The owner of the nation’s oldest depiction of Jesus Christ as a person of color in stained glass is currently searching for a cultural institution that can not only preserve the window but showcase it publicly to the world for religious and academic study.
The 12-foot tall, 5-foot-wide window has prompted a new conversation about race and gender in the 19th century in academia, according to The Associated Press.
While scholars agree that the almost 150-year-old iconography does portray a person with intentionally dark skin, they wonder if the person who commissioned the piece was making a political statement about the two women listed in the work’s credits.
Chief among the questions was if the window, initially installed in the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, a Greek Revival worship body in Warren, Rhode Island, in 1878, was loose commentary or critique of the way America saw the Black or brown person at the time.
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“It was a statement that Jesus is the color of the Jesus in your heart, all around the world,” 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, told AP. “If Jesus is my brother and I am Black, Jesus is Black.”
The biblical Jesus would have been a first-century Palestinian Jew, a man of color.
A metaphoric reference to Jesus as the Son of Man in Revelations 1:14-15 states that he has “feet of burnt brass” and “wooly hair.” Many use this quote to connote race, supporting the idea that a historical representation of Jesus is darker than the Eurocentric depiction of him.
The stained glass image seems to debunk the long history of Jesus having soft brown hair, blue eyes and the racial hierarchy that image represents. It also aligns with what most scholars believe to be fact: Jesus would have had dark hair, dark eyes, and…
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