Christian biblical artists consistently refused to depict Jesus in oriental dress.

Evidence

The above discussion shows that the choice of whom to represent as oriental in orientalist biblical art is rule-governed, and that its underlying rules remain the same even as its forms change historically, reflecting different geopolitical and ideological relations between the Christian and the Muslim worlds. I suggest that these underlying rules can be described in terms of two very simple principles, which together can generate all the varied choices that artists have made throughout the history of the type of representation we are discussing. One concerns the exceptional status of Jesus, and the other presents a hierarchy of choices concerning how to represent the rest of biblical characters. The first is the Occidental Jesus Rule. As has been stated before, Jesus is rarely portrayed with oriental headdress, that is, with a turban or kaffiyeh, in Christian biblical art. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 223

Categorization

• SEED: An essay tracing the ‘Occidental Jesus’ visual tradition — how artists since the Renaissance enforced Jesus’s cultural dissociation from the very Orient where the story is set.