paintings of the white Jesus.

Thanks Mike for input on yet another article about “White Jesus”…
It’s great that we have so many bloggers and writers that seem to all think alike and of course believe it’s their duty to dictate what others do… Especially Believers.
Now you and I both know that Nowhere in the Bible is Jesus’s “Color” mentioned… Find me a passage that describes The Lord’s physical and national skin color and I’ll apologize.
So as far as I’m concerned the person who sees a “White” Jesus is just as correct as those who, wanna make everything about Skin Color nowadays, believe he was a so called Palestinian. You weren’t there, I wasn’t there they weren’t there and they weren’t there.
I also Must comment on the so-called “Typical” Galilean man who lived in Israel (I named it Israel on purpose Israelkanda FoEva! ) that this Neave fabricated…
How in anyway possible is this called a “Typical” man from Galilee? BECAUSE OF 1 Skull? 1 Skull seriously? That is not only lazy research but also incredibly Hilarious I must say.
So Neave decides one day “I’m Going To Fabricate What An AVERAGE or “Typical” Galilean man looked like in Jesus’s Day… ”
He then goes into Galilee and digs up 1 UNO SINGLE Skull and BAM you got Yo Self A Brown Jesus Folks…
Was there still skin left on the skull that didn’t lose its shade for the 2000 years in the dirt? Of course not so how did Neave determine the Skin Color of this One UNO Single Skull? He didn’t… He grabbed the color that his personal opinion guided him to.
I still cannot get over the ONE SKULL being regarded as TYPICAL its Asinine.
God didn’t give us an Image of Jesus for a reason… The person who has a painting of a White Jesus hanging in their living room is no more wrong, wicked, sinful or right as the very insecure person who, has to make Skin Color apart of everything, Hangs Coolio Jesus on the Wall…
And what is even more beautiful about it is the fact when those who reach Heaven and finally lay eyes upon the Lord IT WON’T EVEN MATTER AT ALL… White Chocolate Jesus, Oreo Jesus, Rolo JESUS, Caramel Jesus or “Palestinian” Jesus. We will be in the presence of the Lord and Savior Christ Jesus, if you catch yourself really stressing about this issue or if your triggered than I really can guarantee you will have a very tough time in the coming months when it hits the fan in this world.

It’s a bit more complicated than the simple east-west, Muslim-Christian divide, Chris. The church has had a continual presence in Africa and the Middle East to this day. You can find beautiful, ancient images of brown-skinned Jesus from Ethiopia, Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, and Syria. But as Christendom in both its forms took root in Western Europe and Russia, royal patrons funded the production of religious art, reaching its high point in the West with the Renaissance. We can’t blame Caravaggio, Michelangelo or Bellini for painting Jesus as a white European. They used Italian models. They didn’t have access to encyclopedias to know what Middle Eastern people looked like or dressed like. Over time these beloved images came to dominate our imaginations so much so that even by the 19th and 20th centuries when we DID know what Middle Eastern men looked like, artists like Warner Sallman and Holman Hunt were still producing devotional images based on the long-haired, white-skinned version of European art. Then Hollywood got in on the act and cast actors like Max Von Sydow, Robert Powell and Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus and the dye was cast.

I have a couple of questions.

Was there a more naturally positive uptake in Roman/Greek (white) cultures, or maybe a wider more wholesale acceptance to Jesus by Europeans?

East of the “middle east” seems to have never had the same kind of uptake and successfully stamped out any meaningful presence of the church from the turn of millenia for about 500 years? Not withstanding the resurgence of faith in eastern countries in more recent decades.

The Muslims were very successful in pushing the church back well into Europe, out of North Africa and into the minority wherever it survived within its boarders.

Was the increasing whiteness of Jesus a result or cause of this?

Was it an effective tool to give a white gloss to Jesus to make him more relateable to Europe when they were the intended audience and were predominantly white? But now it’s out of date in the multicultural West context?

Is what is proposed here just the same thing? Re-casting Jesus into Australian first people’s context, Mexican or African because they are now the intended audience?

Thanks for the reminder that we are released by God’s gracious act in Jesus into freedom (but I’m not a liberatiin theology fan), and that this freedom is for his glory, and not exclusively for any race or any other “privileged” section of humanity, but for all of us.

I’m all for surrendering our whitified Jesus and stopping to listen to how other people see Jesus through different eyes and seeing what can be learnt (including what we have to learn from our church fathers, monks, nuns, theologians and missionaries).