Why is jesus painted white

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Retreat Houses. Much later, anti-Semitic forces in Europe including the Nazis would attempt to divorce Jesus totally from his Judaism in favor of an Aryan stereotype. As Europeans colonized increasingly farther-flung lands, they brought a European Jesus with them. Jesuit missionaries established painting schools that taught new converts Christian art in a European mode. Scholar Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey argue that in the centuries after European colonization of the Americas, the image of a white Christ associated him with the logic of empire and could be used to justify the oppression of Native and African Americans.

In a multiracial but unequal America, there was a disproportionate representation of a white Jesus in the media. Pictures of Jesus historically have served many purposes, from symbolically presenting his power to depicting his actual likeness. But representation matters , and viewers need to understand the complicated history of the images of Christ they consume. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Banner image photo credit: Painting depicting transfiguration of Jesus, a story in the New Testament when Jesus becomes radiant upon a mountain.

Share this Story! Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide. The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee , a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. The earliest images of Jesus Christ emerged in the first through third centuries A.

They were less about capturing the actual appearance of Christ than about clarifying his role as a ruler or as a savior. To clearly indicate these roles, early Christian artists often relied on syncretism, meaning they combined visual formats from other cultures. Probably the most popular syncretic image is Christ as the Good Shepherd , a beardless, youthful figure based on pagan representations of Orpheus, Hermes and Apollo. In other common depictions, Christ wears the toga or other attributes of the emperor.

This belief originated in the seventh century A. From the perspective of art history, these artifacts reinforced an already standardized image of a bearded Christ with shoulder-length, dark hair.