Christian Symbolism: Race and Christian Art — St Mary Magdalen School of Theology

Next in our series on Christian symbolism, Fr Jarel Robinson-Brown writes on race and depictions of Jesus in Christian art.

The 4th Century Bishop Gregory of Nyssa, wrote regarding the image of God that: ‘It dwells within every one of us, ignored and forgotten’[1]. Images of God in Christian art, have regularly reflected a lack of imagination when it comes to the diversity of God’s people. Art, it could be said has a crucial role to play in challenging racial prejudice in the world and in the Church today. In particular, the whiteness of Christian art is a hotly contested topic and reactions to a present-day Bishop making the statement ‘Jesus was a black man’[2] have caused many to reflect on the identity of Jesus and the way in which Jesus is and has repeatedly been depicted. Both Bishop Gregory of Nyssa and Archbishop Stephen Cottrell’s statements push at the contours of our imaginations – to see the image of God in us, and to see the image of God in the other. Theologians frequently help us to wonder, and to understand but Artists help us to see. We can imagine Gregory of Nyssa having something quite profound to say on the way in which the image of God in George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Stephen Lawrence was both ignored and forgotten by those who took their lives, yet we can be certain that their murderers if they had any concept of God in their minds at all, did not see God as anything other than White.

One of the demands that the incarnation makes upon the mind of the Christian, is a demand firmly invested in the realm of the imagination. The world into which Christ is born is called upon to reconceive its understanding not only of God, but of time and space and culture. God does not enter the world in the grandeur to which our imaginations may have already been limited, rather God transcends our imaginations and becomes human in the most vulnerable form of a homeless Middle Eastern baby who enters the world between urine and faeces just like the rest of us. Imagination is an inherent part of our vocation as God’s children and therefore it is a mark of true freedom. All art is a symbol of the artist’s liberty, or their attempt at liberty. To the enslaved, persecuted and oppressed – to dream and to imagine is a subversive and deeply political act. All Black art therefore is inherently transgressive, but most profoundly so, when such art dares to imagine and to depict the Saviour of humanity as Black. The image of the Black Christ is emblematic of Black refusal to make peace with the status quo, and further still to allow White Supremacy to have the last word on God. A Black Christ is one who knows the suffering of Black people, a Black Christ is one who has survived the worst of the principalities and powers of an unjust world, A Black Christ can relate to and be in solidarity with all those whose blackness has cost them their lives whether he be fixed into a stained-glass window, the cover of a manuscript, or nailed to a cross at the centre of a Passion Play. In depicting Jesus as Black, artists are entering the realm of the prophetic imagination where the tools of White Supremacy are dismantled and the disinherited are lifted up – in the image of a Black Jesus, those in whom the image of God is ignored and forgotten see something of themselves reflected in the God’s taking on flesh.

Crucifixion. Illuminated Gospel, c.14th Century, Amhara Region, Ethiopia — *Crucifixion*. Illuminated Gospel, c.14th Century, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

The essayist and playwright James Baldwin found the image of a White Jesus to have strangled his concept of freedom and frozen it at the root. In his youth, he recalled being presented with a Jesus who ‘though he was born in Nazareth under a very hot sun, and though we know that he spent his life beneath that sun, the Christ I was presented with was presented to me with blue eyes and blond hair, and all the virtues to which I, as a black man, was expected to aspire had by definition, to be white.’[3] Baldwin has no issue holding in tandem both a Black and Jewish Jesus. It is this Jesus who reveals to us, he says, the fact that ‘no one wants to be a slave’[4] and thus stretches the boundaries of our present condition and pushes the limits of our imaginations. The image of a Black Jesus says to the last, the least and the lost: ‘God is with you’. For Black people to see themselves reflected in Christ is to push the boundaries where Black imagination and White Power meet. The concern of those who in art depict Jesus as Black is less to do with the literal colour of the historical Jesus, rather it is about the symbolism of blackness and what it says about our understanding of God. To call Jesus ‘Black’ then is to position Jesus where he in the Gospels is to be found: amongst the downtrodden. The Gospel is not good news for the rich and powerful who seek to retain their position in the world, and art can be a powerful medium for proclaiming the Gospel of justice and equality. A Black Jesus models for White Christianity the very path it needs to go down – one where it divests of its Whiteness and becomes poor. To the rich and powerful, a betrayed, beaten, crucified and risen Black Jesus offers an invitation which leads to Calvary where all worldly power and might is defeated and overcome with the vulnerability of love.

Jesus heals a paralytic. Dura-Europos. — *Jesus heals a paralytic*. Dura-Europos.

Historically however, anyone looking for a plethora of representations of a Black Jesus from the ancient world will be largely disappointed. One of the oldest depictions of Jesus from Dura-Europos in Syria dates to c.235 AD and is a colourless carving of Jesus performing a healing. The 6th Century AD Eastern Orthodox image of Christ ‘Pantocrator’ at the St Catherine’s Monastery, in Sinai is again anything but ‘Black’. Even more disappointing to those seeking out a historically Black image of Jesus are the many Coptic Orthodox representations of Jesus which are frequently Eurocentric and certainly couldn’t be referred to as ‘Black’ in the way we understand blackness in the modern world. And whilst, as the classicist Frank Snowden has made clear “nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world”[5] we do know that things haven’t always been as they appear now. Much statuary for example in Classical Antiquity was both coloured and gilded rather than created in the pure white marble to which we are so often familiar in our museums today. Both Vitruvius (d. 15 BC) and Pliny[6] (d. 79 AD) record the use of colour by sculptors in Classical Antiquity, yet our imaginations are limited by the presentation of the ancient world which almost seeks to pretend as though diversity did not really exist. Interestingly, many Ethiopian images of Jesus which can certainly be deemed ‘Black’ images of Jesus are not ancient at all and date from only the 16th - 18th century with a few dating to the 12th century but mostly of Saints rather than of Christ, and many are frequently abandoned, undocumented and destroyed. Those who are threatened by the idea that Black images of Jesus are an attempt to eradicate the Jesus of history can rest assured that the notion of Black Jesus is the result of those who have witnessed the accumulation of brutalised, mutilated and snuffed out Black bodies and seek in Christian art to present Jesus as an icon of the Black body which unlike so many, survives the brutality of the Empire. In the words of James Cone, ‘There is no place in black theology for a colourless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color…Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism.’[7]

The limits of our imagination when it comes to Christianity and particularly to Black African contributions to Christian art is revealed in the excitement expressed by Black Christians in seeing Jesus depicted as Black and some of the pushback from White Christians as Caucasian Jesus falls out of popularity. Christianity is an Eastern faith, yet the Western Church and its members remain almost wholly ignorant of the history of Christianity in North Africa, which in Egypt traces its origin to the arrival of the Holy Family fleeing persecution[8] but more concretely to the 1st Century AD at the arrival and martyrdom of St Mark in Alexandria[9]. It is from this African Christianity that early Celtic monasticism derives its character as seen in illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. Coptic influence is seen in the binding, carved panels, animal motifs and the use of lapis lazuli (an azure blue pigmentation) as well as arsenic trisulfide (a yellow pigmentation) serve as signs of not just an Eastern influence, but one that is specifically Egyptian.[10] The high crosses and beehive monastic cells, and even monastic offices extant in Hibernia in Late Antiquity all show signs linking Ireland to the North African Egyptian desert.[11] The recent discovery in Ireland of the Faddan More Psalter found to have elements of papyrus from the 8th century go to further challenge our lack of imagination when thinking about who the artisans of Western Christianity were, and what they may have looked like.

Our history regarding the place of Black lives in the Christian tradition is not yet truthfully told. Christian art is a powerful tool for telling the truth about the past and signalling our aspirations for the future. Anti-blackness even in the realm of art, is spiritual idolatry. To insist that Jesus cannot be Black in a time when Black life continues to suffer under the sin of racism is not only to further the violence of White Supremacy – it is to close our minds to the incarnate God who took on flesh which was not White, and who seeks to transform our limited understandings and enlarge our imaginations. In this time in the life of the Church and the World, Christian art must seek to reflect both the sacred beauty and holy blackness of Christ who is oppressed and suffering alongside and within Black communities. It is not enough for Jesus to be Black, rather he must Black and beautiful. Christian art must tell the truth not only about God, or about the history, but it must tell the truth about those within whom the image of God is still ignored and forgotten.