Christianity
Jesus is almost always portrayed with a beard in iconography and art dating from the 4th century onward. In paintings and statues most of the Old Testament Biblical characters such as Moses and Abraham and Jesus' New Testament disciples such as St Peter are with beard, as was John the Baptist. John the Apostle is generally depicted as clean-shaven in Western European art, however, to emphasize his relative youth. Eight of the figures portrayed in the painting entitled The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci are bearded. Mainstream Christianity holds Isaiah Chapter 50: Verse 6 as a prophecy of Christ's crucifixion, and as so, as a description of Christ having his beard plucked by his tormentors.
In Eastern Christianity, beards are often worn by members of the priesthood and by monastics, and at times have been recommended for all believers. Amish and Hutterite men shave until they are married, then grow a beard and are never thereafter without one, although it is a particular form of a beard (see Visual markers of marital status). Many Syrian Christians from Kerala in India wore long beards.
In the 1160s, Burchardus, abbot of the cistercien monastery of Bellevaux in the Franche-Comté, wrote a treatise on beards. In his opinion beards were appropriate for lay brothers, but not for the priests among the monks.
Nowadays, members of many Catholic religious communities, mainly those of Franciscan origin, use a beard as a sign of their vocation. At various times in its history and depending on various circumstances the Catholic Church permitted and prohibited facial hair ("barbae nutritio") for clergy. The vast majority of Roman or Latin-rite clergy are clean-shaven.
Although most Protestant Christians regard the beard as a matter of choice, some have taken the lead in fashion by openly encouraging its growth as "a habit most natural, scriptural, manly, and beneficial" (C. H. Spurgeon), or by banning shaving altogether, as in the case of some Presbyterian Churches. Some Messianic Jews also wear beards to show their observance of the Old Testament.
Diarmaid MacCulloch writes: "There is no doubt that Cranmer mourned the dead king (Henry VIII)", and it was said that he showed his grief by growing a beard. But "it was a break from the past for a clergyman to abandon his clean-shaven appearance which was the norm for late medieval priesthood; with Luther providing a precedent, virtually all the continental reformers had deliberately grown beards as a mark of their rejection of the old church, and the significance of clerical beards as an aggressive anti-Catholic gesture was well recognised in mid-Tudor England."
Read more about this topic: Beard, Beards in Religion
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