A traditional Jesus, left,
and the BBC’s image of
what he might have looked like
A traditional Jesus, left, and the BBC’s image of
what he might have looked like Jesus has been
named the top black icon by the New Nation
newspaper. Their assertion that Jesus was black
has raised eyebrows in some quarters – so what
colour was he?
Just as no one will ever produce proof for the
existence of God, the question of Jesus’s colour
may always be a matter for personal belief.
Was he white, white-ish, olive-skinned, swarthy,
dark-skinned or black? There are people who
believe he was any one of those shades, but
there seem to be only two things about the debate
that can be said with any degree of certainty.
First – if the past 2,000 years of Western art were
the judge, Jesus would be white, handsome,
probably with long hair and an ethereal glow.
Second – it can almost certainly be said that
Jesus would not have been white. His hair was
also probably cut short.
I think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus as ‘a
man of colour’
Yet the notion that Jesus was black – highlighted
this week in a survey of black icons by the New
Nation newspaper which ranked him at number
one – is genuinely held by some. One school of
thought has it that Jesus was part of a tribe which
had migrated from Nigeria.
And Jesus probably did have some African links –
after all the conventional theory is that he lived as
a child in Egypt where, presumably, his
appearance did not make him stand out.
Blue-eyed and brown-eyed Jesus
The New Nation takes it further: “Ethiopian
Christianity, which pre-dates European
Christianity, always depicts Christ as an African
and it generally agreed that people of the region
where Jesus came from looked nothing like Boris
Johnson,” the paper says. As light-hearted
evidence that Jesus was black, it adds that he
“called everybody ‘brother’, liked Gospel, and
couldn’t get a fair trial”.
But the truth, says New Testament scholar Dr
Mark Goodacre, of the University of Birmingham,
is probably somewhere in between.
“There is absolutely no evidence as to what Jesus
looked like,” he says. “The artistic depictions
down the ages have total and complete variation,
which indicates that nobody did a portrait of Jesus
or wrote down a description, it’s all been
forgotten.”
From: BBC News Online Magazine