Earlyface

Jesus has been named the top black icon
by the New Nation newspaper. Their
assertion that Jesus was black has raised
eyebrows in some quarters - so what
colour was he?
Just as no one will ever produce
proof for the existence of God, the
question of Jesus's colour may
always be a matter for personal belief.
Was he white, white-ish, olive-skinned,
swarthy, dark-skinned or black? There are
people who believe he was any one of those
shades, but there seem to be only two
things about the debate that can be said
with any degree of certainty.
First - if the past 2,000 years of Western art
were the judge, Jesus would be white,
handsome, probably with long hair and an
ethereal glow.
Second - it can almost certainly be said that
Jesus would not have been white. His hair
was also probably cut short.
I think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus
as 'a man of colour' - Dr Mark Goodacre
Yet the notion that Jesus was black -
highlighted this week in a survey of black
icons by the New Nation newspaper which
ranked him at number one - is genuinely
held by some. One school of thought has it
that Jesus was part of a tribe which had
migrated from Nigeria.
And Jesus probably did have some African
links - after all the conventional theory is
that he lived as a child in Egypt where,
presumably, his appearance did not make
him stand out.
"Ethiopian Christianity, which pre-dates
European Christianity, always depicts Christ
as an African and it generally agreed that
people of the region where Jesus came from
looked nothing like the one shown," the
paper says.
As light-hearted evidence that Jesus was
black, it adds that he "called everybody
'brother', liked Gospel, and couldn't get a
fair trial".
But the truth, says New Testament scholar
Dr Mark Goodacre, of the University of
Birmingham, is probably somewhere in
between.
"There is absolutely no evidence as to what
Jesus looked like," he says. "The artistic
depictions down the ages have total and
complete variation, which indicates that
nobody did a portrait of Jesus or wrote
down a description, it's all been forgotten."
Traditional depictions
Dr Goodacre was involved in the
reconstruction of a Middle Eastern first
century skull for the BBC's Son of God
programme in 2001, which resulted in a
suggestion of what a man like Jesus might
have looked like. He advised on hair and skin
colour.
Deciding on skin colour was more difficult,
though. But the earliest depictions of Jews,
which date from the 3rd Century, are - as far
as can be determined - dark-skinned.
"We do seem to have a relatively dark
skinned Jesus. In contemporary parlance I
think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus
as 'a man of colour'." This probably means
olive-coloured, he says.
'Fascinating' debate
Professor Vincent Wimbush, of California's
Claremont Graduate University, who is an
expert on ethnic interpretations of the Bible,
says the matter of the historical colour of
Jesus seems to him a "flat, dead-end issue".
"He's of Mediterranean stock, and it's quite
clear what that means. We see people like
that in the world today, and that should end
the matter." The fact that the debate rages
on regardless is fascinating, he says,
because of what it says about people's
other issues.
The artistic representations of Jesus which
are so familiar are not necessarily a negative
thing, Dr Goodacre says. There is
"theologically something quite profound" in
the fact that throughout history people have
tried to depict Jesus in their own image.
"This is not a rough image of themselves
people have been depicting. It's an ideal
image of themselves, painting Jesus as
something they are aspiring to.
"Things have changed a bit in recent culture
because people are conscious of the need to
be challenged by him and shocked. I think
that's why in more contemporary
representations, even those coming from a
white, western background, people will
think very carefully about the
representation."
Even the world of film is catching up, albeit
slowly. Robert Powell had famously piercing
blue eyes in Jesus of Nazareth in 1977. And
although Jim Caviezel, who played the lead in
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, also
has piercing blue eyes, by the time the film
was shown they had miraculously become
brown.