![]() Not only did he represent Christianity - which colonizers hoped to spread - but his fair skin put the colonizers themselves on the side of God. Wikimedia Commons Jesus Christ as depicted in the sixth century at Saint Catherine’s monastery in Egypt.įor colonizers, white Jesus had a dual purpose. The inscription reads “Alexandro worshiping his god.” This “graffito” from first-century Rome shows someone named Alexandros worshipping a man with a donkey head who is being crucified. Unsurprisingly - given the persecution of early Christians - one of the earliest known depictions of Jesus Christ is a mockery. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus is described as having hair like “white wool,” eyes like “flames of fire,” and feet “like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace.”ĭespite this lack of concrete descriptions, depictions of Jesus Christ began to emerge in the first century. ![]() Other descriptions of Jesus Christ in the Bible offer few other clues. In the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah describes Jesus as having “no beauty or majesty.” But the Book of Psalms directly contradicts this, calling Jesus “fairer than the children of men.” Though the Bible tells the story of Jesus Christ - whose real name was actually Yeshua - it says little about his appearance. Yet, a white Jesus remains the standard in most modern depictions. However, scholars have a better idea of what people, in general, looked like in the Middle East around the first century - and they weren’t light-skinned. But why is Jesus white in most of these depictions?Īs Jesus’ following spread out of the Middle East - sometimes via devoted missionary work and sometimes by more aggressive methods - people across western Europe started casting Jesus in their image.ĭoing that was relatively easy since the Bible contains only a few (contradictory) words on what Jesus’s race was and what he looked like. As the central figure in Christianity, images of him fill churches, homes, and museums around the world. Jesus Christ has been an object of veneration and worship for nearly 2,000 years. ![]() Public Domain A 19th-century depiction of a white Jesus Christ by Danish painter Carl Heinrich Bloch. ![]()
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