Race and appearance of Jesus
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The race of Jesus has been a subject of debate since at least the 19th century. The physical appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, though with no explicit emphasis on race, was also debated by theologians from early on in the history of Christianity. Different societies have depicted Jesus and most other biblical figures as their own ethnicity in their art, for example he is primarily white in western art, Semitic in the Middle East, and black in Africa. However, many historians and theologians dispute the accuracy of such representations. The current dominant opinion among secular historians and scientists is that he was most likely a bronze-skinned man, resembling modern-day persons of Middle Eastern descent. Others, however, have suggested other possible racial backgrounds, including African and Indian ones. For orthodox Christians the question is complicated by the belief that his birth was a unique miracle, an incarnation in flesh of divine substance.
Theories about the race of the historical Jesus
Jesus in the Book of Revelation
Contemporary textual evidence on Jesus' life is scarce, and specific descriptions of his appearance even more so. There are no direct references to his appearance during his physical lifetime, though Revelation 1:13–16 describes his features as he appears in his heavenly form, as seen in a vision by John. These have sometimes been used in modern arguments concerning Jesus' race:
- 1:13 And in the midst of the seven candlesticks [one] like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.
- 1:14 His head and [His] hairs [were] white like wool, as white as snow; and His eyes [were] as a flame of fire;
- 1:15 And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and His voice as the sound of many waters.
- 1:16 And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and His countenance [was] as the sun shineth in his strength. (KJV translation)
Some commentators use this passage to argue that Jesus was black, based on the description of his hair as being "like wool," possibly a reference to hair with many naps, as people of African descent have. However, most interpret the reference to "wool" as referring only to the color of Jesus' hair, not the texture. The "feet of fine brass" line has also been used to argue for a black or Middle Eastern race. Additionally, the references to having a white "head" and a countenance that is "as the sun shineth" has been used to argue for Jesus being racially white. However, all of these descriptions are full of vague poetic imagery, seeming more like attempts to glorify the heavenly body of Jesus than to accurately describe his appearance when on earth. There is also debate whether "John" the author of Revelation was actually John the Apostle, who knew the earthly Jesus, or even John the Evangelist (see authorship of the Johannine works). The relatively late date ascribed to Revelation by modern scholarship lead many scholars to argue that it seems unlikely that someone who had personally seen Jesus in life wrote the description.
There are also many other later descriptions of Jesus from saints and others who believe they have seen him in a vision.
Early theological debates
Most early theological debate about Jesus' appearance arose from interpretations of Messianic prophesies and on the assumption that his physical form was the result of a miraculous virgin birth and so was determined rather more by divine will than ordinary biology. However, there were complex Christological debates about mechanisms of the divine incarnation into human flesh and about how Jesus may have inherited his mother's characteristics and the lineage of King David. This debate originated a dispute about the nature of Jesus' physical connection to the Jewish people, an issue that was later expressed in more racialized form.
Following Isaiah 53:2, most early theologians such as Justin Martyr insisted that Jesus was physically unprepossessing, with "no beauty that we should desire him." The anti-Christian author Celsus states that he was "short and ugly," an assertion that his Christian opponent Origen does not dispute. Whether these early debates reflect a purely scriptural view or a continuing oral tradition about his actual physique and physiognomy is not known.
In later centuries this early view was reversed. The Fathers of the Church Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine of Hippo argued that Jesus must have been ideally beautiful in face and body. For Augustine he was "beautiful as a child, beautiful on earth, beautiful in heaven."
Supposed descriptions of Jesus
By the Early Middle Ages the positive view of Jesus' looks was bolstered by a number of descriptions of him purporting to date from his lifetime. Nicephorus quotes a description of him as tall and beautiful with fair wavy hair and dark eyebrows that met in the middle. He had an olive-tinted complexion, "the color of wheat." One Publius Lentulus is supposed to have described him as perfectly beautiful in features, with "hazel-coloured" hair that flowed to his shoulders, and a forked beard. His eyes continually "change their color." Epiphanius Monachus provides a similar description, in which Jesus is six foot tall, golden haired, with black eyebrows, light brown eyes and swarthy skin "like David's."[1]
Almost all modern authors dismiss these descriptions as medieval fabrications. They were, however, copied in many Western artistic portrayals.
Emergence of racial theories
While the early descriptions of hair, skin and eye color clearly have implications for defining Jesus' "race," they are not explicit in their desire to ascribe a racial identity to him in the modern sense. By the 19th century, however, theological arguments were increasingly replaced by more secular biological ones, as attempts were made to envisage Jesus in the context of the people and culture of the Middle East. While some writers stressed his Jewishness, the growth of anti-Semitic racial theory led others, such as Emile Burnouf and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, to argue that he was racially an "Aryan." This led to explicitly racist portrayals of Jesus as a blond Nordic individual, a concept that was taken up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and by Hitler.
In more recent times the fact that the Middle East was a meeting point of cultures and races has led to suggestions that Jesus may have been black or Indian. The ancient Near East was a cultural crossroad, and the only land route out of Africa, where that continent physically joins the Eurasian landmass. The Roman province of Judea (known in the Bronze Age as Canaan, to the Romans as Iudaea, and today as Israel/Palestine), where Jesus lived, had many different waves of immigrants pass through at various points in and before recorded history, with the last major group being the Arab conquest in the 7th century. As such, it is not inconceivable that Jesus could have been of African descent. Likewise, he could have had Arab, Berber, Roman, Greek, Iranian or even Indian ancestry. Some Hindus argue that his ideas can be traced to Indian sacred culture, leading to suggestions he was either Indian or had studied Vedic traditions.
It is most commonly argued that Jesus was probably of Middle Eastern descent because of the geographic location of the events described in the Gospels, and, among some modern Christian scholars, the genealogy ascribed to him. For this reason, he has been portrayed as a bronze-skinned individual typical of the Levant region. A team of forensic scientists recently attempted to recreate what Jesus may have looked like based on human remains from the area where and time period when Jesus is believed to have existed. However, this image does not reveal any specific details about what Jesus looked like; it is intended only to give a view of the typical person living in Jesus' time and place. [2]
Artistic portrayals
Not all depictions of Jesus are intended to literally represent how he is thought to have looked when, and if, he existed; many such representations are largely symbolic, spiritual, and personal, and the race chosen may be intended only to reflect, or more recently to contradict, local expectations. Additionally, whether intended to be realistic or not, images of Jesus throughout history have almost always characterized him as being of the race of the artist or target audience, further complicating the task of determining Jesus' race and sometimes leading to racial tensions. Categories of racial difference have also changed over time. While the German artist Albrecht Dürer often depicted Jesus as blond and the Spanish artist Velazquez depicted him as Mediterranean, there is no evidence that either of them would have interpreted these differences in terms of separate racial identities: as they might be in modern America, in which "WASP" and Hispanic peoples are sometimes characterized as racially distinct.
African
The widespread concept of the "Black Jesus" is still relatively recent in Christian thought, though some scattered beliefs in this racial background have existed for several centuries, such as in some branches of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The more recent form of this belief has chiefly been forwarded by black religious movements, either as a serious historical hypothesis or as a symbolic statement of black pride, though many black individuals rebut the idea as blasphemy, arguing that the depiction of a black Jesus is only a distortion derived from syncretic religions, such as Santeria or Voodoo, where African gods were merged with saints of the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1992 the African American actor and director Blair Underwood starred as Jesus in The Second Coming, in which Christ returns to earth in the form of a black man.
Some confusion over Jesus' race has also resulted from various images and statues, more often of Jesus' mother Mary than of Jesus himself, which are darkly colored due to soot, smoke, or rock or wood discoloration, and are referred to using the term Black Madonna.
White
In the majority of Western art, narrative and cinema depicting Jesus, he is portrayed with brown hair and brown eyes, having a short beard and white skin. However, some artists, including notably Dürer, have also depicted him as blond and/or blue-eyed. This is also the case in several films, including Jesus of Nazareth (1977) in which he has dark brown hair but pale blue eyes. Nonetheless, because Western or European ethnicities are composed of many subgroups (whether biological or perceived), such as Mediterrean, Slavic, Northern European (Nordic), the issue is more complex than monolithic.
Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo all depicted Jesus as white. Nonetheless, it must be noted that most figures of the Bible, including the Israelites and Egyptians described in the Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament), were also portrayed as identical in appearance to European whites. In this sense the portrayal may be largely unselfconscious, as might also be the case even in periods with more prominent awareness of race, such as the 20th and 21st centuries.
Because of the commonness of this depiction, it is often confused with historical fact. It has dispersed so widely that many cultures have at least to some extent assimilated the image of a white Jesus. Western Christians spread images of a Caucasian Jesus through their encounters with peoples of Africa, the Americas, Australia and parts of Asia (often through colonization), from the 16th to the 20th century. Many nonwhite regions and ethnicities have depicted Jesus in this way, sometimes routinely, though sometimes with partial adaptations to the local setting, including dress. Moreover, in addition to images, the fact that Christianity was predominantly introduced to them by Caucasian or white individuals makes the racial connection even more complex. Nonetheless, portrayal of Jesus with local features is also common, especially in areas where Christianity has been prominent for a longer period of history.
Additionally, in some cultures nonwhite depictions of Jesus are actually criticized or dismissed outright, with some considering it blasphemous to portray of Jesus as being of another ethnicity. Ever since the Nazi claim that Jesus was Nordic, Christian white supremacists have commonly equated Christian identity with white racial separatism.
Middle Eastern
In the 19th century a number of artists sought to produce realistic images of Jesus based on the assumption that he was of Middle Eastern appearance. The most assiduous of these was William Holman Hunt, who traveled several times to the Holy Land in order to portray Jesus using local people as models for his works The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and The Shadow of Death. However, Hunt retained many conventions derived from the medieval descriptions. Other painters such as James Tissot and Vassili Verestchagin used what they believed to be more specifically Judaic features, causing some controversy. By the late 19th century several artists sought such ethnographic accuracy. The African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner painted many episodes from the life of Jesus based on his studies of the population of Palestine. More recent artistic and cinematic portrayals have also made an effort to characterize Jesus as Semitic.
Other races
Throughout Latin America many Saints have been depicted as being Hispanic or Lusitanic, following on from Spanish traditions. The Mexican muralists of the early 20th century depicted Jesus in a variety of dramatic ways, as a revolutionary figure often with local features. While Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Marian apparition, appears to some degree of Hispanic ethnicity, this should not necessarily be taken as evidence for the conclusion of a Hispanic Jesus. It is often held in Catholic beliefs on Mary that the Virgin Mary frequently appears of similar appearance to the people she is revealed to. In principle then, this would not necessitate the conclusion that Jesus Christ, her son, belonged to the race of which she is depicted, since her appearance naturally differs between different apparitions.
In India, where the St. Thomas Christians have been established for nearly two thousand years, there is a long-standing tradition of depicting the Holy Family with local features and costume. During the colonial period many European prints or icons were later copied and adapted to be given more Indian features.
Worshippers in Japan, where Francis Xavier preached, often depict him with Asian features.
Notes
- ^ Frederic W. Farrar in Christ in Art (1894) collects all these descriptions. pp. 67-85. PDF of Farrar's book. The descriptions are also collected in other sources: The Nazarene Way: Likeness of our saviour.
References
- "From science and computers, a new face of Jesus". CNN article. November 24.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=and|year=/|date=mismatch (help) - "So what colour was Jesus?". BBC article. November 24.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=and|year=/|date=mismatch (help) - "What was the race of Jesus Christ, the Messiah?". Black Jesus. November 24.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=and|year=/|date=mismatch (help) - Mosley, William: What Color Was Jesus. Chicago, Illinois. African American Images Press, 1987 ISBN 0913543098
See also
External links
- Commentators of Jesus' race
- Religion Online discussion
- From Nova Online: George W. Gill argues here for the biological concept of "race" and, in a matching article, C. Loring Brace argues against the existence of "race" as a biological entity.
- From California Newsreel: Race: The Power of an Illusion, an in-depth website (companion to a California Newsreel film), presenting the argument that while race is a biological fiction, racism permeates the structure of society.