Random Reasons Why Jesus Is Depicted As Being White (15 items)

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  (#10) White Jesus Was A Necessary Tool For Slavery

  Slavery was built on the premise that only certain racial groups (the white one) possessed higher-order faculties like morality. Under this way of thinking, Black Africans had souls somewhere beneath their "heathen" behaviors and exteriors, and it became Europeans' "Christian duty" to convert them. White Jesus was an essential tool in this fight for the souls of the slaves. As the scholar Francesca Ramsey points out: "white supremacy" was "used in Christianity to colonize and control before and during slavery," and Jesus represented whiteness, purity, and European superiority; a more Israeli-looking Jesus simply wouldn't have worked in the same way.

  Biblical scholar Christena Cleveland adds: "By negating his true identity as a dark-skinned, oppressed minority, slaveholders were better able to justify the master-slave hierarchy and forget Jesus’ ministry to set the oppressed free (Luke 4:18)."
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  (#11) The Nazis Claimed Jesus Was Aryan

  The image of white Jesus was initially popularized by Europeans in the Middle Ages to support their own political and racial agenda against Arabs. And since then, it has similarly been misused for racial bias.

  In the 19th century, folks tried to make Jesus even whiter. The idea that Jesus was Aryan, or specifically Nordic, arose in accordance with anti-semitism. Scholars attempted to separate Jesus from his Jewish roots, which culminated in the Nazi ideology of "Positive Christianity." The racially charged argument posited that there was a religious Judaism separate from an ethnic or racial Judaism. Theories also claimed Galilee (where Jesus was from) was a non-Jewish region speaking an Indo-European language, which has been widely debunked. 
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  (#6) Documents Of Questionable Origin Began Describing His Appearance In The Middle Ages

  As Christianity became acceptable, and then even popular, people realized they didn't have any true physical renderings of their savior, Jesus Christ. So they did what people do best and started making stuff up.

  A forged letter from one Publius Lentulus (circa 14-37 CE) to the Roman senate claims to give a physical description of Jesus, saying he is tall, wavy-haired, rosey-cheeked, and blue-eyed. The only problem is that there's pretty much no way this letter was written at the time it claimed to be, as there was no such Lentulus during this time period, and it includes many phrases and references that place its creation sometime around the 13th century.

  Several other supposed ancient descriptions of Jesus arose during this time, but, like the Lentulus letter, they have been dated to the Middle Ages, when artistic depictions of Jesus would have already become commonplace and influential. 
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  (#9) Artists Had Numerous Incentives To Portray Jesus As White

  While Popes weren't the ones painting the pictures, artists during this time could've faced some dark consequences for going against the Church and its accepted depiction of Jesus. For most starving artists, compromising in their rendering of Christ certainly beat out getting burned for heresy.

  In addition, artists would want to actually sell their artwork, which would have been difficult if they strayed from the popular and mainstream image of White Jesus. Having one agreed-upon image of the savior helped to unify the religion and worked as proof against the nay-sayers.
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  (#15) White Jesus Is More Oppressive Than Black Or Korean Jesus

  So, at this point, you might be saying to yourself: don't other racial and ethnic groups of Christians create representations of Jesus that look like themselves? Aren't there Black and Korean versions of Jesus? Why all the focus and criticism of White Jesus? If you're asking yourself these kinds of questions, you're right - to a point. Undoubtedly, representations of Jesus get created in the likenesses of the groups who worship him; people have a way of liking to see themselves in their deity. The big difference is that Black and Korean Jesus aren't as oppressive as White Jesus; they haven't been used as a tool of suppression throughout history.

  According to the scholar Francesca Ramsey, the "pure" whiteness of Jesus plays into the longstanding "narrative of dark skin people being bad, thus needing to be tamed or killed in order to confirm to the good, or white, standard." Added to that is the fact that, during slavery, Christianity was used as a tool of oppression and a justification for wrongdoing. Black and Korean Jesus simply don't carry that historical baggage, and they definitely aren't as widespread.
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  (#3) Early On, Christians Were Too Persecuted To Create Jesus Representations

  After Jesus' death, being his known homie wasn't exactly cool. Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire for several centuries after his death, and followers therefore relied on symbols to represent their religious beliefs and secretly connect with one another. These symbols included the ichthyos, (the Jesus fish still prevalent today), and the Chi-Ro, a monogram of the letters chi (X) and ro (P), the first two letters in the Greek word "Christos," meaning Christ.

  Unfortunately for historians, this means that there are virtually zero depictions of Jesus from the time when people actually might have accurately remembered what he looked like. Womp womp.

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