Was Jesus white?

The traditional Image of Jesus

If we look at Christmas cards & stationery with Christian themes, the face of Jesus looking back at us has a pale skin, blue eyes, and often fair hair. This image of Jesus comes from the painter & sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564) who used his lily-white cousin as the sitting model. Ever since, western Christians have reproduced this image or variants in their churches, picture cards and so on. White representations of Jesus continue to dominate Euro-American Christian culture. The suggestion that Jesus might have been dark-skinned (black in today’s racial taxonomy of the US or UK), makes most westerners uneasy. In addition, Adam & Eve, Moses, the Apostles and even God "himself" are depicted as fair-skinned folk, all of which can contribute to a white supremacist view of the world.

Novette Thompson, Methodist minister at Neasden church (in 1993) told Spare Rib in Jan 1993:

"Christianity began to change when it spread to the Greek & Roman world that was rooted in empire and a patriarchal structure. Then came the theologians who had a position of authority and interpreted the scriptures according to their world view... Those who were no in agreement with mainstream thinking were declared heretics.

"Jesus was no doubt African-Arabic... with Europe's immigration laws today, he would not be allowed in. Rome was the new coloniser and Greek influence was strong. Jesus came to be Europeanised."

The evidence for a dark Jesus

a) Biblical lore: Soon after Jesus was born, Herod is believed to have sent his soldiers to seek and kill him as an infant. To hide the Christ child, we are told his family fled with him to Egypt but pre-Arab Egypt was a society of dark-skinned Africans (as evidenced in their own hieroglyphs) and it would be folly to try hiding an Aryan baby there of all places. The land was referred to as Kemet (the Black land), for thousands of years, and themselves as "Kemetcu" (the black humans). The "father" of modern history, Herodotus, himself acknowledged as much when he said "the Egyptians, Colchians and Ethiopians have thick lips, broad nose, wooly hair and are of burnt skin." Elsewhere, he actually referred to them as "black”.

b) History: Tim Wise, progressive writer from Nashville, Tennessee points out that the earliest representations of Jesus, Mary, and Christ's disciples appear in the catacombs of Rome, where the first Christians, known as Essenes buried their dead. All of these portrayals show a dark-skinned Messiah. In addition, the Roman Empire under Emperor Justinian II minted a gold coin that pictured Jesus. This coin, which today can be viewed in the British Museum, shows a man with clearly non-white facial features and tightly curled hair, consistent with the description of Christ in the Book of Revelations, wherein it is stated that Jesus had hair like wool, feet the colour of burnt brass, and resembled jasper and sardine stones: both of which were brown in colour.

c) New Research: In April 2001, the BBC reported fresh historical and archeological evidence in a 3-part TV documentary entitled Son of God. It had taken 16 months to make. The research team (including a forensic expert) studied ancient Jewish skulls and examined Jewish faces from the 1^st century and then proceeded to make models using the latest computer techniques. They concluded that Jesus was much stockier and darker than depicted in classical European paintings and graphic experts generated a computer model of the face of Jesus, a face that Asian and Arab peoples can be comfortable with.

The Vatican (which tends to have a Eurocentric worldview) was not too happy about the BBC’s the computer image of a dark Jesus. Father Pfeiffer, Professor of iconography & history of Christian Art at the Gregorian University in Rome said the ‘true version’ is found the “sacred Shroud of Turin and the Holy Face of Manopello” (in Italy). According to pious belief, the Holy Face was imprinted on Veronica’s veil on Christ’s way to the crucifixion.

Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ
In April 2004, Gibson's film stirred controversy whether the Jews rather than the Romans were being blamed for the death of Christ. A larger issue was overlooked - why Gibson (like every other white filmmaker or artist before him) felt the need to make Jesus white. The only physical descriptions of Jesus in the Bible (indicating his feet were the colour of burnt brass, and hair was like wool) were ignored.

Jesus did not look like a long-haired version of the Ashkenazi Jewish, Eastern European. He was dark enough to guarantee that were he to come back tomorrow in New York City at the wrong time of night, he'd be dispatched far more expeditiously than was done at Golgotha 2000 years ago.

In the classic and widely distributed Robert Maxwell Bible Series for children, known as the "blue books", volume I tells readers (at least visually) that the Garden of Eden was in Oslo: a fact unknown to Biblical scholars to be sure.

US writer and activist Tim Wise noted that when a New Jersey theatre company put on a passion play a few years ago with a black actor in the lead role, they received hundreds of hateful phone calls and even death threats for daring to portray a dark Jesus.

Reference

BBC 3-part documentary Son of God April 2001

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