Was Jesus a man of color? Why this question matters more than ever

The debate over the color of Jesus’ skin is one of the oldest running arguments in religion. But this Easter, the question is a serious one — for several reasons.

Christena Cleveland spent much of her childhood in an evangelical church surrounded by traditional images of a porcelain-skinned and flaxen-haired Jesus. But one day she came across a portrayal of Christ that was so astonishing that she gasped. It was a painting of a resurrected Jesus surrounded by his awe-struck disciples, including “Doubting Thomas” touching the wound in Christ’s torso. The painting looked like an ancient relic discovered in some long-forgotten desert monastery in the Holy Land, a Byzantine-styled fresco filled with sharply contoured figures, bursting with colors of deep blue and blood orange. But it was another color in the picture that caught her eye. Jesus was depicted as a man of color — somewhere between brown and Black — and so were his disciples. Cleveland, who would go on to become a theologian and social psychologist, realized she had always pictured a Nordic-looking Jesus who looked like Thor. Now she realized that he looked more like her, a Black woman. For Cleveland, changing the color of Jesus changed how she viewed the meaning of Easter. “When I see the Easter story, I see Jesus being a victim of state-sanctioned violence. I see Jesus surrounded by Black and brown people who wish they could do something, but had no power in the moment,” says Cleveland, author of “God Is a Black Woman.” “And I see people being victims of a system that can’t see their full humanity and assumes the worst of them. And yet there’s hope in the end,” she says. “The universe does bend toward justice, even though the arc is long.”