Jesus wasn't White!



We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created Man and wanted Man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the Earth. We have known this High God in darkness, and now we know Him in the light. God promised in the book of His word, the Bible, that He would save the world and all the nations and tribes.
We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, He rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all our sins are forgiven through Him. All who have faith in Him must be sorry for their sins, be baptised in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the Good News to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for Him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.

This is the Masai Creed: the Christian faith summarized from the cultural experience of the Masai people of Africa. The creed was written for them by Catholic missionaries around 1960.

At first sight, it's a very nice creed that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. However, the darkness is just below the surface: the creed was written FOR the Masai, but not BY them. Masai Christians have their experience of Christianity defined for them. I'm originally from Singapore, and Christians here have our experience of Christianity defined for us also, mostly by White, Evangelical, conservative missionaries. On my parents' fridge is a small picture of Jesus, his hands outstretched and palms open, a beatific expression on his face. He has light brown hair and Caucasian features. The thing is, my parents and I are Chinese, as are 80% of Singaporeans. And yet, the only images of Christ we see are Caucasian.

Colonialism goes beyond worshipping a God that doesn't look like you, although that is bad enough. Malcolm X, during the Civil Rights era, castigated Black Christians for worshipping a White God and a White Jesus. He saw it as an example of self-hate. Black girls played with White dolls. Even Martin Luther King Jr initially maintained that Jesus was White.






However, Jesus was not White. He was a dark-skinned Semite. A while ago in Popular Mechanics, a forensic anthropologist reconstructed what Jesus probably looked like. The article is here: http://www.dadsdayoff.net/Jesus-real-face.html






Richard Neave, a retired medical artist from the University of Manchester, acquired some skulls of Jesus' era from near Jerusalem, and reconstructed facial features typical of people from that area in Jesus' time. They used drawings from other archaeological sites to estimate Jesus' skin and eye coloration. Paul, in Corinthians, describes it as disgraceful for a man to have long hair; this makes it likely that Jesus had short hair.

If images of Jesus as a Caucasian are the only images available, they are invalid. However, they are valid if Jesus is also portrayed as an African man (the icon above; ironically, orange is the color of the Masai), a Native American, a Chinese man, a woman... It is a sin to appropriate Jesus to serve our cultural values. It is a sin to portray to people of color that Jesus was White - and in retrospect, it does not make sense. MLK eventually came to deny that Jesus was White (although, he did not say that Jesus was Black). Hopefully, churches in Asia will take the Caucasian images down some day. David Abalos says that in order to deal with sustained oppresion and/or to create lasting and positive change, cultural groups must reclaim four "faces", or aspects of themselves: the personal face, the political face, the historical face, and the sacred face. Lentz' portrayal of Jesus as an African goes to the personal, historical, and sacred faces.

Ironically, Lentz is White (Russian ancestry). Whereas people of color often have their skin lightened when portrayed in religious art, Lentz' icons have their skin darkened, if anything. Furthermore, a lot of the Caucasians in his icons look like they've had their skin darkened as well, or at least gone for a tan. Who knows, maybe Lentz is doing subliminal advertising for a tanning salon.