The Black Body of Christ?
The new Archbishop of York says Jesus was black. Is this progress?
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The enthronement of a new archbishop of York this summer passed without the attention it might have once garnered. Stephen Cottrell knocked tepidly on York Minster’s door with his staff, in compliance with tradition, but from the inside, in compliance with COVID-19 guidelines. Outside, meanwhile, an orgy of enthusiastic self-denunciation, spurred by Black Lives Matter, was breaking out among global institutions.
Ascending to the archbishop’s seat at a moment of moral reckoning, and not willing to see his Church outdone in the guilt stakes, Cottrell put out an intriguing statement. Reaching beyond the boilerplate indictment of the Church of England as “too white,” he further claimed that “Jesus was a black man” — in contrast to which the Church’s whiteness just wouldn’t do.
By any straightforward interpretation of its terms his claim was flatly false. But that’s not what was interesting about it. That Jesus, the man from Galilee, was black, is a meme growing in currency and trendiness. Where does it come from and why does it appeal even to those, like Archbishop Cottrell, for whom one would expect Jesus to be a specialist subject?
A feature of our postmodern intellectual world is that a statement’s function matters far more than its veracity. Simply stating that a claim is false, and that we should prefer truth, is inadequate. A threatening subtextual question lurks beneath the discourse: Why not let falsehoods slide, if they serve the right purpose? Why do you care what is true?
In this frame, “white Jesus” is basically a valuable cultural symbol to be offered up in reparation for sin. This time around the paschal lamb is sacrificed not for all mankind but to atone for Christian Europe’s abuse and exploitation of black Africa.
The tribal logic is ancient and powerful. Jesus’s transference from one group to the other is a sort of diplomatic gift-giving, a means to demonstrate remorse and rebuild friendship. In the Middle East, Islam introduced diya payments for exactly this purpose, defusing potentially intractable blood feuds. From now on, the unstated logic goes, white people should affirm Jesus’s blackness to prove to black people that they value and respect them.
Besides the obvious racist condescension involved, there are two big problems here. First, the implications for Europe, and second, the implications for Jesus’s own homeland.
To adopt this idea would not simply be to distort history, but to participate in a terrible slander against Western culture. Why? Because our societies have indeed presented Jesus as white, and not just owing to unthinking artistic convention — like the historically incongruous fashion-sense on display in many a Renaissance painting — but to a then-uncontroversial assumption about the real man’s appearance.
And so, if he was in fact black, they are guilty of propagating a petty, self-aggrandizing, racist lie. And not just any lie, but one that touches on the very core of what Europe has been. The image its people have loved and prayed towards, the personhood around whom they have sought to build their being.
Europe was, according to this narrative, so bigoted and narrow-minded that it could not bear to present God incarnate in any image but its own, thus perverting his message of universal salvation and the oneness of humanity. The real effect of this idea, then, is to demoralize and discredit European society as foundationally racist. Your treasured icon was just a tool of oppression all along.
Furthermore, “black Jesus” erases the real history of the Levant, making it a mere plaything in the games of others.
As the ever-combative Nassim Nicholas Taleb once reminded Mary Beard in a testy online confrontation, the Mediterranean is a single zone, Europe being a mere extension of West Eurasia, no matter how much it may like to distinguish itself as the special, separate repository of “Western civilization.” Today it is in the intersectional left’s insistent identification of “whiteness” with Europe — and Europe alone — that echoes of the old racial chauvinism can be heard the loudest.
Far from being “white-washed,” the people of the Near East are instead subject to racial caricaturing that exaggerates their physical difference from Europeans, who after all live but a short distance across the water. Traveling in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, the everyday faces one passes on the street are often indistinguishable from those one might meet in a biblical scene by Caravaggio or Titian.
Indeed, when immigrants from the region first sought entry to the United States, many of them were eager to be classified as “white” — given the harsh racial hierarchy then in place. Today cultural incentives have shifted, and many Levantines abroad welcome Person of Color status as a fashionable alternative, demonstrating the plasticity of such race categories and our mistake in placing confidence in them.
Far from denying it, mainstream European culture for the last millennium and more knew full-well that Jesus was born and died a Jew in Judea. By contrast, our modern, information-rich society assumes, in its arrogance, the ignorance of the past, when it is itself strangely ignorant.
Europe’s demonization of Jews as a people long predated its attempts at racial differentiation. And when those began in early modernity, it was not on the basis of the “black”/”white” dichotomy.
But today’s paradigm of race in the United States is being universalized across time and place, flattening all before it.
The racial thinking unwittingly embraced by Archbishop Cottrell — in many ways a uniquely 2020 American sort of thinking — doesn’t map well onto the times and lands to which it is being applied. It is only within that warped paradigm that rewriting Christianity’s foundational history, extracting it from the messy complexity of reality to an imagined land of racial binary, makes sense.
Already Nation of Islam and pan-Africanist conspiracy theories casting modern Levantines as interlopers have penetrated popular thinking to an arresting extent. Above all, these ideologies target Jews (in Israel and the diaspora) for delegitimization, mounting a hostile appropriation of Jewish history.
Extremists linked to the Black Hebrew Israelite group have harassed and assaulted Jews from London to New York. Their revisionist claims line up with all the popular tropes of antisemitic slander: Jews as alien, fake, deceitful, greedy, and cruel.
Such wacky ideas aren’t confined to dingy online spaces, but spill out onto the street. Haredi families, especially, have found themselves taunted by assailants on public transport, in shops and hospitals, who accuse them of being “Khazars” — a confused reference to the medieval Turkic people whose elite converted to Judaism — and thus not “real” Jews. And so, far from paying respect to Jesus’s true origins, the archbishop’s “black Jesus” narrative plays straight into the hands of some of the very worst antisemitic ideologues active today.
Announcing Jesus was black helps black Christians as much as announcing he is white harms them — not at all. Perhaps more importantly, it makes a cheap and baseless point that does nothing real for “social justice.” And the archbishop’s baseless revelation does little justice to anything we know about the historical Jesus, the history of artistic representations of Jesus, or Jesus’s real significance as the object of Christian worship.
