![]() So Jesus, a Jewish man from the Middle East, probably didn’t look like the Nordic Messiah portrayed on the church fans of my childhood. “Even with that, over the centuries in the West there have been changing fashions in the way Christ was represented that are as variable as hem lines,” she added. Taylor, a professor who studies early Christianity and Judaism at King’s College London, and the author of “What Did Jesus Look Like?” The artists, she added, were referring to “other gods the people of that era would know.” ![]() “Early Christian artists appropriated images of the long haired pagan gods like Zeus to symbolize the power of Jesus,” said Joan E. There is also a long tradition of adapted local appearances and iconography to the Christian message in the West. The images of the Old Testament prophets are Japanese images.” “The images of his disciples are Japanese images. “The images of Jesus are Japanese images,” Dr. Tamura employed local artists to illustrate his books. Tamura Naoumi, an American-educated Japanese pastor in the early 20th century, sought to change the Western-based Sunday school images of Jesus to those reflecting his culture and that of his students. Hastings, who taught for decades in Japan, recalled how the Rev. Thomas Hastings, the executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Conn., said, “They did their own version of Christianity, to put it simply.”ĭr. “Christianity around the world was becoming less white, and pictures of Jesus hanging in churches from Jordan to Japan to Jamaica were looking more like the people, instead of the standard white portraits from Europe or North America,” said Todd Johnson, co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. Only I didn’t know it.īy the middle of the 20th century, the global center of Christianity had begun shifting away from Europe to Africa, Asia and Latin America. Baptist church there that killed four little girls, the youngest not much older than I - even in my innocence, worshiping someone who didn’t look like us seemed incongruous.Īs it turns out, at about that time, “God” as depicted in the form of Jesus Christ was beginning to look more and more like me. This confounded me as a young child - the image of a white Christ (in my case, blond and blue-eyed) - printed on the hand-held fans cooling the black congregants of my grandmother’s church in Los Angeles.Įven at that age, with only a peripheral awareness of the brutal attacks on civil rights marchers in Birmingham, Ala., and the bombing of the 16th St. ![]() And whether he is a dashboard Jesus or the nearly 100-foot tall Cristo Redentor, arms outstretched atop a mountain rising over Rio de Janeiro, he is likely to be male - and white. Likely as not, the image that presents itself to most Americans is of a lithe, bearded man with shoulder-length, chestnut-colored hair. Is the man kneeling in prayer in the Garden at Gethsemane Chinese? Is the man sitting at the table of the Last Supper Navajo? Is the man dragging his cross toward Golgotha Nigerian? Or is the crucified figure a woman? Close your eyes and imagine that Jesus is in front of you.
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