In 2018, researchers at the University of North Carolina announced startling news: God had gotten a makeover.

American Christians no longer envision the deity as the fierce, judgmental power figure Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, according to the study led by cultural psychologist Joshua Conrad Jackson.

“The face of God in America” is, in fact, a gentle yet distinctly male being with wide eyes, a warm smile and a friendly expression, researchers concluded.

“Unconsciously, as people go through these images and select God, they are anchoring their choices on their own religious values,” explained Jackson, who asked more than 500 test subjects to sort through thousands of computer-generated faces and repeatedly choose which face of a random pair looked more divine. Blending the panel’s 153,000 choices into a single image produced a God who is more loving than stern.

The seemingly surprising results were in keeping with the ancient traditions underlying Judaism, Christianity and Islam, according to the new book “God: An Anatomy” (Knopf), out now, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a professor of the Hebrew Bible at the University of Exeter in Great Britain.

God is a decisively male deity with a human-shaped body and a beautiful face, writes Stavrakopoulou, who draws on archaeological evidence and her own translations of ancient texts to uncover the physical God hidden in the Bible.

In the Bible’s Song of Songs, God appears as an outright hottie with “eyes like doves,” radiant skin, and “cheeks like beds of spices.” Coins and carvings portray him with long, lustrous hair and a fashionably groomed black beard. Sometimes God even describes his own features, Stavrakopoulou notes: he calls himself “long-nosed” when speaking to Moses in the book of Exodus.

To the poet who wrote the book of Psalms, Yahweh was “a deity so alluring that adoration borders on desire,” Stavrakopoulou explains. For the early rabbis who interpreted those texts, she writes, “The overwhelming beauty of that ruddy face and muscular body . . . could only be understood as their beautiful God who had first revealed himself to their ancestors as they fled Egypt.”

Jackson, now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, has ambitious plans to build on his initial findings, cited in Stavrakopoulou’s book.

He and two colleagues, psychologists Jamin Halberstadt and Jesse Bering of the University of Otago in New Zealand, are building a huge database of religious art that will help scholars track the interplay of faith and culture through time — and could provide new insight into the psychology of people who lived long ago.

“Right now we have almost 3,000 images, but the goal is to have as many as 30,000,” Jackson said. “We thought, if Christians today think of God as a loving figure, then you should see it in the art,” he said. “If you line up images of the Christian God over time and quantitatively analyze God’s expression in these images, you should see them getting more and more loving. And that’s something we’ve actually found in the images we’ve already gathered.

“In past research, we find that people view authoritarian gods as effective regulators of society during periods of instability.” But “as society has become less threatening and more stable, these authoritarian conceptions of gods may have lost their appeal.”

Despite 2,600 years’ worth of teachings by both Jewish and Christian theologians that the Bible’s many descriptions of God’s body must be taken figuratively and not literally, many believers tend to agree with the Book of Genesis that we were created “in His own image.”

“There’s a natural tendency to view God as anthropomorphic,” Jackson said. “We don’t know anything about how God looks – so how can we not start with what we know best, which is us?”