Comments on: Excuse Me, Why Is Jesus White?

By: Simon Lee

Simon Lee — Wed, 27 May 2015 15:48:27 +0000

Jesus should be brown.

By: Wellington Pereira Carneiro

Wellington Pereira Carneiro — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 04:05:19 +0000

Let’s not be silly and naive. Jesus is depicted white in ancient churches and paintings because middle age Europeans simply did not know how Jesus looked like and they used the only image of what they knew. A white man.

By: Sami Faltas

Sami Faltas — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 22:30:58 +0000

If images of Jesus are to reflect the man who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago, then probably he should look like a Levantine.

But this raises the question what the purpose of these images is. In Cameroon, it struck me that all images of Jesus depicted him as a white man, often with blonde hair and blue eyes. He did not look like a Cameroonian at all, whereas in Ethiopian churches, he usually looks like a local man. Then I found an unusual church with paintings that made Jesus look like a Cameroonian, and I asked a Cameroonian friend what he thought of them. He smiled and said: “They’re nice. But they’re not Jesus.” Clearly, he had grown accustomed to thinking of Jesus as a northern European.

If images of Jesus are supposed to make people feel close to him, if he is to look like the Son of Man (as he called himself), that is to say a human being like you or me, then it seems best that he should look like you or me. Consequently, he will look different in Cameroon, in Ethiopia, in the Philippines, in Peru and in Australia.

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:45:56 +0000

In reply to Subhro Prokas Mukherjee. Yes, I wonder if this was plagiarized from the movie :-). This article is SO derivative and just silly.

By: Subhro Prokas Mukherjee

Subhro Prokas Mukherjee — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 03:52:27 +0000

A fantastic piece but I heard this argument first when Denzel Washington was talking to a priest while playing the role of Malcolm X. 🙂

By: Roger

Roger — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 02:17:00 +0000

Drake: I very much like your comments.
In 2015, how can anyone really take religion seriously at all? It’s mostly just a tool used by idiots to justify inflicting harm on “non-believers” (those of other traditions and so on) while now and then invoked by the members of the various “flocks” to support some good deeds here and there.
Singh’s article doesn’t talk about this essential issue at all. You’re right. It’s mostly just some silly boasting and elitist nonsense.

By: Drake

Drake — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:29:42 +0000

Stupid article. Where does one start? Apart from the ‘look how smart I am and how smart I was at a boy when I showed up my teacher’ aspect of it, your point here isn’t about why Jesus is portrayed as white in many European depictions, your target is the conquistadores of old who did terrible things in the name of Christianity.

When you say ‘stop making Jesus white’ or ‘he should look Palestinian’, who exactly are you talking to? You seem to think there is some conspiracy that the church is trying to foist on its gullible flock that Jesus is white, but I don’t know a single person who believes that. There are lots of Renaissance-Victorian age images of Jesus looking pretty European done by European artists, but there are also Jewish looking Jesuses, there are black Jesuses etc etc etc. Everybody knows Jesus was a Jew from what is now Palestine.

So when you say: in 2015, he should look like a Jew, who on earth is that directed at? There is no one officially-sanctioned picture of Jesus, there are just millions of different ones representing a number of different ethnicities.

What an idiotic article, sorry to say. I shuddered when I read the sentence “In my lectures…”. You have a chip on your shoulder about this from your upbringing obviously.

By: Jasmine

Jasmine — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 06:49:36 +0000

In reply to Sangeetha. It seems that Singh does draw attention to this issue, though perhaps from an opposing standpoint. His argument lies in the fact that Jesus is (unfortunately and unnecessarily) most often depicted as a white man by white men, which leaves little to the imagination.

By: john

john — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 05:06:23 +0000

Viracocha was described as “a man of medium height, white and dressed in a white robe like an alb secured round the waist, and that he carried a staff and a book in his hands.” The old texts all agree that children of God[s] were fair skinned. Even Noah was white, with blue eyes, and it was extremely unusual. Pale skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, these were the most obvious indicators of bloodlines that were traced to the God[s]. Read your history and your Holy texts, you will see. Fear not, the mathematics support the idea that today the color of your skin does not preclude you from having the genes of such wonderful ancestors, in fact, the opposite. All modern humans must have some genetic heritage from those which the God[s] left among us by now, assuming they bred at all. We are all Descendants of them, to a greater or lesser degree, perhaps, but color is no discriminator by now.

By: Alfred Gerteiny

Alfred Gerteiny — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 03:23:00 +0000

In reply to Sangeetha. Good, intelligent comment that, nevertheless, does not diminish the soundness of the article.

By: Roger

Roger — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:22:35 +0000

In reply to Sangeetha. That is a very good point and was not addressed by Singh. Still, Jesus (like Mohamed) is most likely a fiction.

By: Sangeetha

Sangeetha — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 09:25:19 +0000

I say, if he is a virgin born (not out of Man and Woman) then he is neither Palestinian nor European. Neither white nor black.
It is left to your imagination.