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It is a common misconception that Jesus wore shoulder-length hair. Many have used this myth to justify long hair on males today. What does history reveal about this matter? In Modern Student’s Life of Christ, Phillip Vollmer says:
Archaeologists object to the conventional pictures of Christ because they are not true to history. A German painter, L. Fahrenkrog, says “Christ certainly never wore a beard, and his hair was beyond doubt closely cut.” For this we have historical proofs. The oldest representations, going back to the first Christian centuries, and found chiefly in the catacombs of Rome, all picture Him without a beard… The further fact that Christ must have in His day worn short hair can be proved by the Scriptures. Among the Jews none but the Nazarites wore long hair. Christ was …not a Nazarite… like the rest of the Jews He wore his hair short. Further evidence is furnished by Paul in 1 Cor. 11:14, where it is expressly declared that it is a dishonor for a man to wear his hair long, something no apostle would have said had his Master worn it thus!
Statuary, coins, and paintings from the first century consistently depict short hair on the Greek and Roman males, making it the universal practice of the period. No one can honestly appeal to Jesus as an excuse for long hair on a male except in ignorance of the facts.
Unquestionably, long, effeminate hair on a male is a sign of some sort of rebellion in many cases. A notorious radical leader of many youth wrote:
Young kids identify short hair with authority, discipline, unhappiness… and long hair with letting go, campus disruption, dope. Long hair is the beginning of our liberation… (Do It, by Jerry Rubin).
Ironically, some young men in the church loudly argue that their long hair isn’t a sign of rebellion, all the while rebelling against their parents’ orders to cut it.
Whether a man so intends or not, his long hair symbolizes certain things to most people and none of those things is good.
[Note: I wrote this article for, and it was published in the May 15, 1975, edition of the Granbury Gospel, weekly bulletin of the Granbury Church of Christ, Granbury, Texas, of which I was editor.
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
