Or hear me out, most depictions are from the renaissance when "Not being white" was a relatively new concept to Painters?
Jesus is white and ripped because of several very prominent renaissance painters using their hot twink lovers as their models
Unironically this!
This is a pretty flawed understanding of history.
Humans have always travelled, in Europe even serfs would hope to go on pilgrimage and Lords generally had to allow it. Although it may only be to a nearby cathedral. Italy was a trade hub, and a relatively short trip by boat to north Africa.
European painters knew that people came in different shades. As proof, go look at the school of Athens painting.
shhhhhhh op feels smart. he used big words and everything.
The renaissance is heavily linked to white racial superiority
Are you trying to say any historical event involving white people is racist in and of itself (As opposed to it merely being limited to the tragically high amount of ones directly linked to the exploitation of minorities) or that you are racist and believe renaissance era artwork to be proof of white racial superiority? Which brand of idiocy am I dealing with?
Jesus became white when Christianity spread in Europe and became a European religion. Earlier Jesus paintings had him a few shades darker. Palestinians are still light skinned and the dark skin is mostly acquired from working in the field.
Jesus is depicted as black in the Ethiopian Orthodox church and is shown as Japanese in some Japanese Orthodox churches.
Ethiopian Jesus looks like an east African.
It's not only Jesus, but it's religious figures too. Muslims do the same to depictions of their saints, they should always look like "us".
Majority of Muslims actively avoid portrayals of religious figures. They would rather have the persons head glowing or something like that to avoid misrepresentation.
Muslims do it too?
Deceptions of Salahuddin always seemed like a Kurdish man to me
I'd be shocked if they put that much thought into it. It's probably just good old unconscious ethnocentrism. Jesus is white because I'm white and that's my default setting to view the world.
Or because at that time they only knew white people so they assumed he looks like a person.
It doesn't even have to be some subconscious ethnocentrism. It could just be someone painting what they know people to look like.
There's quite a bit of evidence they knew what other people looked like. Western Christianity goes big in Italy and they have regular trade contact with the Levant and Northern Africa.
That trade contact comes to the entirety of Europe thanks to the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire.
Nope! Renaissance painters just really liked their white twink lovers and used them as their models
Do we have evidence the Renaissance white washed the Bible? Or were they just enthusiastically following what was already the idea?
Jesus is like a Marvel superhero. Like any pop culture fiction, it's rendition changes to reflect and is a product of the era of that particular iteration of the superhero. You even have the religious offspring sect equivalents of Invincible and The Boys.
Was going to say... there's no shortage of art - historical or modern - that portrays Jesus as the dominant regional ethnicity.
A theory that claims multiple leaders – from Jesus to Barack Obama – are actually Turkish and that modern nations are little more than portions of a greater Turkic whole is gaining traction in many countries
Jesus, what do you mean by "you people"?
Well he's talking to a little black girl about race, so it's either black people or all of not white people.
Nah, not Jesus too 😭
He's white because Michelangelo had one hell of a sense of humor.
You know that there's different depictions of Jesus in many races, right? Like, people in Africa have depictions of a black Jesus, for example.
Yeah, I think the far easier explanation is "people around the world depict their religious figures as looking like themselves".
How are we supposed to get outraged at that though?
Humans depict god and his boy like a human, so yeh makes sense
Not seeing a lot of purple-skinned five-legged jesuses around here.
"Black Jesus" is a deliberate response to the traditional white depiction of Jesus, arising out of an acrimonious colonial relationship with whites. We're trying to discuss why Jesus was depicted as white in the first place.
It's about European churches using historical revisionism (depicting Jesus as a white European) to establish a sense of "superiority".
Those churches are by far the most dominant
Frankly this comes off almost as a conspiracy theory. Christian art in Europe developed its typical imagery when the vast majority of Europeans could have no direct contact with non-Europeans, before colonialism or coherent ideas about racial identities, when far-off lands were thought to be occupied by one-legged giants...
The real Jesus was brown was he not?
Maybe there never was a real Jesus.
He was Palestinian.
Why don't you make your point instead of appealing to other people?
who cares. christianity is stupid and bad for society.
jesus of any color is stupid. this shouldn't be about anything more than destroying religion for the sake of humanity.
Time to add some transparency to Jesus.
I have accepted PNG Jesus into my photo editor.
Religion lost its use. In the past it was useful to form bigger communities by providing rules and a common sense of "what's right".
Nower days it's quite the opposite. Just let it die already.
Dude bro that was so brave what you did there.
are you some kind of fucking christian apologist?
Jesus: It's because I'm not your god. I'm god of the people that colonized your country, took some of your people as slaves and made you all believe in me instead of your original black gods.
Imma be a total dweeb and give the correct answer. Jesus is just Josh in Greek. There's many meticulous Roman records about messianic rebels in Judea, not a single Josh among them. One possible interpretation would be that the Romans were so invested I'm erasing Jesus from history, they removed the Joshes, but Christianity was a NON-factor before 77AD, so doubtful Roman clerks were furiously burning records to cover up a messianic figure nobody would give a shit about for a century.
The earliest 1st century CE images have Jesus portrayed like a little Harry Potter of indeterminate race, which seems weird since he's supposed to be 30, but maybe it's a Michael J Fox situation, where he points his magic wand at images of the miracles (like loaves and fishes) but it's more likely he never existed (thus the absence of that Josh in the meticulous records).
Rome around this time was religiously divided between an ostensible state religion of the Roman pantheon we all know and love and various "cults" such as The Cult of Saint John, which predates Christianity -- you can think of his appearance in Christianity like how Munch from Homicide: Life on The Streets carried over to Law & Order: SVU. Other cults were influential among various groups -- Cult of Isis and Osiris was for the nerds, Mithraism was for the jocks, Cult of Cybele was for the ladies.
Constantine, when he came to power, desperately wanted to reboot the Roman state religion with more of that slick theocratic energy they saw in Judea, so he decided the answer was scrapbooking: He'd call the religion Christianity, but Jesus would be sexy Apollo, and God would be bearded Zeus, both of Greco-Roman imagery. The marriage ceremony would come from Isis and Osiris, and they shoehorn in mother imagery from Cybele and Skandamata, creating Mary iconography. Throw in a dash of baptism from John the Baptist and Mitraism's bath in bull's blood, and voila! Christianity as we know it.
So the tl;dr is that's not your Jesus, that's Sexy Apollo with a Jesus skin mod, and there never was a historical Jesus, he never existed
There's many meticulous Roman records about messianic rebels in Judea
No, there’s not. And the consensus of historians who actually study this is that Jesus was a historical person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
You’re repeating a fringe theory that has been examined and rejected by scholars.
I mean, there probably was a carpenter called Jeshua... But you could probably say the same today.
This is why I don't take it seriously.
Was there a carpenter turned preacher named Jesus in ancient Judea? Sure why not.
Was there an accountant turned preacher named Bill in 1940s Alabama? Sure why not.
It's such a mundane claim it's not worth taking seriously.
You're Joshin' me...
Ugh, this is something my FB friends need to see, but I can't post to FB because they're touchy.
Because the Vorlons have programmed the younger species to view them as holy beings
I wonder what I'd see if I perceived a Vorlon. Bill Nye the Science Guy?
Is there a Why Files episode about this or something similar?
Because he was drawn by Europeans
Just like Black/Yellow Jesus existing in those populations
You ask someone to draw a person, they will likely draw someone resembling people they see. If you tell an artist a thousand years ago “from the middle east” they will say what’s that
Then you just propagate those depictions
Say it louder for the people in the back. This is how white supremacy works. One of capitalism's most powerful tools.
Except Jesus is depicted as black, asian etc depending on where in the world they are worshiping him. Everyone in this thread is revising history to match with their contemporary race ideologies instead of just saying "Hmm maybe Jesus is depicted as white because that's what made sense to the iconographers in Greece" One of the earliest icons of Jesus showed him as tawny with a robe and he looked Roman. People also assume he must be brown or black even though there are people in the levant that look super white. The reality is no one knows. This is a stupid thread.
This is why deities, demons, spirits, angelic beings and so forth should be animalistic, aka furry. Have fun being racist about animals lmao.
It's called speciesism and it's how people justify eating cows.
I justify eating cows because they're delicious.
There should be a black Jesus, just like there is a black Santa or a black Barbie.
There is.
Of course search engines are all shitted up with the TV show and ai slop.
The “rightymemes” version of this is a kid asking Miles Morales why he’s brown and having text below that says
“Because, I'm a psychological tool. By creating the image of a brown Spider-Man this subliminally engrains the myth of brown superiority into the subconscious minds of white people. This makes you people more compliant with our brown dominance over your lives.”
The circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.
It’s one thing to make an observation of how Jesus’s “image” has been adopted by different ethnicities, but when the official lore is that all humans are made in the image of God I think there are more productive ways to approach the topic of the societal impact of whitewashing.
I guess it’s the difference between saying “fictional white characters/heroes are bad because they reinforce white supremacy” vs asking “how foolish is it to look at a painting and try to judge which color of paint is ‘best’?”
