![\"Scrovegni](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2020\/05\/1280px-Giotto_-_Scrovegni_-_-31-_-_Kiss_of_Judas.jpg\")
<\/a>(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> sent out a letter earlier this week calling upon local leaders to ensure that the foyers of our meetinghouses contain artwork that is focused on Jesus Christ. \u00a0This is, of course, entirely consistent with the renewed emphasis on the proper name of the Church that has been a hallmark of the ministry of President Russell M. Nelson and even with the new Church symbol or logo, which is based upon Bertel Thorvaldsen\u2019s statue of the Christus. \u00a0(See my recent blog entry\u00a0\u201cOn \u2018Mormon\u2019 and \u2018Mormonism.'\u201d<\/a>) \u00a0We\u2019re trying to make clearer who is at the center of our faith, because so many outside of the Church plainly don\u2019t understand that:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cArt depicting Jesus Christ to become the standard focus of foyers in Latter-day Saint meetinghouses\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, for some folks there are always<\/em> grounds to criticize the Church and every day is a good day to do<\/em> so, and thus, predictably, this letter was no exception. \u00a0No good deed goes unpunished. \u00a0So there were, in at least one quarter that I noticed, complaints that the Church insists that Jesus always be depicted as \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cCaucasian\u201d rather than \u201cracially neutral.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019ll be candid: \u00a0I don\u2019t know exactly what \u201cracially neutral\u201d even means<\/em>. \u00a0Ghanaians and Koreans and Norwegians just aren\u2019t exactly easy to confuse with one another. \u00a0And I\u2019m not a fan of artwork \u2014 there\u2019s a lot of it at Nazareth\u2019s Church of the Annunciation, for example \u2014 that makes Jesus and\/or his mother, Mary, look Asian or African or Filipino. \u00a0Not because I have anything against Asia, Africa, and the Philippines or their people, but because, well, Jesus wasn\u2019t actually from<\/em> any of those places. \u00a0He was incarnated as a specific gendered human person in a specific place with a specific lineage. \u00a0 And he was, as it happens, a first-century Palestinian Jew. \u00a0Behind the story of Judas\u2019s identification of Jesus with a kiss \u2014 recounted at Matthew 26:47-49, Mark 14:44-45, and Luke 22:47-48 \u2014 must surely stand the fact that Jesus looked pretty much like other men of his age at that time and place, which is why Judas needed to point him out to the soldiers who had been sent to make the arrest. \u00a0Jesus was almost certainly of a relatively dark complexion and very likely had black or dark brown hair. \u00a0He was Middle Eastern.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n For that very reason, I\u2019ve also been vocally critical for years of art that tends to make Jesus look too American or even, say, Swedish<\/em>. \u00a0And there\u2019s too much of that, especially among Protestants and, yes, Latter-day Saints.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Back to the question: \u00a0Was the historical Jesus \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cCaucasian\u201d? \u00a0First of all, such categories are rather artificial, and they\u2019re definitely slippery. \u00a0(I\u2019m fond of the black conservative economist Thomas Sowell\u2019s distinction between \u201cpink\u201d and \u201cbrown\u201d people, instead of \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d people.) \u00a0And, I would argue, these categories are less and less significant or meaningful, and they were never very<\/em> meaningful or significant in the first place. \u00a0(I hope \u2014 probably in vain \u2014 that nobody, reading this, is going to try to accuse me of harboring any sympathy whatever for contemporary \u201cAryan Jesus\u201d nonsense.) \u00a0But the case can easily be made that, yes, Jesus was white or Caucasian. \u00a0A darker kind of Caucasian, probably, but nonetheless Caucasian. \u00a0(He certainly wasn\u2019t Ghanaian or Korean, any more than he was Norwegian, or English, or American.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Even today, there are debates \u2014 sometimes rather angry<\/em> debates, as ethnic-related disputes too often are \u2014 about whether Jews<\/em> are \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201cCaucasian\u201d<\/a> and about whether Arabs and Iranians are<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n For whatever little it may be worth, I point out that the Caucasus Mountains, from which the term Caucasian<\/em> derives, stretch from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and can themselves be considered Middle Eastern, as are many of those who live in and about them.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 The First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent out a letter earlier this week calling upon local leaders to ensure that the foyers of our meetinghouses contain artwork that is focused on Jesus Christ. \u00a0This is, of course, entirely consistent with the renewed emphasis on the proper name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[195,11486,2247,11483,1356,1809,11474,11477,9257,1369,2935,2938,4699,11489,2905,1815,788,81,11471,1260,11480],"class_list":["post-85109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-arab","tag-arrest","tag-art","tag-caucasian","tag-christ","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-ethnic","tag-ethnicity","tag-historical","tag-jesus","tag-jew","tag-jewish","tag-judas","tag-kiss","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-lds","tag-mormon","tag-palestinian","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-white"],"yoast_head":"\n