Was Jesus cool? What do you think?
Our friend Elvis (the alive one) wrote this:

I think Jesus was always sitting with the weird kids at the proverbial 1st-century Palestine lunch table. Tax collectors? They’re not cool. And Jesus was called out by Dobsonites– no, sorry, Pharisees– for palling around with prostitutes because they were outcasts, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, not because Jesus was having too rockin’ a time with them.

Maybe that is right. The Bible suggests that there wasn’t anything about Jesus’ appearance that stopped anyone in their tracks. The Gospels say nothing about his looks. Lots of people – including his family – thought he was loopy. All of this would suggest he was anything but cool.
And yet I can’t read the Gospels and see how people reacted to Jesus and not get the impression that there was a “coolness” too him – a coolness in the sense that he set a style, he made people want to follow him, he clashed against cultural norms, he was utterly winsome. So, maybe cool?