Stained glass window shows Jesus Christ with dark skin, stirring questions about race in New England

[Jilly_in_VA]

A nearly 150-year-old stained-glass church window that depicts a dark-skinned Jesus Christ interacting with women in New Testament scenes has stirred up questions about race, Rhode Island’s role in the slave trade and the place of women in 19th century New England society.

The window installed at the long-closed St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Warren in 1878 is the oldest known public example of stained glass on which Christ is depicted as a person of color that one expert has seen.

“This window is unique and highly unusual,” said Virginia Raguin, a professor of humanities emerita at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and an expert on the history of stained-glass art. “I have never seen this iconography for that time.”

The 12-foot tall, 5-foot wide (3.7 meters by 1.5 meters) window depicts two biblical passages in which women, also painted with dark skin, appear as equals to Christ. One shows Christ in conversation with Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, from the Gospel of Luke. The other shows Christ speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well from the Gospel of John.

https://apnews.com/article/jesus-christ-stained-glass-dark-skinned-49c3d84ab5a939beba621bc1ae54eda0

Icons in Orthodox churches, from Coptic to Russian, all depict Jesus with dark toned skin, as any Middle Eastern man would have. And so?

[viva la]

1. Well, as has been pointed out about "Black Cleopatra"--

the skin color of people in the Middle East and North Africa is closer to "dark" than "light."

The Scandinavian Jesus of the last millennium was the real travesty.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

2. And so...early American whites well knew Jesus was a brown man...The whitewashing of the new

brand of colonial Christian had to precede sending ships towards Africa and the Middle East…for slaves who definitely not same color as Jesus!

[keithbvadu2]

3. Ben Carson's Jesus - not the evangelicals' blond, blue-eyed Jesus

[msongs]

4. every culture creates its gods in the image of that culture. white culture, white jesus. black

culture, black jesus. scandinavian jesus is possible but less likely, just as sub saharan black jesus is possible but less likely. considering the jesus character is a myth the racial identity is probably somewhere in the middle of the two extremes statistically speaking

[dlk]

5. How would a middle eastern Jew be white?

Seriously?

[Probatim]

6. Cleveland Jesus - that's what my uncle calls the "model" white Jesus of the US.

Looks like any white guy off the street in middle America.

[Jilly_in_VA]

7. If Jesus came to Cleveland

(or Detroit, or most any big city in the US) he'd most likely be Black nowadays. Just saying. I mean, since he was among the poor and a tradesman. Or maybe he'd be Latino. In any case, not blonde and blue-eyed.