Behind the #WhiteJesus wars: Lessons to learn from ancient Christian iconography

For modern skeptics, the 6th-century icon hanging in the Orthodox monastery in the shadow of Mount Sinai is simply a 33-by-18-inch board covered in bees wax and colored pigments.

For believers, this Christ Pantocrator ("ruler of all") icon is the most famous image of Jesus in the world, because the remote Sinai Peninsula location of St. Catherine's Monastery allowed it to survive the Byzantine iconoclasm era. The icon shows Jesus -- with a beard and long hair -- raising his right hand in blessing, while holding a golden book of the Gospels.

This Jesus does not have blond hair and blue eyes. "Christ of Sinai" shows the face of a wise teacher from ancient Palestine.

"When you talk about ancient icons, you are basically talking about images of Jesus with long hair, a beard and some kind of Roman toga. That's just about all you can say," said Jonathan Pageau of Quebec, an Eastern Orthodox artist and commentator on sacred symbols.

In the early church, he added, believers "didn't ask other questions -- about race and culture -- because those were not the important questions in those days. … Once you start politicizing icons there's just no way out of those arguments. You get into politics and dividing people and then you're lost."

In these troubled times, said Pageau, many analysts are "projecting valid concerns about racism and Europe's history of colonization and the plight of African-Americans back into issues of church history and art that are centuries and centuries old. It's a kind of category error and everything gets mixed up."

But that's what happened when debates about some #BlackLivesMatters activists toppling Confederate memorials -- along with attacks on Catholic statues and even insufficiently "woke" Founding Fathers -- veered into #WhiteJesus territory.

"Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy," tweeted Shaun King, author of "Make Change: How to Fight Injustice, Dismantle Systemic Oppression, and Own Our Future."

The popular Internet scribe later added: "All murals and stained-glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. … We can debate [whether] or not Jesus was real all day long. What I do know, is that white Jesus is a lie. And is a tool of white supremacy created and advanced to help white people use the faith as a tool of oppression. Also, they never would've accepted a religion from a Brown man."

THE QUESTION:

Was Jesus white?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No.

But in these racially anxious times for America, there’s more to be said.

In a biblical dream-vision, presumably not meant to be taken literally in racial terms (Revelation 1:15), the feet of the triumphal Jesus Christ are bronze in color. In terms of actual 1st Century history, it makes the most sense to think that Jesus was neither north European white nor African black. As a man of the Mideast, he’d presumably have had a light brown or olive complexion like today’s Arabs or Sephardic Jews, with a good tan from all those outdoor travels.

Megyn Kelly assured Fox News viewers in 2013 of the “verifiable fact” that “Jesus was a white man.” In recent days, similar racial uproar was generated by Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King. After tweeting that memorials to “despicable” slaveowners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson must come down, he added obliteration of statues of “the white European they claim is Jesus,” seen as “a form of white supremacy.” A further tweet extended the ban to such “racist propaganda” in murals and stained glass of Jesus.

King did not specify that paintings should likewise be removed from display or destroyed, though that seems an obvious implication. Such iconoclasm would denude the world’s museums of countless masterpieces. In one example, so treasured is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Savior of the World” portrait of a Caucasian-looking Jesus that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia paid $450 million for it in 2017.

Moving to popular art, should we still watch those movies and TV productions where Jesus looks Caucasian, and more Gentile than Jewish? On that score, Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) gave Jesus a modest prosthetic nose and colorized the actor’s eyes to darken them.