They grew up seeing all those portraits of cool, clean, attractive, and decidedly not-Semitic, clearly Nordic Jesus:
...and didn't realize that the real Jesus was an undistinguished, unattractive, unexceptional Jew:
http://www.teoti.com/religion/139106-je ... warf-.html
The image of a rather unatractive Jesus is provided by numerous other sources:
In the Coptic Acts of Paul and Thecla, Paul describes him as “a man small in size, bald-headed with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed” (v.3)
In the Acts of Peter, Peter quotes a prophet who described Jesus “And we saw him and he had no beauty nor comeliness" (v. 24).
In the Acts of John, John says: “And oft-times he [Jesus] would appear to me as a small man and uncomely" (v. 89)
The monk Dionysius of Fourna in a "Handbook of Painting", specifies “beautiful eyebrows that meet” in the section entitled: “On the countenance and form of our Lord as we have learned it from those who have seen Him with their own eyes."
An 8th century description of Christ is found in the works of St. John of Damascus, in his Epistola ad Theophilum include: "beautiful eyes, with eyebrows that meet”.
One of the Fathers of Christianity, Origen Adamantius, preserved some of the work of the Greek philosopher, Celsus, who described Jesus as “small and ugly and undistinguished.” Celsus is also possibly the source of the claim that Jesus’s father was a Roman soldier named Panthera.
“beautiful eyebrows that meet” lol.