In church the other day I was surprised to see two small paintings toward the front of the building depicting Jesus. I recognized them and I believe the appropriate term for them is an “icon.” (I could definitely be wrong on that).
They where obviously painted a few centuries ago. They didn’t look exactly like this but similar. By similar I mean it was the long haired white Jesus we seem to see portrayed everywhere we look. So much so I think we actually think he looked something like that. Now I don’t know much about historical looks and fashions but I’m fairly confident that is NOT what he looked like.
In fact, I just so happened to see that educational show the other day where they went through all kinds of evidence and have come to the conclusion that he looked something like this. I’m really not quite sure if they are right, but at least they gave it a good long consideration.
Now the reason I’m bringing this up is mainly that I think it’s a dangerous and troubling thing that we’ve got all these white Jesus pictures hanging around. The main argument I hear in response when I bring this up is that they are historical, and thus because of their history have value, regardless of how inaccurate they are. I think that is just ridiculous. I also hear people talk about how Jesus becomes like one of us, so a white church can have a white Jesus, a Hispanic church can have a Hispanic Jesus, etc. Now if we are happy and content with our racial divided churches then this might seem slightly feasible, especially if we wanted to promote our racial superiority in our theology (That was extremely sarcastic and I hope you see the terrible flaws in it). I’ll write more at some point about the damage these sorts of imagery cause to children with different skin colors (then the one on the Jesus picture).
For now, I’d just like to say to every person who goes to a church where there are white Jesus’ hanging around, that it’s time you either get a vastly more accurate picture of what Jesus looked like, or you start putting up more depictions of Jesus from other cultures. I guess next Sunday I should bring in this depiction of Jesus.
man, i totally agree with you on this. there’s this picture of a white feminized jesus in my church office that i refused to hang up, much to the charign of the churchyfolk. i do have a picture of a chinese jesus eating rice with chopsticks, which i think was far more accurate
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I have worked with many children of hispanic and African descent, and it is always very sad when I discover they imagine Jesus is white. I persuaded one child to colour Jesus brown (her own colour of skin), but she simply could not bring herself to make his face brown. The racist teaching she had received, as I see it, struck at the very root of her own acceptability as a human being. How did we ever imagine Jesus was something other than brown?!
A nun told me the Bible said Mary’s skin was “olive” which meant to me, it was either black or green. Of course the church had the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” type paintings all over the place. Never found it stated in the bible about Jesus’ mothers skin tone, but from what I’ve read of history “white” people came from way further North, so he won’t have been fair skinned. It does bother me when Christians are racists.
It’s a sad situation and not Jesus alone, even though we’re not supposed to depict God, whenever you imagine him, he has a beard, he’s white with white clothes, the angels too are seen as white.
There was a funny picture I saw once with a KKK member arriving on the door step of heaven, and God was there to judge him but he was black and had a big knowing smile clearly telling the KKK guy: access denied! lol