Jesus depictions today further promote a white supremacist agenda

[struggle4progress]

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, December 23, 2015, 3:37 PM

... In Atlanta, I see them everywhere I go. Jesus as a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby and his blue-eyed supermodel mother are ubiquitous and done without even a slight hint of humor. It's preposterous. It would truly be no different from depicting Christopher Columbus as a dark-skinned African or Thomas Jefferson as a long-haired Latino. People actually look a certain way.

Jesus was not a European.

Even if you believe Jesus is a myth and the Bible is a myth, please understand when mythical baby Jesus and his parents needed to hide, they didn't flee to England, but to Egypt — where scripture suggests they blended in well. Two thousand years ago and in virtually every generation since, blending in with the everyday people of Egypt has always meant dark hair and dark features ...

When we lived in California, I cringed when my children saw stringy blond-haired surfers with beards and they would blurt out to us, "Hey, he looks like Jesus!" I would have to stop and correct them and say, "No, he looks how white people want Jesus to look, but Jesus did not look like a California surfer dude" ...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-white-jesus-symbol-u-s-anglo-saxon-agenda-article-1.2475220

[BlueJazz]

2. As I mentioned once on this forum, one of my friends is an anthropologist. He looks at the..

...modern Jesus and shakes his head. He told me, most people in those days didn't move very far from home so a Middle-eastern Jewish person would definitely look a certain way. Dark-skinned and brown eyes.

[Chemisse]

3. I still picture Jesus as he appeared in an illustration in my childhood Bible.

Light brown hair, blue eyes and beatific smile. A lovely and comforting image for a child. But black hair, brown eyes and darkish skin would have been just as nice. What really counted for me was his angelic countenance, the sense that he loved all the children perched in front of him.

At any rate, Jesus has been depicted as white for many centuries. I think it is a natural human tendency to want your deity to look like yourself, and throughout the millennia, the bulk of Christians have been white.

I don't blame Christians for nurturing the image of a white saviour in the past. But in modern days, when it is obvious that he must have been dark skinned, resistance to a shift in the image of Jesus, and consequent acceptance of people of color, is narrow-minded and rigid at best, and racist at worst.

[NOLALady]

5. That was NOT

a lovely and comforting image for this child. Eventually my Mom got the message. She took all images and pictures of Jesus out of my bedroom.

[Chemisse]

6. Really?

Although if you had pictures of Jesus in your bedroom, it sounds like you were really immersed in a Christian lifestyle. That must have been rather suffocating.

Mine was limited to a trip to church each week, but only when my parents had a church available that suited them. We moved a lot, so it was sporadic. I only had a Bible because I earned it at one Sunday school I attended, by memorizing the books of the Bible.

[NOLALady]

14. Immersed? Definitely.

Twelve years of Catholic School.

But, I started hating those pictures long before I started school.

[cleanhippie]

8. How many jesus pics did you have in your bedroom?

You make it sound like you had them plastered all over the walls like a teen idol or something.

[NOLALady]

13. Actually, I only remember a couple.

I destroyed them. They were replaced. I destroyed them again. Eventually they realized it wasn't a childish prank of taking crayons and trying to repaint a picture.

They made the serious mistake of telling a 2 year old that the person in the picture along with with his henchmen (angels) decided to take my Mother to live with them. Somehow, they thought I would understand that this was a good thing.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. Absolutely.

[AtheistCrusader]

7. Not unsurprising, after all, man made god.

[Act_of_Reparation]

9. Sure is funny how that works.

And it goes well beyond looks. Theists have the annoying tendency to ascribe their own personal opinions to their dear and fluffy lord as well. Come to think of it, I've never met one who disagreed with God on any particular issue. Curiouser and curiouser....

[AtheistCrusader]

10. I'm sure it's all just a big coincidence.

[Igel]

11. Why would Jesus in Egypt have needed to blend in with everyday people?

Nobody was looking for him in Egypt.

He wouldn't have had to "blend in" with "everyday people" in most of Egypt. His family would almost certainly have gone to Alexandria, which had a very large Jewish community. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Tanakh, was made in Alexandria for Greek-speaking Jews. Even then, if he didn't blend in nobody would have cared because he was fleeing a local tyrant (according to tradition) and not anybody with authority over both the part of Palestine his parents lived in and Egypt.

"Dark skinned" means a variety of things. The racial boundaries that have solidified in the last 20 years in left-of-center circles were more fluid. The Egyptian paintings distinguish between upper and lower Egyptians and Semitic tribes. By our standards, they'd all be "brown skinned," but that's based on having strongly internalized a N. European/late 19th-century American idea of what "white" meant. Italians used to be considered "dark skinned" and now they're white; same for Greeks. I'm in my mid-50s, and there are people I call "white" who insist they're "brown skinned"--a racial category that I seem to lack and which came around really only after people started claiming "there's no such thing as race." Odd, introducing new divisions even as it's claimed such divisions don't exist, but I've long since stopped trying to understand the beloved schizophrenia that afflicts some academic disciplines.

Details of such gradations in skin color in antiquity are hard to come by. There was extensive movement of people from Egypt into the Middle East and quite a few sub-Saharan slaves as part of the Muslim slave trade. There were also Europeans brought in from the other direction as slaves, and the Ottomans resettled entire villages into the Middle East when necessary to break up resistance to their rule. Mosaics help, but coloration of mosaics is often stylized and inexact. You can look at immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and some are paler than I am (Irish-American) and some are darker than Obama. Good luck sorting out the One True Shade for somebody we have no pictorial representations of. Even the much touted depiction from a forensic anthropologist is a generic guess based largely on current, 2000-years-after-the-fact, population samples.

[Cartoonist]

12. One Love