Jesus in Popular Culture

In an article—“Jesus Was Not White. Here Is Why Recognizing That Matters”—published in Newsweek magazine, Whitaker (2018) challenges the portrayal of Jesus Christ as a white person. From the outset, he states that anyone who has been brought up in the Western environment can be forgiven for thinking that Jesus was white. At home, parents would hang huge photos of ‘Jesus Christ’ portrayed as a white person: Jesus in Popular Culture.

Besides, a visit to Museums and Churches also had huge artworks that displayed Jesus as a white person. He avers that a wide body of evidence suggests that Jesus must have been a brown Jew from the Middle East. By referring to different movies about Jesus Christ, Whitaker (2018) implicates Europeans for attempting to falsely portray Jesus Christ as a white person.

Whitaker (2018) avers that Jesus’s representation matters because it influences how people feel about themselves. In particular, when such messages on images are carried on the media, they have a huge implication. The author gives the example of the Kenyan movie actress Lupita Nyong’o, who struggled with low self-esteem because mainstream media only displayed white people as beautiful. It was not until she saw the world embracing a Sudanese model, Alek Alek, that she realized that black can be beautiful.

The same can be said about the portrayal of Jesus as a white person. Most people will have difficulty identifying with Christianity if Jesus and all the characters around him, including the disciples, are constantly portrayed as being white. To make it worse, such a portrayal does not align with reality since people from the Middle East are not white. Whitaker (2018) avers that if God is always depicted as white, the default human becomes white, and such thinking contributes to racism.

References

Whitaker, R. J. (2018, March 31). Jesus was not white. Here is why recognizing that matters. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/jesus-easter-white-middle-eastern-jew-opinion-867456

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In this second discussion, find one radical statement concerning the historicity of Jesus Christ that has been published in the recent past (within the last ten years). Feel free to take your research back a few years, but more recent research is better. You may find that news magazines such as Time and Newsweek are easily accessible sources, but these are just suggestions for a starting point; do not necessarily limit yourself to these two popular magazines. Summarize your findings, including a title, the source, the author or proponent of the radical statement concerning Jesus, and a synopsis of what was said.

Jesus in Popular Culture

Feel free to be flexible here; the main thing is that others in your class have enough information to enter into the discussion. As a class, discuss what the media is saying about Jesus, and how this is impacting society, both in the secular and religious realm. It is encouraged that you discuss the particulars related to the “radical things” discovered by the peers. In your discussions, seek to draw out the fallacies being promoted about Jesus, and attempt to refute these fallacies for the practice and edification of your peers