Why is Jesus White?

Despite being Jewish, Jesus is typically depicted as Caucasian.

Understandably this confuses people. Whilst this depiction of Jesus is popularly thought to be modelled on Cesare Borgia, this could only happen in the first place because Christianity was (and is) a missionary religion.

(Jesus had been shown as white long before Cesare Borgia was alive. Hence people using Cesare Borgia as the sole reason for white Jesus is faulty to the extreme.)

Missionary religions (including Buddhism, Islam and the Hare Krishna Movement of Hinduism) seek to spread their religious beliefs to other ethnic groups aside from their own.

Humans are social creatures that make bonds based on similarities of identity, from shared interests to shared ethnicity. People will then start to depict important religious figures as their own ethnicity to heighten the shared identity. It helps indigenise the religion to the ethnic group. It’s a process I call ‘ethnic shift’.***

For example, in regards to ethnic physiological features, fashions and hairstyles, statues of the Buddha look Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan and Greek in Gandhara, (the area in Afghanistan where Greeks settled after Alexander the Great’s failed conquest of India). This is true even though Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was ethnically Nepalese.

Depictions of Jesus have undergone the same process.

            Aboriginal Australian and Native American Christians depict Jesus as their own ethnic groups. Jesus is considered, after all, God become Man: if Jesus looks like you then God looks like you. God is no longer ‘foreign’.

White people did the same. As Caucasian men dominated the world and most forms of Christianity, Jesus will ultimately always be depicted as white to a western audience.

This had led Christians to antagonise Jewish and Arab people as the other, to abuse them and to use them as a scapegoat. This brings up the question: should depictions of Jesus have an ethnic shift back to His true Jewish ethnicity?

***

Anthropic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are forbidden in Islam so this process couldn’t happen.

There are photographs of the people Hare Krishnas venerate so for them to undergo an ethnic shift would be odd.

In Hinduism, there are strict rules for how a deity should be depicted and murtis are only worthy (and able to host their deity) if these requirements are met: for Krishna to become a white Caucasian instead of blue and from Mathura would be unthinkable.