University Times

Think back to the first image of Jesus you remember seeing, invited San Diego State University faculty member Edward J. Blum in a recent lecture on campus.

Responses from the audience spanned a wide range:

One remembered the iconic 1941 Warner Sallman “Head of Christ,” which Blum said is the single most-reproduced image of Jesus.

Another recalled a similar depiction that hung in her Sunday school classroom: Jesus as a white man with long blond hair.

Yet another remembered his Bible storybook in which the face of Jesus had been covered with a Mister Yuk sticker —“My parents were hyper-Protestant and so they didn’t allow any depictions of God in the house,” he explained.

Another recalled the close-up depiction of the face of the crucified Christ that hung on the wall of her grandparents’ bedroom. In it, Jesus’ eyes appeared to be open or closed, depending on the viewer’s angle.

In his most recent book, “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America,” written in conjunction with University of Colorado professor Paul Harvey, Blum, a historian of race and religion in the United States, examines the ways American images of Christ have been used over time.

“At various historical moments, Americans have deployed bodies of Christ to express their political, economic, social, cultural and religious differences,” Blum said. “The ways Jesus is depicted are expressions of these various positions and differences.”

He pointed out the stark contrast between the present day — in which it is deemed important to portray what Jesus looked like — with America’s early Christian settlers. “New England Puritans were certain that they did not know what Jesus looked like, they did not want to know what Jesus looked like and they would destroy anything — and perhaps anyone — who tried to force them to know what Jesus looked like,” Blum said.

“We in the United States have gone from a nation, in part founded by people who vigorously did not want to display Jesus, to today the most creative-producing people in the world when it comes to producing Jesus imagery,” he said.

“It has a lot to say about how obsessions of the body have grown and grown and grown throughout our history, a history that is born from an extraordinarily important focus on bodies: What bodies can be enslaved; what bodies can be free. What bodies can own property in marriage; what bodies cannot. What bodies can be moved off land in Georgia and what bodies can then occupy it.”

Blum said, “Bodies have come to matter. And as the various forms of technological expression allow us to alter bodies, change bodies, display bodies, it has grown and grown and grown.”

Over time, Americans’ corporate sense of their relationship to the sacred has manifested itself in various depictions of Jesus that were somehow “right” for their time and audience.

When Americans create Jesus from a community level, “Who are we talking about here?” he asked.

Between the 1880s and 1930s, Jesus imagery expressed a sense of frustration that “The old Jesuses we had are not right for us,” Blum said.

He cited the 1925 Bruce Fairchild Barton bestseller, “The Man Nobody Knows,” in which Jesus was portrayed as a modern advertising executive. The book influenced Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 film “King of Kings,” which Blum said sought to portray a shorter-haired, more manly Jesus that would be more appealing to men of that day.

In the 1920s and ’30s, African-American artists became frustrated with their own churches’ imagery of Jesus as white. “During the Harlem renaissance we get a whole production of black Jesus figures, typically set in stories or poems that bring incarnate Jesus here in the United States — not as a businessman but as a black Southerner, who for whatever reasons in the story, always invariably is crucified or lynched,” Blum said.

As Americans in the 1930s became less comfortable with Jesus’ Jewishness — which had not been problematic in the 19th century — an image of a blue-eyed Nordic Christ became popular. Blum said a de-Semiticizing of Jesus coincided with white Americans’ attempts to close immigration doors to Jews in the early 20th century.

In the 1940s, as depicted in “The Grapes of Wrath,” the character Jim Casy represents a working-class image of Jesus, not described as white, but as dusty and gray, a Jesus who “was not pretty, but gritty,” Blum said.

Technology also has played a role in defining how people envision Jesus’ physical appearance.

“Technological abilities and accessibilities, production capacities and social networks also matter,” Blum said. “It’s one thing to be able to produce something; it’s another to be able to distribute it through networks.”

The famed Sallman image, Blum said, was not created by the artist in isolation. “Editors would write on his paintings: ‘Hair too short,’ ‘Hair too long,’ ‘Eyes need to be a little bluer.’ It was corporately done in conversation.”

That image was distributed through evangelical networks, even being printed on pocket-sized cards given to GIs.

Current images range from the Semitic depiction (including blue eyes digitally altered to appear brown) played by Jim Caviezel in the 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ” to the portrayal in the cartoon “South Park” of a small, weak Jesus who takes on the much larger, tougher devil in the boxing ring.

“Today things have changed considerably, but because of the power of the past, it might not have changed perhaps as much as we would like,” Blum said.

For instance, a Google images search on “black Jesus” yields a variety of results ranging from a Rastafarian Jesus to an Africanized version of Sallman’s “Head of Christ.” “Today, you can find black Jesus,” whereas only a few decades ago, such images would have been rare, Blum noted.

A search for Native American versions of Jesus also yields results.

However, a simple image search on “Jesus” yields a variety of more traditional images. “Far and away, black Jesus doesn’t come up,” Blum said.

“Various depictions of Jesus are built into political, economic, legal struggles. They’re contingent upon what kind of access to materials one has, and then how one can produce them and send them around,” Blum said.

“Even today, with our multiculturalism, our massive digital technologies and our ability to get lots of different imagery and images, we’re still tethered to the normative sense that Jesus is somehow, some way white. That concept replicates itself even at an unthinking level,” he said.

“Google isn’t racist. Google is an algorithm,” Blum said.

However, the weight of history has in impact. “Because certain people had technological capabilities, certain people had capital, certain people were determining what laws were, we got the proliferation of white Jesus imagery” to the point that it became normative, he said. “When things then get digitized, when we search, this is the norm.”

The lecture was organized by the Department of Religious Studies, and co-sponsored by the Center on Race and Social Problems, Graduate Studies Office, Humanities Center and University Honors College, and the Departments of Anthropology, History and Sociology.

—Kimberly K. Barlow