Christ! He’s Coloured

The Jesus in my Children’s Bible was blond and blue-eyed, and he wore a white robe with a sky-blue sash that hung off one shoulder. When he wasn’t shown reaching for someone, he was standing with his hands at his sides, palms out, as if to collect something, like souls.

I believed in Jesus as pictured in my Bible. The fact that I knew no blond, blue-eyed men only added to the allure. Even now, I can be brought up short at the sight of a skinny, bearded young man with similar colouring and be prepared to like him.

No, it’s not Christology at its finest, but there you are.

Would it have mattered if Jesus was black?

For — well — ever, historians, theologians and others have said it is impossible that Jesus was a Nordic man. The historical Jesus most likely was far darker than the European figure with whom many of us are most familiar. If he wasn’t very dark-skinned, he was at least olive-skinned.

Color of the Cross, a movie that enjoyed limited release in last October, is now due out on DVD. Color… is not a great movie but it raises the interesting point that Jesus was decidedly black, as portrayed by Jean Claude LaMarre, who also wrote and directed the movie.

The movie looks at the last 48 hours of Jesus’ life without the sadistic glee of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. But like that movie, Color… has its share of historical bugaboos. Mary Magdalene is a prostitute, though there’s no scriptural authority that she was. The bad guys are all white, though it would have been hard to find such paleness in that region at the time.

Characters refer continually to Jesus’ colour. Mary asks a question that most black mothers ask at some point, whether the authorities are dogging her son because of his skin colour. When discussing the possibility that Jesus is the hoped-for messiah, officials sneer that he is only a black Nazarene. Thomas, the doubter, asks Jesus what it’s like to be different, and Jesus responds that his mother was denied lodging because she was different.

To believers, the fact of Jesus’ existence matters more than what he looked like while he was on earth. No, it’s not the biggest question facing Christians, but what if we all had grown up with a black Jesus?

—Susan Campbell / LATWP

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