This idea has been knocking around in my head for awhile.

Nobody knows what Jesus looks like. Consider the traditional depection of Jesus: long light-brown hair, small beard, eyes lidded in a certain way, hair a certain length and combed a certain way, dressed in robes and sandals, right? It's not just a matter of that old cliched thing about "Jesus being a white european" or whatever, it goes beyond race. It's a very specific image being promoted. The same face, not just the same race. This is the "mainline Jesus" image, that has been promoted by every Church more or less...Catholic, protestant, orthodox, pentecostal/evangenlcal, what have you: They all more or less agree on this same image, which is pretty strange when you think about it because they don't agree on much else. Moreover, the image is remarkably stable over time, being repeated for centuries. Sure, there are a few accepted variations, like the "black Jesus" or the "baby Jesus" and so on, but these form a very very small portion of the great majority of pictures of Jesus.

Think about it: In early days, who had the power to begin with? The Church, and the Roman empire, other wealthy early elite families, ancestors of today's European nobility and so on were they ones who commissioned these artworks first, crafting this image. Who made the renaissance happen? Think about it -- elite bloodlines in Europe, the ancestors of today's TPTB, the nobility class, etc...this was the money behind Michaelangelo and Rubins and every other major artist down through the ages.

A theory I've been kicking around: We are being set up somehow with this somehow, by TPTB, on a very long-term timeline, many hundreds of years, generation after generation, with this image of "Jesus." TPTB always think very carefully about symbolism, they play with it, they even use it to taunt those of us who are onto their game, they like to rub our faces in it everywhere from high art to pop culture...and what symbol has been more central to Western Civilization than the very image of Jesus? Do you think for one moment that the choice of features has been arbitrary?

For example, what if this is the face of the Antichrist? And then the Antichrist shows up and the entire world falls on their knees because he looks like the mainline image of Jesus promoted by the establishment, again total full spectrum dominance, from academia and high art right through down to crass pop culture and cartoons, the same face again and again and again, for two millennia. Programming, settuing us up. And you don't even have to be a Christian to see the conspiracy possibilities...It could be a kind of long-term "project bluebeam" plan, for example, carried out over centuries to esecure total elite domination at last. Or any number of other things. What do you guys think?

The early Christ icons were a young man with shorter hair and no facial at all. He is depicted as a shepherd with a flock of sheep in a pastoral setting usually.

You are 100% correct about the image.There is no desciption mentioning a beard,hair length or colour.Let alone eye colour ! All images are from the renaissance period, which came well after Christ's departure .Many Christians do not even understand that Jesus Christ is a title, not a name .In revelations The Christ, in an address to the 7 churches mentions his new secret name and gives it, although it is not revealed to the reader .It is in refererance to the zodiac wheel and calander .
I once had door knocking Mormon's tell me that a renaissance painting of Christ was infact a photograph and proved Christ was real ! Go figure ????

It is also my opinion that the “face” of Christ is built on symbolism, however this symbolism is simply intended to provide a metaphoric explanation of what Christ represents. (When Christianity began, Christ had a different face because Christianity had a different face also.) Consider the fact that in The Zohar (a key text of Kabbalah) the “beard” of Macroprosopus is described in 13 parts and the “beard“ of Microprosopus is described in 7 parts. Nobody in their right mind would go into such detail unless there was some symbolic meaning that was being communicated. If you can determine the real meaning of the symbols then you will find the “Anti-Christ”. (In The Zohar and elsewhere metaphors are defined in relation to other metaphors so you can't tell what the face of Christ represents without a significant amount of digging.)

Religion is built on allegory, and every piece of it has a hidden meaning.