Think for a moment of the rather dashing Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. In most of these churches, Jesus will be depicted as a white man, a guy that looks like Anglo-Australians, a guy easy for other Anglo-Australians to identify with. On Good Friday, Christians attend churches to worship Jesus and, in particular, remember his death on a cross. This is not controversial from a scholarly point of view, but somehow it is a forgotten detail for many of the millions of Christians who will gather to celebrate Easter this week. But while there is no physical description of him in the Bible, there is also no doubt that the historical Jesus, the man who was executed by the Roman State in the first century CE, was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you’ve ever entered a Western church or visited an art gallery. He is also light-haired, blue-eyed, and very white. In this picture, Jesus looks kind and gentle, he gazes down at me lovingly. It is schmaltzy and rather tacky in that 1970s kind of way, but as a little girl I loved it. I grew up in a Christian home, where a photo of Jesus hung on my bedroom wall.
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