Iconoclast Archbishop Trashes ‘White Jesus’
by Jules Gomes, Church Militant:
The archbishop of Canterbury’s recent polemic against a “white Jesus” sparked a fresh wave of anger as academics and celebrities of varied ethnicities accused Justin Welby of “white paternalism” and “abject ignorance of Church history.”
In a Friday BBC 4 Today program, the head of the global Anglican Communion said the Western church’s portrayal of Christ as a white man needed to be challenged.
Interviewed in the context of a raging debate provoked by American writer and leading Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist Shaun King (who called statues of a “white European” Jesus “a form of white supremacy”), Welby was asked if the Church had to rethink the white image of Jesus.
“Yes of course it does, this sense that God was white … You go into churches [around the world] and you don’t see a white Jesus,” the archbishop replied. “You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jesus — which is of course the most accurate — you see a Fijian Jesus.”
Historian Robert Spencer of Middle Eastern origin blasted Welby’s “white Jesus” remarks as demonstrating “abject ignorance of the Church’s history.”
“Byzantine tradition has it that the first icon was painted by St. Luke, who, of course, knew Jesus and His Mother personally,” Spencer, Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, told Church Militant.
“Byzantine icons of Jesus generally resemble one another, because, tradition has it, the first of them were created by people who had seen Jesus and knew what He looked like.”
“That’s why they also all depict a Mediterranean man, who in today’s reductive categories, would be classified as ‘white,’ albeit not ‘white’ like a Scandinavian,” Spencer explained.
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