that era before power tools, that’s plausible enough.

We do know his charisma was not due to any particular physical appearance. When you can do miracles, you can look any old way and still impress people.

Tabloid Source

Drudge links to an article in the The Sun, a British tabloid, and the article contains some more stunning revelations. Such as:

• “The Son of God may have looked very different to the actors that often portray him on screen”
• “While she admits we will never know for certain, [Joan] Taylor surmises he would have had olive-brown skin, dark hair and brown eyes”
• “Pointing to a computer-generated image by forensic anthropologist Richard Neave, she says his features would have been ‘Jewish.’”

So a Jewish guy probably looked “Jewish.”

Conclusion

Usually, tabloids titillate with stories the truth of which is questionable. But in this case, they have published something blazingly obvious, and pretended it is some sort of revelation.

Marquette on Drudge — Again

If you are going to get bad publicity, the last place you want to see it linked is on the Drudge Report, a hugely popular news aggregator. We’ve seen reports of daily newspapers in mid-size cities having their servers melt down because of the traffic that a link on Drudge creates. (Not literally melt, you understand.)

So it can’t have pleased Marquette officials when a link to the Breitbart story on their attempt to fire us appeared on Drudge.



As has been typical in the media, the headline gets the story wrong. We didn’t “defend man-woman marriage,” merely the right of a student to express opinions on the subject without being demeaned and bullied.

The Drudge link is the second one in less than a year. The last time was when the story broke that Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center had, painted on its wall, a mural glorifying cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.

Thus, the narrative of Marquette being a place dominated by intolerant political correctness is gaining steam. Will this hurt Marquette?

Many kinds of institutions can be as politically correct as they want with impunity. Ivy League universities, for example, are so prestigious that they can do almost anything and still attract a massive number of applicants. If you can get yourself admitted to Yale, you want to go to Yale, and will tolerate the political correctness.

Public universities, likewise, have a captive clientèle consisting of families that can’t (or don’t want to) pay the high tuition of a private university. Especially if they doubt that the private university provides a better education.

But Marquette, as a mid-level institution (ranked in the top 100 nationally, but not in the top 50) which markets itself as a “Catholic university” and has high tuition, may be especially vulnerable when the notion that it’s actually Catholic becomes more and more transparently untrue.