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I am jesus christ skins9/5/2023 ![]() As Christian mission became partnered with colonization, the image of a white Jesus reinforced a social system in which white Europeans occupied the upper tiers and indigenous people with darker skin ranked lower. Since the Middle Ages, the image of a light-skinned European Christ has been exported to the world via trade and colonization. It is driven by a yearning for representation. Much of the impetus for the current interest in non-white depictions of Jesus isn’t just driven by a desire for historical accuracy. ![]() Here are two recent American versions:Īnd American photographer Brian Behm recently won the “De-Colonizing the Christ” art exhibition with this piece, titled Pantocrator in Black and Brown: ![]() But it’s only relatively recently we’ve begun to see him portrayed as such. So, we know Jesus was of a swarthy complexion. It’s a long way from when whiter-than-white Jeffrey Hunter played Jesus in King of Kings (Google him). Indeed, the whole cast of The Chosen, while predominantly American, was highly multiethnic, including performers with backgrounds in Israel, India, Italy, United Arab Emirates, and Brazil. But I sense a change is in the air.Īfter decades of white actors playing Jesus in Bible movies, the popular new web series The Chosen cast Jonathan Roumie, an Egyptian-American actor, in the role. In saying this, I’m not suggesting that white Jesuses don’t dominate church culture. Biola is holding out and keeping the painting in place, but there’s no way such a mural could be painted today. Since that time the protests against the mural have only intensified. When conservative Baptist school Biola unveiled a 30-foot mural of a white Jesus in 1990 it raised a few eyebrows, but not that much controversy. It is increasingly seen as inappropriate to depict Jesus as Caucasian. And it seems like some of those of us who are white are getting the hang of this. Whether that’s the face you imagine when you say your prayers at night, I’m not sure, but both the above images are closer to what the historical Jesus looked like than many of our most beloved sacred portraits. Anyway, his portrait of Jesus looks like this: Uterwijk uses GAN (generative adversarial network) to generate hyper-realistic portraits of famous historical figures. ![]() And he sure didn’t look like the alabaster-skinned savior found in European cathedrals.Īnd then more recently, Dutch photographer Bas Uterwijk presented his version of Jesus. He just wanted us to see what a first century Galilean man would have looked like. He used an actual skull found in the region and gave his model olive skin and curly short hair in the style of the time. In 2001, forensic anthropologist Richard Neave created a model of a Galilean man for a BBC documentary, Son of God. Princeton professor James Charlesworth goes so far as to say Jesus was “most likely dark brown and sun-tanned.” And Christena Cleveland says, “The earliest depictions of an adult Jesus showed him with an ‘Oriental cast’ and a brown complexion.” As early as the third century, Syrian, Indian and Ethiopian artists produced images of Jesus that showed him with dark skin. He would have had a dark complexion, not unlike the olive skin common among Middle Easterners today. In this post I want to explore the ways different artists have portrayed Jesus in distinctly non-Caucasian ways.įirstly, a few words about what Jesus probably looked like in reality. In an earlier post in this series on portraits of Jesus, I raised questions about when Jesus became almost exclusively white-skinned in sacred art. You can read the others by checking the menu on my blog. Over the next few posts I’m planning to take a very selective look at how we have pictured Jesus at different eras and in different cultures. I’m neither an artist nor an historian, but I’ve been fascinated with the way Jesus has been portrayed by artists throughout history.
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