Black Jesus: Does it matter?

 

Bill Knight column for 3-11, 12 or 13, 2021

 This month, Hollywood announced the next Superman will be Black, and in Illinois, the Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church in Chicago plans to restore a 117-year-old mural portraying Jesus as a Black man.

So?

Images of Superman in print and film have shown the Last Son of Krypton as husky or skinny, and Jesus in movies and paintings has been blue-eyed or brown-eyed, fair-haired with light complexions (Warner Sallman’s iconic “Head of Christ” from 1940) or rough around the edges (Willem Dafoe in “The Last Temptation of Christ”). On TV, the sit-com “Black Jesus,” set in contemporary Compton, Calif., shows the returned Messiah as sporting dreadlocks and occasionally using street language, but the series is as gentle and optimistic as the Gospels.

Last summer, Right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas sparked a hubbub about Jesus’ skin color, which caused some anxiety, if not the vapors, here and there.

Arguing against His European depiction, University of Pennsylvania religious studies professor Anthea Butler told Religion News Service. “If Jesus is White and God is White, then authority is White,”

But Jesus in the Holy Land was anti-authority, for and of the disenfranchised and downtrodden.

Unitarian Universalist minister Don Rollins wrote, “To say that Jesus is Black – or, more broadly, to say that Jesus is not White – is to say that Jesus identifies with the oppressed and that the experience of marginalized people is not foreign to God, but that God is on the side of those who, in Matthew 25, Jesus refers to as ‘the least of these’.”

Protestant pastor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writing in Ebony magazine in 1957, said the “color of Jesus’ skin is of little or no consequence. … The significance of Jesus lay not in His color but in His willingness to surrender His will to God’s will … He would have been no more significant if His skin had been black. He is no less significant because His skin was white.”

Father James Martin, a Catholic priest, said, “Jesus should be portrayed more like he probably looked: a 1^st century Galilean carpenter.”

Everyday folks – particularly Caucasians – might concede there’s systemic racism, especially during a resurgence of White supremacy, and see past prejudice in pictures of the Lamb of God.

“Whites simply couldn’t conceive of owing their salvation to a representative of what they considered an inferior race,” Robert P. Jones, author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity” told the Washington Post. “No proper white Christian would let a brown man come into their hearts or submit themselves to be a disciple of a swarthy Semite.”

Of course, early Christian leaders, such as Augustine of Hippo, were African. But the question of Jesus’ look has been raised for centuries, with conclusions often influenced by political and cultural thoughts of the times. Research and Jewish practices then indicates a typical Judean would have had dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes, probably stood about 5-foot, 5 inches tall, and favored short hair and a beard.

The Bible has few physical descriptions of anyone and usually (appropriately, I’d say) ignored racial features. Likewise, the New Testament has little about the appearance of Jesus, a Palestinian Jew – although in two non-canonical texts, Jesus is described as small and ugly to the ignorant (“The Acts of Peter”) and bald with no good looks (“The Acts of John”).

Perhaps we should just take comfort in “the eye of the beholder” concept. In fact, the highly recommended 1950 movie “The Next Voice You Hear,” with James Whitmore and Nancy Davis, dramatizes how the world responds when God simultaneously addresses the whole planet through all radio broadcasts – received in the language of each listener.

Accepting He’s like us (no matter who “us” is) makes sense. It’s a matter of faith – and also maybe the need for everyone to feel they recognize the Savior as “one of us.”

After all, apart from skin color, before paintings (much less photographs), historical figures’ appearances are speculative. Did Greece’s “father of medicine” Hippocrates have piercing eyes? Did Genghis Khan have tiny hands? Did 9^th century Muslim mathematician ʿAbd al-Hamīd ibn Turk have floppy ears? Did the 13th century artist Sister Ende the Illuminator have a limp? Did the Incas’ emperor Roca have lustrous hair? Did the 6^th century B.C. Greek poetess Corinna have a big nose?

Who cares?

An Iowa newspaperman friend commented, “He was the agitator, not content with the status quo. What He looked like is the least of our worries.”

Whether the Man of Steel or the Son of God, fictional or real, we can see figures we enjoy or revere as like us, regardless of who we are.