Insight with Bishop Osei-Bonsu : What did Jesus really look like?

Question By Joseph Appiah Kubi (Joeken), Hamburg, Germany:

My Lord, is it true that Our Lord Jesus Christ was black, and that it was only in 1490 that pictures of him as a white European emerged?

Answer By Most Rev. Joseph Osei-Bonsu:

The claim that Jesus was black, and that Europeans began to portray him as white only around 1490, contains a reasonable point and some historical errors. It is fair to say that the fair-skinned European image of Jesus should not be treated as an exact historical portrait. It is not correct, however, to say that Jesus was black in the modern racial sense, nor that European artists began portraying him as white only around 1490.

1. What The Historical Jesus Probably Looked Like

The New Testament gives no physical description of Jesus, and no portrait or authenticated likeness from his lifetime survives. What history, archaeology and forensic reconstruction can tell us is that he was a first-century Jewish man from Galilee and Judea, living in the eastern Mediterranean world.

The reconstruction linked to the forensic artist Richard Neave, together with the scholarship of Joan Taylor, points to a broadly similar picture: olive-brown skin, dark eyes, short, dark and probably curly hair, and a height of about five feet five inches. Neave’s work, however, portrays a typical Semitic man of the period, built on a first-century skull, and not Jesus himself. By modern racial categories, such a man would most likely be seen as Middle Eastern, rather than northern European or sub-Saharan African.

The claim that Jesus was black is therefore imprecise. Where “black” is used loosely to mean “not white”, or “dark-skinned Middle Eastern”, it points to a real correction. Where it is meant to describe a sub-Saharan African appearance, the available evidence does not support it as a historical reconstruction.

Some have proposed Cushite ancestry in his genealogy. Cush was an ancient kingdom south of Egypt, in what is now northern Sudan, and the Old Testament uses “Cushite” of its people, whom it presents as dark-skinned Africans. Tamar and Rahab, both named in Matthew’s genealogy, are sometimes linked to Cushite or wider African ancestry on this basis.

The proposal remains speculative. The genealogies give no physical descriptions, the text does not identify either woman as Cushite, and Rahab is explicitly a woman of Jericho. The identification therefore rests on inference rather than testimony.

More generally, the assignment of modern racial categories to biblical figures has rested more on cultural assumption, ethnocentrism and later political concern than on first-century evidence. Afrocentric and Black liberation theologies may carry real cultural and theological significance, but they should not be presented as straightforward historical reconstruction.

The verses most often cited in support of a black Jesus are Revelation 1:14–15, which speak of hair “like wool” and feet “like bronze glowing in a furnace”. The text in fact says his head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow. The passage belongs to apocalyptic visionary literature and draws on the symbolic imagery of Daniel 7 and 10. It describes the risen and glorified Christ symbolically, and it is not a physical description of Jesus of Nazareth or biographical evidence.

2. When Did European-Looking Depictions First Appear? Not In 1490

The date 1490 has no real historical anchor. Art historians are clear that European-looking depictions of Jesus did not begin then. The earliest surviving Christian images date from the third and fourth centuries. They appear in the Roman catacombs, such as those of Callixtus and Domitilla, and in the house church at Dura-Europos in Syria (c. 235). These images follow Graeco-Roman convention. Jesus is typically shown beardless, with short curly hair, drawing on the imagery of Apollo or the Roman shepherd. He wears Graeco-Roman dress and has Mediterranean features.

By the sixth century, the Pantokrator image of Christ had become well established in the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. The word Pantokrator is Greek for “Almighty” or “Ruler of All” and is a title used for Christ, especially in Christian art and worship. The Pantokrator type usually portrays Christ with a long face, dark hair parted in the middle, a beard, and a complexion ranging from fair to olive.

One of the best-known early examples is the sixth-century icon of Christ at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. An even earlier example is the mosaic of Christ in the Church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, generally dated to about 400–410. By the sixth century, this representation had become a well-established feature of Byzantine Christian art, and a similar image of Christ even appeared on the coinage of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II in the 690s.

In medieval Europe, Romanesque and Gothic art generally portrayed a light-skinned Christ with local European features, centuries before 1490. What occurred between about 1490 and 1600 was an intensification and wider dissemination of this image, not its introduction. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1495–98) and Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (1536–41) are well-known examples. They reinforced the pale, idealised Christ in the Western imagination, but they built on centuries of prior convention.

The twentieth century added further layers. Mass-produced images such as Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1940) carried a fair-featured Christ into millions of homes, especially in North America. In Germany during the same decades, Nazi-aligned theologians promoted an “Aryan” Jesus as a deliberate racial ideology.

The story often repeated online, that Pope Alexander VI instructed Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo to model Christ’s face on his son, Cesare Borgia, has no contemporary documentation. It circulates in popular and online sources, not in Vatican records or the biographies of the artists concerned. The figure of 1490 appears to be a popularised and imprecise shorthand. It may be a distorted reference to a particular Renaissance painting, or to the so-called Letter of Publius Lentulus, a forged description of Christ’s appearance, purportedly by a Roman official, that circulated in the late Middle Ages.

If anything, 1490 is notable for the opposite reason. It falls in the years of the Portuguese voyages along the West African coast and of Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas (1492), when Europeans were carrying their inherited image of Christ into Africa and the Americas. The fair-skinned Jesus became globally dominant through empire and missionary activity from this period onward, but it was not invented then. The claim under discussion appears to conflate the global spread of the European Jesus with its supposed invention.

One better-attested claim is worth noting. According to the art historian Virginia Raguin, a stained-glass window donated in 1877 to a church in Warren, Rhode Island, is the earliest known stained-glass depiction of Jesus as dark-skinned. This is a very different claim from the “1490” one in circulation. It suggests that the white Christ long preceded any such image in Western stained glass, though it says nothing about the many Black Christs and Madonnas of other traditions.

3. Why Depictions Vary: The Principle Of Inculturation

Across two millennia, a wide range of depictions of Christ has appeared, shaped by cultural setting, political circumstance and theological context. Christian art has generally followed a pattern of inculturation, in which each culture depicts Christ within its own demographic and visual world. The Ethiopian tradition has long painted a brown or black Christ.

The Coptic, Indian and East Asian traditions have depicted him in local form, as have Latin American and Ghanaian art, while Western Europe painted a light-skinned Christ. This is the ordinary pattern of faith finding expression through local cultural form. It does not depend on any single point of invention or forgery.

At the same time, the fair-skinned European Jesus has often served as an instrument of cultural dominance, reinforcing racial hierarchy and associating divinity with whiteness. Black liberation theology and related movements have sought to reclaim a dark-skinned Christ as a corrective to centuries of such distortion.

4. A Note For Pastoral And Catechetical Use

Where this question is addressed in a homily, pastoral letter or catechetical piece, the historically and theologically defensible line is as follows. Jesus was a Jew of first-century Galilee and Judea, and his appearance would have been that of a man of that time and place, not that of a European. The fair-skinned European Christ of much Western art is an inculturated artistic convention, not a historical record.

Every culture’s image of Christ, whether Ethiopian, Byzantine, Latin American or Ghanaian, testifies that the Incarnation, though it took place in one Jewish man at one time and place, is for every people. There is no need to assert a specific and doubtful date such as 1490 as established fact.

The underlying question is more complex than a verdict that white-painted statues in African Catholic churches are simply mistaken, or that Jesus was black. It requires an understanding of how art, culture and faith have interacted across the centuries.

Conclusion

The more accurate statement is this: Jesus was probably a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jewish man, while the familiar European image of Jesus was shaped over centuries by Christian art, particularly in Europe, and was exported globally from about the fifteenth century onward through colonialism and missionary activity.

The claim under review is partly right in rejecting a white European historical Jesus, but wrong in asserting that Jesus was certainly black, or that European depictions began only in 1490. The substantive question today concerns less the exact shade of Christ’s skin than the way depictions of him have been used to shape cultural and racial narratives.