Editorial

Joan E. Taylor, What Did Jesus Look Like? (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018); 269 pp.: 9780567671509, £17.99 (hbk)

This delightful and well-illustrated book would make an excellent and intelligent Christmas present. Joan Taylor is Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at Kings College London. Very sensibly she plays to her academic strengths, going into considerable detail about images of Jesus on, for example, Roman sarcophagi and contemporary sculptures and paintings of other people around the Mediterranean world, but commenting only very broadly (and disparagingly) on modern-day, largely Western images of Jesus. This book can be read on so many different levels. It makes a splendid coffee-table book for pleasurable browsing. It makes an excellent study of different typologies, with Jesus portrayed variously as an androgynous boy, as an almighty cosmocrator, as a young God, as a new Moses, as a philosopher, or as a vagabond. It also makes a real contribution to interdisciplinary studies – art, archaeology, literary studies and theology. And it is a detective story. The last is teasingly suggested by the title, but only really gets going towards the end of the book. Unsurprisingly, Jesus is pictured by Professor Taylor as a Mediterranean Jew – olive skin, brown eyes and black hair. More speculatively, he is seen as slim (because he did so much walking and begged for his food) and of median height for the time at around 5 feet 7 inches (because otherwise, Taylor argues, his height would have been mentioned). Quite meagre fruit, but then we knew it would be, given that we have no contemporary images of Jesus. Instead, what we have is an exuberance of conflicting images with which the author delights and teases us.

Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); 522 pp.: 9780199995356, £22.99 (hbk)

This book is also extraordinarily interesting and nicely priced, albeit a much more arduous Christmas read. Rob Iliffe is Professor of History of Science at Oxford and General Editor of the online Newton Project. As the title indicates, his book focuses less on the towering scientific achievements of Newton than on his voluminous, but almost entirely private, theological studies. Professor Iliffe argues at length that Newton himself regarded his theology as more important than his science and that he devoted the same kind of rigorous and independent critical study to both science and theology.

It is fashionable to regard Newton as a great scientist who dominated physics for over two centuries until Einstein, but as someone who was also an eccentric and of his time, especially with his interests in theology and, indeed, alchemy. Iliffe says little about the alchemy (which doubtless Newton approached with equal rigour) but he does set Newton into his specific religious context – much influenced by the Commonwealth in which he was brought up. He argues that Newton’s science and theology were intimately connected and that, by nature, Newton was a deeply pious and intelligent, albeit heterodox, Christian.

From a theological perspective I believe that Iliffe is basically right: Newton’s theological studies should be taken more seriously than they often have been. Newton shared some of the Commonwealth tropes: anti-Catholicism, a suspicion of idolatry, a fascination with millenarianism, and a puritanical personal lifestyle. Yet he was a very serious New Testament and Patristic scholar – probing textual and hermeneutical issues using primary sources whenever he could. Perhaps unsurprisingly (given his intelligence and independence) this led him to theological conclusions that were at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy on Christology and the Immanent Trinity – conclusions that are still much debated in theology today. He shared some of these theological conclusions with his friend, the clever and pious philosopher John Locke. The latter encouraged him to publish some of his studies that lay behind these conclusions, but Newton, secretive by nature and perhaps also anxious not to offend the Church of England to which he belonged, finally resisted this advice.

This book is not for the faint-hearted. It has many detailed digressions on the obscure ideas of Newton’s contemporaries. Yet it does do justice to Newton. Here, it contrasts sharply with the dismissive (and often untutored) atheism of some prominent scientists today. This is a book to read and to relish slowly: it will take you well into the New Year to finish. But you will be wiser when you do.