For WPS.News / Occupy 2.5
Monday, August 11, 2025 – 09:00 CDT

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Who Was the Historical Jesus?

Modern scholarship converges on the consensus that Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century Jewish man from Galilee—approximately 5’5″ in height, with olive-brown skin, short dark hair, brown eyes, and a trimmed beard. He looked like a Semitic Galilean, not a fair-skinned European icon (Levine et al., 1992; History.com, 2019).

What Did the Earliest Depictions Look Like?

The oldest surviving images of Jesus come from Roman Christian catacombs dated to the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. He appears as the Good Shepherd—a youthful, beardless figure in a tunic, not a white European with flowing blonde hair. These images reflect symbolic roles more than ethnic accuracy.

The now-standard long-haired, bearded visage only solidified around the 6th century in Byzantine and later Western Christian art. By then, Jesus’ image was shaped by imperial iconography and artistic convention—not eyewitness memory.

When Did the “White Jesus” Appear?

From the Renaissance onward (14th–16th centuries), European artists increasingly portrayed Christ with fair skin, light eyes, and long, often golden hair. These depictions reflected the artists’ own ethnicity and cultural context, not the historical reality of a Middle Eastern Jewish preacher.

The most globally circulated image of a white Jesus is Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940)—a blue-eyed, fair-haired savior that became widespread in Protestant and Catholic homes alike. This image was not based on archaeology or scripture, but on American Protestant marketing in the postwar era.

Was the Catholic Church Engaged in Colonial Expansion When These Images Emerged?

Yes. The emergence and global dissemination of white Jesus imagery coincided directly with European colonial expansion, particularly from the 15th century onward. Catholic missionaries often carried religious artwork depicting a pale-skinned Christ as they accompanied colonizing powers into Africa, the Americas, and Asia.

This alignment of race, divinity, and empire helped to reinforce the supposed spiritual and racial superiority of Europeans. Christian iconography thus became a subtle tool of imperialism, linking salvation with whiteness and erasing the swarthy, subversive Semitic body of the actual man from Nazareth.

Why the Discrepancy Matters

The myth of a white Jesus shapes more than just art—it shapes power, theology, and identity. The white Christ has been used to justify white supremacy, cultural genocide, and the missionary erasure of indigenous beliefs. Correcting that image isn’t just about historical accuracy. It’s about decolonizing our spiritual imagination.

Portraying Jesus as a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew does not diminish Christianity. It restores it to historical reality and challenges the centuries-long merger of whiteness with godliness.

Final Summary

Jesus was not white. He was a Galilean Jew under Roman occupation. The white Jesus we see in stained glass and Bible storybooks is a European invention, born of imperial interests, racial hierarchy, and theological spin. To embrace the real Jesus is to reckon with what was lost—and stolen—when whiteness took the throne.

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APA-Style References

Green, J. (2021). Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces. Random House.

House, A. S. (2020, July 22). The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/07/conversation_white_jesus.php

Levine, A.-J., McKnight, S., & Marshall, A. (1992). Jesus. In Handbook to Exegesis of the New Testament. Brill.

History.com Editors. (2019, February 20). What did Jesus really look like? History.com. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/articles/what-did-jesus-look-like

Depiction of Jesus. (2025). Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depiction_of_Jesus

Jewish Dartmouth. (2020, February). Recolored History: Art, Iconography and the Myth of White Jesus. Retrieved from https://jewish.dartmouth.edu/news/2020/02/recolored-history-art-iconography-and-myth-white-jesus

Frost, M. (2022, March 17). Picturing Jesus – Does it Matter What Color Jesus Is? Retrieved from https://mikefrost.net/picturing-jesus-part-v-does-it-matter-what-color-jesus-is/

Merritt, J. (2013, December 12). Insisting Jesus Was White Is Bad History and Bad Theology. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/insisting-jesus-was-white-is-bad-history-and-bad-theology/282310/