Excerpts from Jesus Is A Black Man: An Inconvenient Truth by T C Wanyanwu
In what ways have the image of Jesus changed throughout history, and what factors influenced these alteration?
A rare early portrait of Jesus was discovered in 2018 on the walls of a ruined church in southern Israel. Painted in the sixth century A.D., it is the earliest known image of Christ found in Israel, and portrays him with shorter, curly hair, a depiction that was common to the eastern region of the Byzantine empire―especially in Egypt and the Syria-Palestine region―but disappeared from later Byzantine art.
The long-haired, bearded image of Jesus that emerged beginning in the fourth century A.D. was influenced heavily by representations of Greek and Roman gods, particularly the all-powerful Greek god Zeus.
At that point, Jesus started to appear in a long robe, seated on a throne (such as in the fifth-century moaic on the altar of the Santa Pudenziana church in Rome), sometimes with a halo surrounding his head.
“The point of these images was never to show Jesus as a man, but to make theological points about who Jesus was as Christ (King, Judge) and divine Son,” Joan Taylor, professor of Christian origins and second temple Judaism at King’s College London, wrote in The Thelrish Times. “They have evolved over time to the standard ‘Jesus’we recognize".
“Cultures tend to portray prominent religious figures to look like the dominant racial identity,” Cargill explains.
Of course, not all images of Jesus conform to the dominant image of him portrayed in Western art. In fact, many different cultures around the world have depicted him, visually at least, as one of their own.
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