Who came up with the popular image of Jesus?

They "Romanized" Him after Constantine. The Shroud is a fake, completely apart from radiocarbon dating - that style of weaving wasn't even invented until c.900 CE, and the Orthodox icons depicting Him as fair of skin and blue of eye predate it.

Haha you must have been watching old Hollywood movies it seems! From the 1950s and 60s. I didn't know there still was a "popular" image but I think most of us make our own image that is meaningful to us.  

I think it was the same guy that designed the white Santa Claus.

How about that white Easter Bunny?

And the White Cupid?

AND 

When did he first pop up?   Then go from there.  What were the times like?   Probably that Jesus became blonder as America grew fonder of blondes.   And the Aryan, Christian race. 

We want Jesus to look just like us. 

Beautiful.

Most think He looked more like this picture below.   

In his book Racializing Jesus, Shawn Kelley states that the assignment of a specific race to Jesus has been a cultural phenomenon emanating from the higher levels of intellectual circles within societies, and he draws parallels between the seemingly different approaches within different settings.[41] Cain Hope Felder has argued that New Testament passages such as Galatians 3:28 express a universalism that goes beyond race, ethnicity or even religion.[42]
Jesus with Nicodemus, by Tanner, 1899

By the 19th century theories that Jesus was of the Aryan race, and in particular of Nordic appearance, were developed and later appealed to advocates of the new racial antisemitism, who wanted nothing Jewish about Jesus. Houston Stewart Chamberlain posited Jesus was of Amorite-Germanic extraction.[43] The Amorites were actually a Semitic people.[44][45][46] Madison Grant claimed Jesus for the Nordic race.[7]:48–51[47][48] This found its most extreme form in the Nazi theology of Positive Christianity. Scholars supporting the radical Aryan view also argued that being a Jew by religion was distinguishable from being a Jew by race or ethnicity.[49] These theories usually also include the reasoning that Jesus was Aryan because Galilee was supposedly a non-Jewish region speaking an unknown Indo-European language, but this has not gained scholarly acceptance (in fact, Galilee had a significant non-Jewish minority, but these spoke various local Semitic languages).[7]:48–51[50]

The English writer Godfrey Higgins suggested in his book Anacalypsis (1836) that Jesus was a dark brown skinned Indo-Aryan from North India. In 1906 a German writer named Theodor Plange wrote a book titled Christ-an Indian? in which he argued that Jesus was an Indian and that the Christian gospel had originated in India.[51]

By the 20th century, theories had also been proposed that Jesus was black, but not necessarily a descendant of any specific black African ethnicity, e.g. based on the argument that the ancient Israelites, as a group, were in whole or part originally a black people.[7]:43–50[52] Martin Luther King was a proponent of the "Black Christ" movement and identified the struggle of Jesus against the authorities of the time with the struggle of African Americans in the southern parts of the United States, as he questioned why the white church leaders did not voice concern for racial equality.[52] For some, this blackness was due to Jesus's identification with black people, not the color of his skin,[52] while others such as Albert Cleage argued that Jesus was ethnically black.[53]

A study on the 2001 BBC series Son of God attempted to determine what Jesus's race and appearance may have been.[54] Assuming Jesus to be a Galilean Semite, the study concluded in conjunction with Mark Goodacre that his skin would have been "olive-coloured"[55] and "swarthy"[56]—these results were criticised by some media outlets for being "dismissive" and "dumbed down".[57][58] However, this type of analysis suggests, that even though Caucasian, Jesus may not have fit into all modern definitions of whiteness in the Western world.







This post was edited by WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH at March 5, 2018 11:19 PM MST

Jesus was probably swarthy, dark hair & eyes.  Hair kept shorter.

In the middle ages most were illiterate, so they had to come up with images. The official artist probably only had Caucasian models to hand which would of course appeal to the masses.