Some people make too big a deal about what color Jesus is.
“His head and gis hair were white like wool, like snow; gis eyes like fire’s flames; gis feet like white bronze, like metal burning in a furnace; gis voice like the sound of many waters; having seven stars in gis right hand; from gis mouth came a sharp double-edged saber; gis face shone like the sun in its power.”
That is the only description of Jesus’s appearance in scripture, from my translation of Revelation 1.14-16. The only other thing we have to go on is a description from apocryphal gospels, some hearsay from various saints, and visions people have had of him—and usually in these visions they spend so much time focusing on his eyes that they really can’t describe him otherwise. When you talk about physical description, people usually point you to Isaiah 53.2 (again, my translation)—
- And he rises up before his face, like a sprout,
- and like a root in dry earth.
- He has no beauty, and no honor,
- and we don’t see his appearance
- and delight in it.
—which isn’t a description of Jesus’s physical characteristics so much as it’s a description of what the Messiah will be. Isaiah never actually saw Jesus either, and yet we have some idiots preaching from this that Jesus was an ugly man. I dunno; maybe he is; but this verse is no evidence.
I would simply presume that he looks middle eastern. The historian in me figures he grew up in Israel, had Israeli parents (though it seems he got all his genes from his mom) and spent a lot of time outdoors, which would make him at least tan, if not dark tan. A far cry from all these pictures of White Jesus that we see all over the United States and, strangely enough, the world.
In 1999 I was editor of Countryside Post in Grass Valley, and decided for our Christmas edition we’d have a picture of Christ on the cover, appropriately enough. I didn’t pull it off the internet; I got it from our clip art. (It’s one of those 20-CD packages that has thousands of images, and you find that most of them are poorly drawn and totally unnecessary, but you don’t usually know that when you buy them.) The clip art was of Mary holding an infant Jesus, and it had a stained-glass quality that I liked, but the problem was that they were white and Jesus was blond. But that was easily fixed by opening the file in Illustrator and tweaking the inaccurate skin color.
I should have used a Pantone shade, but instead I eyeballed it, and sent it to the press, and didn’t see it until the issues were printed and ready to send to the Postal Service for delivery. (We distributed it by mail.) Mary and Jesus were a nice, deep brown. I’d gone from one historical inaccuracy to another.
We got complaints. Some were wondering what kind of political statement I was trying to make. So I wrote this in the next issue:
But it isn’t historical accuracy that generated the complaints. Sure, that’s what people claim the problem is… and yet they’ve never once had a problem with the portrayals of a white Christ. … When I point out that Christ wasn’t white either, people shrug this fact off: “Well, of course he wasn’t white. But he certainly wasn’t black!” Is a black Christ less able to save than a white one? Must we have God conform to our own image rather than have us conform to His? Is it that we whites prefer that Christ look like us, or is it that we whites have not adequately dealt with our attitudes about blacks? For if we didn’t, this would be a non-issue.
If we truly believed, and didn’t just claim, that it’s not the color of one’s skin but the content of one’s character, our first thought when seeing this picture of Christ should be, “How appropriate for this time of year, when we remember the birth of our Lord,” and not, “He’s black.”
I’ll tell you though, the Black Jesus stuff on the internet is fascinating… and for the most part political. While the art is very good (and just as historically inaccurate as the pictures of White Jesus) I really can’t say I approve of the motive behind it. It’s exactly like the white supremacists who insist that you buy an image of White Jesus, because his being white somehow ennobles the white race. It’s a twisted form of the truth—that his becoming human ennobles humanity—designed to encourage some of the more evil impulses in our society.
My savior is from a different race than me. He is a Jew; I am a Gentile. He is one of God’s chosen people; I am one of the dogs that get to eat the crumbs that fall from the table. (Mk 7.28) Claiming him for my race is a delusional form of pride, and he doesn’t even like legitimate pride. He chose to become a person from a despised race so that we could learn to deal with our prejudice, not so we could change his race and use it as an excuse for more prejudice.
I appreciate the Black Jesus art because it’s another reminder that he’s not like me… and that doesn’t make any difference in the way that he loves me and I love him.
Happy Christmas.