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THE answer to the troubled and troubling question that makes my topic today is a definite yes.
The reason being that the name and the image of Jesus Christ of Nazareth was stolen, captured and abused by Empire for reasons of imperialism and its pursuant slavish and colonial ends.
As well as decolonial thinking and activism, at a world scale, has occupied itself with colonial statues and figurines it has paid deep attention to the image of Jesus as white. My friend Joshua Maponga, in South Africa, has caused much constructive controversy with the forceful argument that Jesus Christ the Messiah and the saviour could not by any chance have been white.
In other words, the argument, which is a fundamentally decolonial thesis, is that Jesus Christ who was God as far as he was part of the Holy Trinity was only given a race by white colonisers that made him a European white male figure when he was from the Middle East, and therefore not actually a white European male.
Decolonially thinking and speaking, Jesus Christ was perfectly from the Global South.
Cynical observers and analysts have playfully but much controversially observed how a figure like Osama Bin Laden went to many lengths to perform the looks of Jesus Christ as he was portrayed by European artists and imaginists.
Jesus as he is known and understood now is largely a construction and an impression of white European artists that have drawn and sculptured him as a white European man.
One of the biggest claims of the colonising Euro-American Empire was that white colonisers had done great to bring Jesus, a white Jesus, to the barbaric natives of the Global South. Liberation philosophers, the theologians and philosophers amongst them, like Enrique Dussel and Gustavo Gutierrez, have noted how Christianity which was a religion and a Kingdom that was “not of this world” was usurped by colonisers and capitalists who turned it into Christendom, which was a cult, not a religion, of Empire.
That colonial captivity of the name and image of Jesus Christ entails that the entire idea and practice of Jesus Christ should be decolonised, liberated from its captivity to Empire and its global designs.
White European colonisers landed in the Global South, looking for gold, but fronting God and Jesus Christ as their cause and reason, as part of the civilising and modernising mission.
But they were just colonising capitalist conquerors whose works had nothing to do with the life and work of Jesus Christ the saviour of mankind.
Mankind as the extended family of human beings of whatever race, skin colour, culture, tradition and geographic belonging.
That there were Jews and Gentiles, for instance, is a myth and a social and religious construct that Jesus personally confronted and corrected.
The Historical Jesus
The debate is far too deep and too wide.
There are even other cynics and sceptics that hold it to be true that the whole narrative of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a myth.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is understood with emphasis on the fiction part of the word.
Professor Anna Swartswood House of the University of South Carolina is one amongst many art historians and intellectuals that have investigated the Jesus phenomenon from other perspectives beside the spiritual and the theological.
The Jesus topic, because it is spiritual and emotive, it involves believers and followers, atheists and cynics, is fundamentally emotive and volatile.
It is an intellectual hard hat area to say the very least. Scholars have researched the Jesus Christ phenomenon from a dispassionate and removed perspective that can be trusted for reason and sobriety.
Tracing the historical Jesus of flesh and blood allows us to see clearly the colonisation and abuse of the idea of the Christ by conquerors, imperialists, colonisers and enslavers.
Historically and geographically thinking for instance, by his birth and location, Jesus Christ could not by any measure have been European.
The Son of Man was a Man from the Middle East, much closer, similar and even the same in look and make and texture with modern day Arabs and Jews.
The Portrayal of the Messiah
What we prevalently rely on for what the Lord Jesus Christ looked like are drawings of artistes and figurines of sculptors.
That is why some decolonial activists in Europe have demanded that images of Jesus as white should be brought down, should fall, in the language of wokeness.
Professor Swarthood House documents the portrayal of Jesus Christ from AD 1350 to 1600.
The images of Jesus Christ that are hegemonic in public opinion are the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” image and Michelangelo’s “Last Judgement” picture.
There is also the famous 1940 “Head of Christ” drawing by Warner Sallman that presented Jesus as blue-eyed, light-skinned, and fine-featured. Sallman was an advertising artist and impressionist.
He successfully drew an image of a handsome holy man that looked more like ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates and others.
All the available images and pictures of Jesus Christ are constructions and imaginations of some artists.
I can argue that we consume designed and photoshopped images of Jesus and hold them as real.
There was no photographer or artist that captured the image of the real Jesus.
The Jesus we see and know in pictures is an image and a portrait of some artistes, not the Son of Man in veracity. Enterprising colonialists and enslavers also generated their own image and picture of Jesus as European that they used to bully natives into fearful obedience.
Their image of Jesus as a fine and handsome, even beautiful European, was contrasted with the construct of the Devil, Lucifer, as a dark and ugly fellow with horns.
The biblical account, however, holds that Lucifer was a handsome guy, once an arch-angel of the most high.
And some prophets referred to him as once a good singer of hymns.
In that way, the Jesus we know is not the Jesus that was. The picture and the image that is hegemonic is a colonial and racist construction.
Decolonising Jesus
As Christians or not, we have to decolonise how the figure of Jesus Christ, the one whose birthday we celebrated yesterday, and liberate it from colonial constructions and imaginations.
It is important for us to embrace Jesus as black, as local and ours. Not as the God of the conqueror, the coloniser and the enslaver.
It is liberating to hold Jesus as the God of the poor and immiserated. As the God of the conquered, enslaved and colonised, Jesus Christ is a liberator and not an oppressor.
He is the Victor for the vanquished and that is Christ the Messiah.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is writing from Hogsback, in Mathole District, in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
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