Or hear me out, most depictions are from the renaissance when “Not being white” was a relatively new concept to Painters?
Jesus is white and ripped because of several very prominent renaissance painters using their hot twink lovers as their models
Unironically this!
There’s also evidence that White Jesus originated as a Borgia pope, it’s not nearly that cut and dry
This is a pretty flawed understanding of history.
Humans have always travelled, in Europe even serfs would hope to go on pilgrimage and Lords generally had to allow it. Although it may only be to a nearby cathedral. Italy was a trade hub, and a relatively short trip by boat to north Africa.
European painters knew that people came in different shades. As proof, go look at the school of Athens painting.
The average peasant in medieval Europe would certainly never see an African person in his lifetime.
The average peasant in medieval Europe wasn’t painting commissions for cathedrals
Across all of Europe and all of the middle ages? Sure probably. Never hear of them, see them in art? I dunno, it’s hard to say because we don’t have a lot of documentation on what normal people’s lives were like.
In the cosmopolitan cities like Prague you probably would. Also any major Mediterranean trade port. Anyone who went on pilgrimage to those places, or along them, probably would. Cutting off Jerusalem to pilgrimage being such a big political deal indicates that many people went there or wanted to, and people loved sharing stories of places.
shhhhhhh op feels smart. he used big words and everything.
The renaissance is heavily linked to white racial superiority
Are you trying to say any historical event involving white people is racist in and of itself (As opposed to it merely being limited to the tragically high amount of ones directly linked to the exploitation of minorities) or that you are racist and believe renaissance era artwork to be proof of white racial superiority? Which brand of idiocy am I dealing with?
Demand fuels supply. Art style reflects a population. It’s not hard to guess where the Renaissance is hinting at when everything is ripped white dudes.
Race as a concept and part of Renaissance life, however, has not been a central conversation in scholarship on Italy. This has made it difficult [189] for instructors to know where to start if they do want to bring the subject of race to the classroom. But the primary sources are brimming with racialized references: Petrarch extolled a white beauty, Dante condemned Mohammed to Hell, and Ariosto and Tasso both marshaled crusading themes and deified the violent expeditions of Christopher Columbus in their respective epics (and Tasso borrowed from the Aethiopica to create his heroine Clorinda, a white woman born to Black Ethiopian royalty). Racialized narratives around non-Italians, especially Muslims, Jews, and Black Africans, as well as the violent oppression of ethnic and religious minorities throughout the city-states, influenced this cultural production, and are important parts of Italian Renaissance history.
Are there a plethora of examples of black artwork depicting ripped white dudes? Or are we just saying that White Racism existed in a vacuum?
I was thinking the same. It’s white people painting for rich white people, why would they EVER even think about the color of his skin? The right color is the color of whoever is paying you to paint it.
Click the article I linked if you need more context. God transforming into a white man is no coincidence.
Yeah I get that, what I’m saying is: I bet it’s global. Africans probably painted Africans, Asians probably painted Asians. I don’t think white man was exclusively racist.
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I’d be shocked if they put that much thought into it. It’s probably just good old unconscious ethnocentrism. Jesus is white because I’m white and that’s my default setting to view the world.
Or because at that time they only knew white people so they assumed he looks like a person.
It doesn’t even have to be some subconscious ethnocentrism. It could just be someone painting what they know people to look like.
There’s quite a bit of evidence they knew what other people looked like. Western Christianity goes big in Italy and they have regular trade contact with the Levant and Northern Africa.
That trade contact comes to the entirety of Europe thanks to the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire.
Pulling out the Aristotle, wow.
thanks i guess lol, i was pretty young when i first heard it and it’s a pretty useful model so i like to share :)
If you like that sort of thing then there’s a ton of philosopher stuff available online. You just really need to make sure of what they mean when they use certain words. Like, Locke was not talking about universal healthcare when he said a government has a duty to take care of the health and welfare of it’s people. (But I did have a fun time arguing that he would have been in favor of it with my professor.)
i know hehe thats why i linked it
Nope! Renaissance painters just really liked their white twink lovers and used them as their models
Do we have evidence the Renaissance white washed the Bible? Or were they just enthusiastically following what was already the idea?
Jesus became white when Christianity spread in Europe and became a European religion. Earlier Jesus paintings had him a few shades darker. Palestinians are still light skinned and the dark skin is mostly acquired from working in the field.
Jesus is depicted as black in the Ethiopian Orthodox church and is shown as Japanese in some Japanese Orthodox churches.
Ethiopian Jesus looks like an east African.
Jesus is like a Marvel superhero. Like any pop culture fiction, it’s rendition changes to reflect and is a product of the era of that particular iteration of the superhero. You even have the religious offspring sect equivalents of Invincible and The Boys.
Was going to say… there’s no shortage of art - historical or modern - that portrays Jesus as the dominant regional ethnicity.
A theory that claims multiple leaders – from Jesus to Barack Obama – are actually Turkish and that modern nations are little more than portions of a greater Turkic whole is gaining traction in many countries
Jesus, what do you mean by “you people”?
Nah, not Jesus too 😭
Well he’s talking to a little black girl about race, so it’s either black people or all of not white people.
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.
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…
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?
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.
I prefer juiced up Korean Jesus. Does thy god even lift?
I had to check this out. Jesus!!!
Jesus the Barbarian, amazing ✨
“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.
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?
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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.
It’s not only Jesus, but it’s religious figures too. Muslims do the same to depictions of their saints, they should always look like “us”.
Majority of Muslims actively avoid portrayals of religious figures. They would rather have the persons head glowing or something like that to avoid misrepresentation.
Yes, despite that there are pictures from saints (imams) and paintings at least in Iran, which are purely imaginary and look like Iranians.
Imams aren’t prophets like Jesus is in Islam. And some of the imams are Iranian, or at least middle-eastern. It also varies, some do block out depictions of the imams as well.
Muslims do it too?
Deceptions of Salahuddin always seemed like a Kurdish man to me
Jesus: It’s because I’m not your god. I’m god of the people that colonized your country, took some of your people as slaves and made you all believe in me instead of your original black gods.
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Time to add some transparency to Jesus.
I have accepted PNG Jesus into my photo editor.
Religion lost its use. In the past it was useful to form bigger communities by providing rules and a common sense of “what’s right”.
Nower days it’s quite the opposite. Just let it die already.
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We need to take action to see its demise.
Christians are no strangers to being persecuted.
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I’m going to pray for you and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. 🤣
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There is plenty of thought-provoking philosophical, epistemological and metaphysical discussions to be had around the existence of God but something tells me that you and I are not going to get there in this exchange.
Dude bro that was so brave what you did there.
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Imma be a total dweeb and give the correct answer. Jesus is just Josh in Greek. There’s many meticulous Roman records about messianic rebels in Judea, not a single Josh among them. One possible interpretation would be that the Romans were so invested I’m erasing Jesus from history, they removed the Joshes, but Christianity was a NON-factor before 77AD, so doubtful Roman clerks were furiously burning records to cover up a messianic figure nobody would give a shit about for a century.
The earliest 1st century CE images have Jesus portrayed like a little Harry Potter of indeterminate race, which seems weird since he’s supposed to be 30, but maybe it’s a Michael J Fox situation, where he points his magic wand at images of the miracles (like loaves and fishes) but it’s more likely he never existed (thus the absence of that Josh in the meticulous records).
Rome around this time was religiously divided between an ostensible state religion of the Roman pantheon we all know and love and various “cults” such as The Cult of Saint John, which predates Christianity – you can think of his appearance in Christianity like how Munch from Homicide: Life on The Streets carried over to Law & Order: SVU. Other cults were influential among various groups – Cult of Isis and Osiris was for the nerds, Mithraism was for the jocks, Cult of Cybele was for the ladies.
Constantine, when he came to power, desperately wanted to reboot the Roman state religion with more of that slick theocratic energy they saw in Judea, so he decided the answer was scrapbooking: He’d call the religion Christianity, but Jesus would be sexy Apollo, and God would be bearded Zeus, both of Greco-Roman imagery. The marriage ceremony would come from Isis and Osiris, and they shoehorn in mother imagery from Cybele and Skandamata, creating Mary iconography. Throw in a dash of baptism from John the Baptist and Mitraism’s bath in bull’s blood, and voila! Christianity as we know it.
So the tl;dr is that’s not your Jesus, that’s Sexy Apollo with a Jesus skin mod, and there never was a historical Jesus, he never existed
There’s many meticulous Roman records about messianic rebels in Judea
No, there’s not. And the consensus of historians who actually study this is that Jesus was a historical person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
You’re repeating a fringe theory that has been examined and rejected by scholars.
I mean, there probably was a carpenter called Jeshua… But you could probably say the same today.
This is why I don’t take it seriously.
Was there a carpenter turned preacher named Jesus in ancient Judea? Sure why not.
Was there an accountant turned preacher named Bill in 1940s Alabama? Sure why not.
It’s such a mundane claim it’s not worth taking seriously.
The non-historicity of Jesus has never had traction in scholarship. Mythicism is rejected by virtually all mainstream scholars of antiquity, and has been considered a fringe theory for more than two centuries. Mythicism is criticized on numerous grounds such as for commonly being advocated by non-experts or poor scholarship, being ideologically driven, its reliance on arguments from silence, lacking positive evidence, the dismissal or distortion of sources, questionable or outdated methodologies, either no explanation or wild explanations of origins of Christian belief and early churches, and outdated comparisons with mythology. While rejected by mainstream scholarship, with the rise of the Internet the Christ myth theory has attracted more attention in popular culture, and some of its proponents are associated with atheist activism.
You’re Joshin’ me…
Because the Vorlons have programmed the younger species to view them as holy beings
I wonder what I’d see if I perceived a Vorlon. Bill Nye the Science Guy?
Is there a Why Files episode about this or something similar?
Aha! Thank you.
Because he was drawn by Europeans
Just like Black/Yellow Jesus existing in those populations
You ask someone to draw a person, they will likely draw someone resembling people they see. If you tell an artist a thousand years ago “from the middle east” they will say what’s that
Then you just propagate those depictions
OK, so why did they persist with it for all the centuries in between and still to this day?
The last line
You grow up with whatever colour Jesus, then you do your drawing
Lol, its not that I didn’t understand or that I missed it. It’s that I disagree that its a cogent reason.
When I was young, I used to draw pictures of people with stick bodies and round heads. They were also often bright or powder pink in colour. I propagated the shit out of that too.
Then, when I found out that wasn’t the correct way to draw people or the natural colour of human skin, I stopped drawing them and colouring quite so comedically ridiculous.
Why can’t the people who draw Jesus manage this?
The comparison with your own childish vs adult drawings is simply off the mark. A more similar comparison could be provided by how artists depict the Vikings. It is well known today that the helmet with bull horns is made-up, and was probably never used by actual Vikings. Yet tons of people still portray them with such helmets, and most non-artists still have that same association in their minds. Why? Because a child growing up and developing their observational and artistic skills is not the same as a culture with its century-old symbols and images.
Admittedly the depictions of Jesus in art today are frequently done by more or less amateurish artists and are meant to be traditional in their style, which additionally makes them less likely to move away from the inherited imagery.
Your viking analogy is bizzare. Not that many people know that vikings didn’t actually wear anything like that in battle, unlike how everyone knows Jesus was a homeless middle Eastern man and, depsite this, continue to draw him as northern European. More so, vikings are known for wearing those helmets. Jesus isn’t known for being a white man. Why? Because Jesus wasn’t white man and isn’t know for it.
Youre really starting from where you want to end up and working your way back. Theres no cogent justification for it, as much I enjoy people trying to sell me an appeal to tradition, with extra steps.
