Holiday inspires more discussion on Jesus’ race
When the Rev. Kip Banks’ family pulls out its Nativity scene each Christmas, the African features of the baby Jesus provide lessons on both the Bible and self-esteem.
Banks’ 8-year-old son, Kip Jr., has told his father that the Christ child is both "black and white." His father gently corrects him, telling him that the Gospel story of Mary and Joseph’s flight into Egypt with their young son shows that Jesus couldn’t have been white.
If Jesus was white, "then he’d have a very hard time hiding in Egypt," said Banks, minister of public policy for the Progressive National Baptist Convention in Washington,
At this time of year, many Christians dispel the go-to image of a white baby Jesus by including a Christ child of other colors in Nativity scenes and plays.
Edward Blum, co-author of the new book, "The Color of Christ," said the popular image of a white Jesus dates to 19th-century America, when evangelical Protestants latched onto a fraudulent medieval letter that described Jesus with long hair parted in the middle and transformed it into a "believed truth."
"It depicted his face as warm with some redness to his cheeks," said Blum, who teaches at San Diego State University. "In the early 19th century, American Protestants fell in love with it."
Though none of the Gospels describe Jesus’ hairstyle or eye or skin color, mass-produced images after the Civil War followed the widely accepted notion that Jesus was white, Blum said. In time, others began to counter those depictions.
In the early 1900s, the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, carried portraits of a black Mary and Jesus. Later, Nativity plays in black churches would sometimes feature a black doll as the infant Jesus.
But the issue is far from a black-and-white issue.
For Francisco Pereira, who grew up in El Salvador, it was a moment of pride when his infant son played the newborn Jesus at the Christmas Eve service at Washington’s Calvary Baptist Church last year.
The father of the now-1-year-old said he thinks Jesus was brown, but when he himself was growing up he thought Jesus was white. "Like in the movies, the old movies," he said. "That’s what I thought he was."