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 A campaign on Change.org to have the poster of Jesus withdrawn was signed by some 14,000 people from around the country.
Can’t help but notice that no one’s mad about him being white, but being hot is out of the question.
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.
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.
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.
So Jesus was a ginger?
Man you brought receipts big time and still got downvoted. I guess Lemmy likes their race based attacks on religion too much to care.
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)_/¯