After reading on the shroud of Turin and our class discussion about the face of Jesus, I thought I'd go looking for ideas of what people believe he looked like.
This site aims to promote the second coming of Christ and has a gallery of two hundred photos of him. Most of them are fairly similar; a lot are Caucasian-esque representations. I find the Caucasian faces to be hugely common but perhaps not historically accurate. I'm curious about why he is so frequently represented with dark hair, blue eyes, pale skin, etc. with a clearly European or Western ethnicity when he lived in the Middle East. Is this a case of the "white-washing" phenomenon?
I found another article about the contested color of Jesus Christ, that clearly suggests his race changes with those who are worshiping him. While a predominantly-colored church has a stained glass window with a dark-skinned Jesus (installed after a racial bombing,) a Mormon statue depicts Jesus as "chiseled" and Caucasian.
"Korean Times" shows a few images of so-called Korean Jesus, a clearly Asian-ethnic man.
There are tons of sites attesting to the race of Jesus, some of them claiming him for races that are not geographically or historically feasible. The wiki for Jesus's appearance shows him from Caucasian to Middle Eastern to African to Asian.
It's interesting to me how fluid the face of Jesus has become. All races want to claim him for his own; but it makes sense. If religion is supposed to build community and camaraderie among people, then shouldn't they want a savior/messiah/teacher that they can identify with?
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