Given that his light eyes, sharp facial features and long hair (straight from a modern-day conditioner and shampoo advert) are so instantly recognizable, more than half the world identifies Jesus Christ.
As you can probably guess, Yeshua of Nazareth, the man Christians think of as “Jesus Christ” today, actually looked a lot more Middle Eastern seeing as he was… well… actually Middle Eastern.
Most scholastic texts agree that Jesus was like a ‘common man’, a fellow ‘brother’ to the mankind. Sure, he was the divine one, the chosen one, but he was also someone who led by example. And to be that, he needed to be ‘human’ and not look like someone concocted with magical potions of good looks and Caucasian skin color (something which was pretty synonymous with supposed racial supremacy for the Western world).
Why We Picture it Wrong:
For the dominant image of Jesus as a whitey, blame those Renaissance era master artists – Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and his ilk.
True to their artistic loyalties, they painted him like a handsome Greek or Italian man. It helped that it became easily identifiable for followers of Christianity in Europe. In the age of the Crusades, the Church was better off not reminding people they were praying to a little, brown Jew.
Similarly, many African and Arab Christians painted Jesus with dark skin and bushy mop, or painters from Far East or Hispanic regions added local racial features – something which immediately invokes easier association.
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