A poster in the southern Spanish city of Seville that depicts a young, handsome Jesus wearing only a loincloth has unleashed a storm on social media, with some calling it an affront to the figure of Christ and others posting lewd remarks and memes poking fun at the image.
The poster by internationally recognized Seville artist Salustiano García Cruz shows a fresh-faced Jesus without a crown of thorns, no suffering face and minuscule wounds on the hands and ribcage. It was commissioned and approved by the General Council of Brotherhoods, which organizes the renowned and immensely popular Holy Week processions ahead of Easter in Seville.
As soon as it was unveiled last week criticism of it went viral on social media and a debate erupted over how a resurrected Christ should be depicted. Many called it a disgrace, inappropriate, too pretty, modernist and out of line with Seville’s Easter tradition.
Spain is predominantly Catholic and church traditions such as marriage, baptisms and religious parades are immensely popular both among believers and nonbelievers. A campaign on Change.org to have the poster of Jesus withdrawn was signed by some 14,000 people from around the country.
People really need to drop the whole “people in the middle east in the first century couldn’t be white” thing.
2 Kings 5:27 is literally about a subpopulation who have ancestrally passed skin as white as snow.
Lamentations 4:7 is about how pre-captivity there were people with skin like milk and a ruddy appearance.
Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4Q534 is either describing Noah or the Messiah as having red hair.
The tradition is also really concerned with skin checks and describes what may be skin cancer as its leprosy. Something that occurs at a much higher rate in redheads.
There’s even a scene where the eponymous founder of Edom (‘red’) who is born with hair all over his body and named Esau either because of that hair or the reddish porridge he ate, either gives away or has his birthright/blessing stolen from him by the guy later renamed ‘Israel’ in the Bible.
There’s a lot more to this and the underlying history, but the notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearances and that no one with pale skin or lighter hair were present is preposterous and a modern falsification of historical realities.
Jesus was probably darker skinned and haired than typically depicted, but it is by no means a certainty as it is popularly presented as.
Because its really not about whether or not the historical Jesus was or could have been white - its about the fact that white cultures will almost exclusively portray Jesus as being their own race for reasons that have nothing to do with historical interpretation of demographics is the middle east in ~0ad
People calling out White Jesus arent doing so because of a ‘notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearences’, but instead because of a hypocrisy of many Christian groups - in particular in the evangelical American right - to almost literally whitewash Jesus to look more like themselves, while often dehumanizing the people that look like Jesus ‘probably’ looked like.
Its really not about a historical question of the average middle-eastern skin colour two millenia ago. I assure you that the vast majority of ‘White Jesus’ portrayers have not engaged with that question and do not care about the answer. So to look to that as a refutation of the criticism is really missing the point.
Yeah Herodotus talks about a lot of peoples with different physical characteristics too. Although TBF like the old testament, it’s written centuries before Jesus, I’m not sure the same applies to both time periods.
So Jesus was a ginger?
Possibly. I wouldn’t put money on it, but if the odds were asymmetric enough I wouldn’t put money against it either, as I do think it’s possible.
In particular I think there’s insufficient consideration of the “Nazirite from birth” concepts in light of how one might establish that a baby is part of a social class one needs to sacrifice an entirely red haired cow to join and where one can’t shave or cut their hair.
(Technically, while the group being discussed in Lamentations 4:7 as being ruddy and skin like milk pre-captivity are often translated as ‘princes’ the word is more literally translated as “Our Nazirites were…”).
If John was a Nazirite from birth, and traditionally James, the brother of Jesus was a Nazirite his whole life, maybe Jesus was from an area where a number of babies came out and people looked at them and said “ok, this one is going to be a Nazirite.”
But Jesus himself isn’t depicted as having been a Nazirite at any point in his life so if I really had to get specific with a guess to bet on, I’d wager that Jesus had relatives and friends that may have been ginger but wasn’t one himself.
I met a guy from Nazareth. Arab, but basically white. Maybe you’d think Portuguese if you didn’t recognise the accent. Nice guy, don’t know what happened to him but I guess he finished his degree during COVID and went somewhere.
Man you brought receipts big time and still got downvoted. I guess Lemmy likes their race based attacks on religion too much to care.
Yeah, and one of the biggest ironies to it all is that given the various contexts informing those receipts, my money would overwhelmingly be on the red hair in the region having come from the indigenous populations of North Africa, so if Jesus were fair skinned and red haired it would mean he had African ancestry.
So the desire to sweep the notion under the rug is effectively yet another instance of the erasure of African history in Western cultures.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯