A poster in the southern Spanish city of Seville that depicts a young, handsome Jesus wearing only a loincloth has unleashed a storm on social media, with some calling it an affront to the figure of Christ and others posting lewd remarks and memes poking fun at the image.

The poster by internationally recognized Seville artist Salustiano García Cruz shows a fresh-faced Jesus without a crown of thorns, no suffering face and minuscule wounds on the hands and ribcage. It was commissioned and approved by the General Council of Brotherhoods, which organizes the renowned and immensely popular Holy Week processions ahead of Easter in Seville.

As soon as it was unveiled last week criticism of it went viral on social media and a debate erupted over how a resurrected Christ should be depicted. Many called it a disgrace, inappropriate, too pretty, modernist and out of line with Seville’s Easter tradition.

Spain is predominantly Catholic and church traditions such as marriage, baptisms and religious parades are immensely popular both among believers and nonbelievers. A campaign on Change.org to have the poster of Jesus withdrawn was signed by some 14,000 people from around the country.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      People really need to drop the whole “people in the middle east in the first century couldn’t be white” thing.

      2 Kings 5:27 is literally about a subpopulation who have ancestrally passed skin as white as snow.

      Lamentations 4:7 is about how pre-captivity there were people with skin like milk and a ruddy appearance.

      Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4Q534 is either describing Noah or the Messiah as having red hair.

      One of the more fascinating finds in this tomb, one that has not received much attention, was the preservation of a sample of Jewish male hair. The hair was lice-free, and was trimmed or cut evenly, probably indicating that the family buried in this tomb practiced good hygiene and grooming. The length of the hair was medium to short, averaging 3-4 inches. The color was reddish.

      The tradition is also really concerned with skin checks and describes what may be skin cancer as its leprosy. Something that occurs at a much higher rate in redheads.

      There’s even a scene where the eponymous founder of Edom (‘red’) who is born with hair all over his body and named Esau either because of that hair or the reddish porridge he ate, either gives away or has his birthright/blessing stolen from him by the guy later renamed ‘Israel’ in the Bible.

      There’s a lot more to this and the underlying history, but the notion that the middle east was a monolith of appearances and that no one with pale skin or lighter hair were present is preposterous and a modern falsification of historical realities.

      Jesus was probably darker skinned and haired than typically depicted, but it is by no means a certainty as it is popularly presented as.

      • butterflyattack@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah Herodotus talks about a lot of peoples with different physical characteristics too. Although TBF like the old testament, it’s written centuries before Jesus, I’m not sure the same applies to both time periods.

      • Sunfoil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Man you brought receipts big time and still got downvoted. I guess Lemmy likes their race based attacks on religion too much to care.

        • kromem@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, and one of the biggest ironies to it all is that given the various contexts informing those receipts, my money would overwhelmingly be on the red hair in the region having come from the indigenous populations of North Africa, so if Jesus were fair skinned and red haired it would mean he had African ancestry.

          So the desire to sweep the notion under the rug is effectively yet another instance of the erasure of African history in Western cultures.

          ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Nearly all biblical scholars agree the resurrection was a true historical event and that the attributions of the authors of Gospels are correct.

        Now the question is do you accept the logical fallacy of argument from authority for everything or just stuff that you agree with?

  • the_q@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Well considering Jesus is as real as Bugs Bunny I really don’t see the issue.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know about as real. I’ve seen pictures and movies of Bugs Bunny. I know what Bugs Bunny sounds like. Also, if I do something Bugs doesn’t like, he gets revenge. He doesn’t send me to a fictional land where I burn for eternity.

      Bugs definitely seems more real to me.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is historical evidence that a man named Jesus existed at the time. Not quite 100% conclusive, but probably as good as it will get when looking for evidence from 2000 years ago.

      Whether that human was also divine is a matter of faith, of course. Most scholars who are serious about this make a distinction between the historical Jesus and the divine one from Christian beliefs. The only two events that have this general historical consensus are that the historical Jesus was baptized, and that Pontius Pilate (who most definitely did exist) had him executed. Everything else around Jesus from the Bible can’t really be verified one way or another.

      Yeah, I got most of this from a Wiki link. So what. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There is historical evidence that a man named Jesus existed at the time. Not quite 100% conclusive, but probably as good as it will get when looking for evidence from 2000 years ago.

        There is more evidence of Bigfoot and yet I doubt you believe in it.

        .>The only two events that have this general historical consensus are that the historical Jesus was baptized,

        Paul didn’t mention that. Why not? It would have certainly helped his case.

        and that Pontius Pilate (who most definitely did exist) had him executed

        And yet for no reason whatsoever didn’t kill the rest of the 12 and let them openly operate.

        • dhork@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’re kind of going off the rails a bit here. The case for the historical Jesus doesn’t come out of Paul or any other part of the Bible, but rather out of accounts from ancient historians that have been validated as best as those sources can be.

          And if you are an Atheist, why do you seem so troubled by the idea that the man might have existed? Why couldn’t there have been a subversive Rabbi talking truth to power in Judea, who got on the wrong side of the local government , leading to his death, and further leading his followers to do a bit of (literal) hero worship? None of that requires any belief in his divinity, and fits all the available historical sources.

          • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldM
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            1 year ago

            Actually, most of the evidence of a historical Jesus comes precisely from the Bible. The earliest mention of Jesus outside of the Gospels comes from Josepheus, who was not a contemporary of Jesus, and the oldest surviving manuscripts are early medieval Christian copies.

            Those who argue for the historicity of Jesus base the claim mostly in the early preserved copies of the gospels and historical accounts of early Christians. There is a little more to it, but it basically comes down to the presumed works of those who were presumably contemporaries of Jesus.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The case for the historical Jesus doesn’t come out of Paul or any other part of the Bible, but rather out of accounts from ancient historians that have been validated as best as those sources can be.

            Such as who? Tell me the name of these historians, how they knew what they reported was the truth, what they said, and prove that what they said hasn’t been tampered with.

            And if you are an Atheist, why do you seem so troubled by the idea that the man might have existed?

            I am an atheist. And I am not troubled by it. I am upset that people are believing in something that they do not have good evidence for and using that to alter their lives. It is not an academic question.

            Why couldn’t there have been a subversive Rabbi talking truth to power in Judea, who got on the wrong side of the local government , leading to his death, and further leading his followers to do a bit of (literal) hero worship?

            There could have been but that isn’t the claim that is you weakening the claim so very much that you hope I will concede it is possible. The exact opposite of what we do in other branches of knowledge. Superstitions shrink in claims as time goes on. Which is why horoscopes went from predicting the fate of empires to telling you if you should break up with your cheating partner.

            Put another way how is what you are doing now any different than people who have reduced skydaddy to a diest god and demand that since I can’t know what happened in the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang I have to concede magic?

            I follow evidence where it leads, I don’t look for a way to sneak a claim in by watering it down to nothing.

            None of that requires any belief in his divinity, and fits all the available historical sources.

            It does? Josphius, even if everything we have from him was unaltered, doesn’t say that he was a subversive Rabbi. Tactius doesn’t say that either. Plus it doesn’t really fit in. We aren’t told by those historians why he was executed, what the nature of the trial was, and most importantly why he alone was instead of the 12.

            If it was because he was going against Judaism we know that the Phrariess had a secret police and a rule against handing over heretics to secular authorities (see the Talmud). If it was because Jesus was going against Rome, well the Romans had a way of dealing with that and making sure that anyone even remotely connected to it was taken care of. And yet we are told that both groups acted in a contrary way. Joint probability here.

            This is what people mean when they keep bringing up that even a minimum historical Jesus requires so many crazy things to happen in a precise sequence of events.

            • dhork@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Didn’t you just make my point for me? You are debating why Josephus mentioned Jesus’s execution, not whether he did or not. True, we don’t really know whether his account had been altered before we got to it, but we’re never going to have that certainty.

              • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                No. I conceded a point to show how your idea still doesn’t work “even if everything we have from him was unaltered,”.

                We have two passages from this man.

                One that refers to James the Brother and contains the exact turn of phrase that Matthew uses in 1:16 “legomenos Christos” “so-called Annoited one”. Given the complete context of the passage and the exact quote of the Bible it is most likely a fraud. We know that there was a tradition that James was killed and we have a page that talks about a James and another guy named Jesus. To make it refer to James the Just would take a two words addition. It doesn’t even make sense since it requires James to be very old, for a known hertic to be appointed head of the temple, and for the general population (who were hostile to James) to be upset that he died, and James to be descended from the temple priest clan which means he can’t be from David line, a claim he would have had to defend for his brothers claim of son of god status. None of it works.

                The second passage is so obviously fraud even religious scholars don’t defend it. It expressed 2nd century Trinity ideas, it isn’t in Josphius writing style, it doesn’t fit in the context of the chapter, it goes against Messianic ideas that Josphius had, it isn’t written the same way he describes other Messiahs, and describes Jesus in glowing terms that no religious Jewish person would use.

                My point was even if we somehow someway accept that Josphius really did write this stuff in 71AD it still doesn’t get us anywhere since he could have just been repeating what Christians told him without doing any work of verification.

  • Jubei Kibagami@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reminded me of this passage:

    "You’ve never seen a crucifix with a Jesus who wasn’t almost naked. You’ve never seen a fat Jesus. Or a Jesus with body hair. Every crucifix you’ve ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless and modeling designer jeans or men’s cologne…

    Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire. People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won’t settle for just a human being."

    -Survivor by Palahniuk

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m an atheist, but I was raised Roman Catholic.

    These people that attempt to paint Jesus as some clean cut, light skinned fashion model is some prosperity gospel shit that intentionally glosses over the teachings of Jesus Christ as written in the New Testament.

    Jesus had disdain for those that reveled in greed and decadence. He basically told them they wouldn’t be welcome in heaven as they were. If Jesus were real, I can’t imagine he’d be pleased being portrayed as some stylish, vain douche of means.

    If Christians actually practiced the teachings of Jesus Christ of the new testament, I might not have been so quick to run away. That would involve praising selflessness, acceptance of different cultures, and giving till it it hurts, and shunning greed, gluttony, vanity, and self-interest though, so it was always a non-starter.

    The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are just plain wholly incompatible with the modern global economy, which is human civilization’s true god.