Sunday, June 28, 2020

Funny--You Don't Look Jewish



In an interview on Friday, the head of the Church of England said the west in general needed to question the prevailing mindset that depicted Christ as a white man in traditional Christian imagery.*
Thus, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He went on to say that if you go into churches around the world,
You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle-Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus.
Did you notice who was missing from this litany of Jesuses?

That’s right—a Jewish Jesus.

Some of you might claim that “Middle-Eastern Jesus” includes a Jewish Jesus. However, a little effort would winkle the Jews from the Syrians, Egyptians, Iraqis, et al. But, more important, I see the submerging of Jewishness into the general mire of Middle-Easternness as another example of the centuries-old attempt to ahistoricize Christianity’s relationship to Judaism. Consider one other example, cited by Diarmaid MacCulloch in his massive (and brilliant) biography of Thomas Cromwell: In 1535, parish clergy were enlisted
in a campaign of sermons and addresses to get families to teach their children the first building-blocks of the Christian faith—Lord’s Prayer, Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments.**
Would that be the same Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai for the Jewish people?

To use a very contemporary phrase, aren’t we seeing here examples of cultural/religious appropriation?

*

Anyway, to get back to iconography, I do wonder about the idea that Christians have that any of their portrayals of Jesus—in painting, sculpture, or some other weird  medium***—are really portrayals of the historical personage. Unless I’ve been sleeping at the switch, I have not heard of any itinerant Polaroid photographers snapping pictures of random Nazarenes during the first century. Thus, nobody can claim to know what Jesus looked like. Certainly, the standard portrait has no historical claim to validity; according to Wikipedia, “there is no physical description of Jesus contained in any of the canonical gospels."****

With nothing to contradict us, therefore, I would hope we can all agree on one thing: that he almost certainly looked Jewish.

***


** Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

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