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Was Jesus a man of color? Why this question matters more than ever

www.cnn.com

Was Jesus a man of color? Why this question matters more than ever | CNN

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Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a White man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact,” a remark she later said was meant in jest.

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First, while the classic Nordic Jesus remains a popular image today in some churches, a movement to replace the White Jesus has long taken root in America. In many Christian circles — progressive mainline churches, churches of color shaped by “liberation theology,” and among Biblical scholars — conspicuous displays of the White Jesus are considered outdated, and to some, offensive. In a rapidly diversifying multicultural America, more Christians want to see a Jesus that looks like them.

But in some parts of the country, the White Jesus never left. The spread of White Christian nationalism has flooded social media feeds with images of the traditional White Jesus, sometimes adorned with a red MAGA hat. Former President Trump is selling a “God Bless the USA Bible” with passages from the Constitution and Bill of Rights — a linking of patriotism with Christianity that reinforces a White image of Jesus that is central to Christian nationalism.

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Blum says the image of a White Jesus has been used to justify slavery, lynching, laws against interracial marriage and hostility toward immigrants deemed not White enough. When Congress passed a law in the early 20th century to restrict immigration from Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, White politicians evoked the White Jesus, he says.

“One of the arguments was, ‘Well, Jesus was White,’ ‘’ Blum says. “So the theme was, we want America to be profoundly Christian or at least Jesus based, so we should only allow White people in this country.”

The MAGA movement uses the image of a White Jesus to weaponize political battles, he says, pointing to signs at the January 6 insurrection displaying a White Jesus, sometimes wearing a red MAGA hat. To Blum, some Christian conservatives see a White MAGA Jesus as “an anti-woke symbol.”

80 comments

  • I like the recent estimates of his appearance. This artist renders him even less good looking than probably most imagined when they think of someone from that region of the world, which makes me believe it's closer to appropriate.

    Jesus wasn't a rock star. In Christianity and the new testament, God didn't portray himself in any way other than meager and a bit of a communist. That's the beauty of part of the story.

    Edit, I think Jesus would have been easy to put on the no fly list, or walk by without a second thought, which is a challenge to our ways of thinking.

    • He was a dude from Jerusalem. Yeah, he was brown, and looked like… a dude. Because he was a normal-ass human being like everyone else.

  • I grew up heavily Pentecostal/Evangelical Christian - speaking in tongues, demons are real and possess people, God strikes down the wicked and regularly works miracles, etc. My whole childhood I was surrounded by hundreds of people who did not care about proof. They actually believe the universe is 6,000 years old, that God killed every person, plant, and animal on dry land in a Flood that covered even the highest mountain (~9km) and more nonsense.

    So believing that Jesus was literally an impeccably groomed, attractive blue-eyed white man with a bodybuilder's physique in the Classical Era Middle East is well within the limits of these people's credulity. They believe things because they are told to do so from childhood, not because they've done their homework.

  • If Jesus was born as a blonde haired blue eyed viking spawn in what is now fookin Palestine, where the Sun is a deadly laser and the only whites are the occasional albinos, that would've been the miracle instead of Mary's "virgin birth".

    • Not really. Look closer at the tzaraat 'leprosy' where they are performing skin checks regularly looking for irregular and spreading marks:

      https://www.thetorah.com/article/tzaraat-as-cancer

      You can see there was a white ancestral minority population in ancient Judea given 2 Kings 5:27

      Therefore the skin disease of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever.” So he left his presence diseased, as white as snow.

      But when we look at accounts before the captivity, a different picture emerges given Lamentations 4:7

      Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.

      In fact, in one of the Dead Sea scrolls (4Q534) it claimed Noah was a redhead.

      What's probably going on is a revisionary rewriting of history shortly before the Bible as we know it is finalized. Josiah is allegedly introducing reforms opposing the traditions of Jeroboam (described as the son or grandson of a maternal leper), but the reforms appear anachronistic for Josiah given the communications between Elephantine and Jerusalem a century after his reign that don't reflect them.

      We can even see that in between the time the LXX (Greek version) is written and the later Masoretic version that there's been rewriting of history around Jeroboam in 1 Kings 11-14 which has events attributed to him (sometimes doubled up) in the earlier version attributed to others in the later version. As Idan Dershowitz's book on the topic discussed, early Biblical edits may have been literally copy and pasted together, and one of the tells are duplicate stories.

      Personally, I think there's something to Hecateus of Adbera's claim that the history of the Jews had recently been edited and changed under Persian and Macedonian rule.

      In particular, we're now finding rather extensive evidence of sea peoples settlement and cohabitation around the early Israelites, with the Denyen as actually a great fit for the lost tribe of Dan, and there may well have been an endogamous matrilineal minority population in Judea that persisted throughout the ages.

      And in general, you might be surprised at how ancient peoples might have looked in antiquity. Ramses II in his forensic report was described as having pale skin and red hair (not just dyed with henna but at the actual root), like the neighboring Libyan Berbers. Or the indigenous Ganache of an African isle.

      We tend to mess up how we think people looked or underappreciate how diverse populations may have been because of anachronistic back projections.

  • I have never met a white Jesus, they have all been varying shades of brown.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The painting looked like an ancient relic discovered in some long-forgotten desert monastery in the Holy Land, a Byzantine-styled fresco filled with sharply contoured figures, bursting with colors of deep blue and blood orange.

    Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a White man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact,” a remark she later said was meant in jest.

    His status rests on one remarkable painting, the “Head of Christ.” It’s been reproduced an estimated 500 million times in portraits that have adorned living rooms, Sunday schools, stamps and prayer cards.

    It was released in mid-20th century America during an era of fervent patriotism, record church attendance and hysteria over the perceived threat posed by the Communist Party.

    “By the time he offends abortion providers by saying God hates hands that shed innocent blood and rebukes Americans for our covetousness, he’d be called a bigoted coon and thoroughly canceled,” she wrote.

    The writer Frederick Buechner once tried, memorably describing them as encountering “some new and terrible version” of Jesus, “disfigured by the mutilations of the Cross” while standing up and moving toward them with “unspeakable power.”

    The original article contains 2,355 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

80 comments