Did Jesus Use Jergens Body Lotion?

Look through any collection of classical art and study the depictions of Jesus’ body. You will find portrayals of Jesus as skinny or heavily muscled. An adult Jesus may have a younger man’s body or a “dad body.” Artists show him clothed, semi-clothed or naked. They often depict his wounded body at the crucifixion—sometimes with blood.

                But in the many different paintings of Jesus’ body from artists in a multitude of countries and across a millennia of art-making he nearly always has perfect skin. Sure he may have a wound where the soldier’s spear poked him in the side or cuts on his back where he was flogged. But elsewhere on his body, his skin is without blemish.

                This is not just misleading, but downright inaccurate. The body of Jesus of Nazareth, who had a rural upbringing and spent years of his adulthood walking the countryside, would have been covered in scratches. In fact, he probably spent much of life healing from injuries to his skin. And not him alone, but all of his fellow Galileans.

                Why? Because most of the native flora in northern Israel, within 20-30 miles of Nazareth, is out to get you.

                I know this from personal experience. Earlier this summer, I spent three weeks walking the hills on the west side of the Jezreel Valley. At 8 hours a day, I logged over 300 miles of walking (usually at temperatures where they tell you to get out of the sun). On the other side of the valley was Nazareth, less than 15 miles away.

                What I discovered was this: Eighty percent of the flora has thorns, thistles, spikes, or barbs. It grows prolifically. It is tall. It is overgrown. The bushes grow into the trails and the thistles invade the fields.

                And these plants are not small. The average size for one thistle species was chest-height. But that was average; it often grew well above my head. And I am six feet tall. Once it dried out for the summer (in mid-May), the thorns became hard and inflexible.

                I often encountered this thistle in fields, among the wheat. We forget how much weed killer we spray on fields in modern farming. That did not happen in Jesus’ time. So the thistles would grow with the weeds. A farmer might be able to pull out some of them, but often had to let the weeds grow with the crop and then separate them at harvest. (See Matthew 13.) Whenever he worked in his fields, he encountered these vicious thistles.

                Often the bushes would grow tall and wide, pushing with their thorns into and over trails. To move down such a trail you need to make yourself small and inch slowly between the thorny bushes. You could get 10 feet down such a tight patch and just when you thought you were free, you find a vine with sharp thorns growing across the trail. So you stand there with thorns poking through your skin while you disentangle the vine.

                This was my experience with Israel’s plant life; and I wore long trousers, ankle-high leather work boots, and a long-sleeved shirt. Imagine what it would have been like for Jesus, who would have worn open-toe sandals and a robe. And if he was working outside he would have “girded his loins” by tying the robe around his groin and leaving his legs bare. That provides no protection from scratches.

                Today we have paved roads, streets and sidewalks; we can get on them and escape the thorns and thistles. But once Jesus left the protection of a town, he would have walked down dirt trails from village to village. Trails that would not have been maintained except by travelers. Roman built roads were few and far between, and not near a backwater like Galilee at all.

                So even if Jesus could have used Jergens Body Lotion, it would not have given him perfect skin. The natural world within which he lived his daily life was just too likely to scratch him every time he went out.

Galilee and its Thorns

When religious tourists travel to Israel looking for the land where Jesus walked, they often anticipate pleasant, peaceful places. Their expectations may include a quaint lakeside village of Capernaum, a town like Chorazin nestled among gently rolling hills, a moderate climate, lush farmland, or quiet woodlands filled with birdsong.

Reality differs significantly. Jesus spent most of his ministry in eastern Galilee, around the freshwater Sea of Galilee. The landscape is more like Arizona or New Mexico than the American Midwest or the South. Rugged landscapes dominate, where hills rise and fall rather than roll. Cliffs and precipitous rocky outcrops appear frequently, often rising high above narrow fertile strips of land by the lake.

By mid-May, temperatures are already in the 90s and can crack 100. Spring and its rains are long gone and the wild vegetation has mostly dried out. The streets are dusty, the winds are hot, and you almost expect a tumbleweed to roll across the road.

It brings to mind the 1948 western film, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” although without the ever-present cacti. Indeed, cacti are surprisingly uncommon in Galilee, even though the Sabra cactus is widespread in Judea and southern Israel.

The absence of cacti should not be taken as an absence of thorns however. Indeed, thorn bushes and thorny weeds grow in abundance in this area, and they are nasty.

During my childhood, I often heard Jesus’ Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13. In the story, the farmer sows seed in the good earth and it grows strong and tall, but some of the seed falls elsewhere and fails: rocks, pathways, and among the thorns which “grew up and choked them.” As a child, I thought the thorns were thistles or nettles and could not understand why the farmer simply did not weed them out. After all, that’s what my mom had me do in our garden.

It turns out that plants with thorns grow everywhere in the Galilee and in a wide variety. This month, while I am working in Galilee, I daily walk a mile along the side of field. Along its edge I have counted eight different types of thorny weeds, to say nothing of the trees and bushes with thorns.

The thorn weeds are beautiful in their blooms, with flowers ranging from yellow to blue to purple. There is a calf-high plant with blue stems which dries to a crown shape. There is a waist-high purple thistle with pointed leaves as well as vicious thorns.

But it is the Globe Thistle which really stands out. It frequently grows in stands, and can reach as high as 5 or 6 feet. In the spring it bears a beautiful round, blue flower about the size of a baseball. But as it dries, it hardens so that any soft areas become hard and spikey.

Along the side of a field, it is easy to see why a sower would leave behind any seed that fell among them. A hedge of dry Globe Thistles comprises a formidable obstacle that would discourage even the most keen farmer.

But that is not the worst of it. Upper Galilee produces something like a Scottish Thistle which grows to 8 or 9 feet, towering over any human being. Walking through a grove (what else can you call it?) of these tall thistles becomes an experience of ducking and dodging to avoid the spikes, and even thick clothing provides only a small amount of protection.

In the end, the soft and attractive Galilee of American Christian imagery exists only in imagination. The reality is that it is a challenging land whose weeds seem to be dominated by those with thorns, some of which grow to an intimidating size.

Caption: A six-foot man stands beneath Galilean thistles, while another stands before a thicket of dead Globe Thistles.  Inset: A blooming Globe Thistle. Thanks to Randy Mohr for his design assistance.