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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.
Actually, Christianity in Ethiopia dates from the 4th century and is not the result of European colonialism.
Their Jesus usually looks pretty black.
Yeah, that's definitely an exception, though those depictions were often directly inspired by European artistic depictions. In Protestant Africa, the story is quite different.
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...
Dude: ports exist, people trade, across the Mediterranean you can find lots of different skin colours and customs.
Nobility and their favoured travelled extensively, skilled tradespeople would undertake elaborate pilgramidge if they could afford it all the way to Jerusalem. Even serfs got to go on pilgrimage although usually not to Jerusalem but to other cathedrals.
Stop with this ahistorical nonsense. Maybe someone in the British isles might not have much contact of the greater world but the HRE? Spain? Italy? The eastern Roman empire? Of fucking course they did.
You know that... Christianity developed in the Roman Empire? The Middle East (more exactly Palestine and Syria. Which were larger that today's counterparts) wasn't some magical place where giants lived, but a province of said Empire
Christianity developed in the Roman Empire?
I'm pretty sure we're talking about the pictorial representation of Jesus, not when Christianity itself developed. Christian figurative art in Rome was rare and undeveloped, I highly doubt you have on your mind some examples of Roman portrayal of Jesus that actually support your idea. That's why I described what I have found to be the situation in the middle ages, when the typical iconography zook shape - to the best of my knowledge, but maybe I'm talking with an actual art historian in which case you should have no problem with proving me wrong with examples.
I'm also confused about how you actually imagine the development of the supposedly racist Roman images of Jesus went about. At which stage did that happen, before or after Christianity became the state religion? Were Romans racist against the Middle East populations before Christianity too? Were Romans from the Apennine peninsula racist against them based on their darker skin colour, while themselves certainly being darker-skinned than e.g. Gauls?
I prefer juiced up Korean Jesus. Does thy god even lift?
I had to check this out. Jesus!!!
The real Jesus was brown was he not?
He was Palestinian.
Maybe there never was a real Jesus.
Why don't you make your point instead of appealing to other people?
who cares. christianity is stupid and bad for society.
who cares. christianity is stupid and bad for society.
If anything, it's stupid and bad for society to outright dismiss peoples faith. Faith and hope is a huge part of what drives humans in the first place.
You can still have faith and hope without religion though. I'm not religious and have faith that the good in humanity will prevail. I have hope for a better future created by humanity.
I never said that you can't have faith or hope without religion. I'm not religious myself. But faith expresses itself differently for different people. And in the end, no one can really prove to the living that their answer to life was the truly correct one.
Some people get faith and hope from Christianity. Or Islam, or Buddhistm or others. Nothing wrong with that.
What is "prevailing"? What is "better"? What if I disagree with you? Etc etc. There is no justification for secular "morality". It is mob rule.
Why would your beliefs affect my beliefs at all? I'm just showing that belief and hope are not dependent on religion.
Why would your beliefs affect my beliefs at all?
What beliefs? You haven't stated, much less justified, them.
I’m just showing that belief and hope are not dependent on religion.
You're showing that you can string words together to form a sentence but not much else.