Finding Jesus in Historic Iconography

Every so often, topics on social media generate honest debate surrounding historical narratives, events, and myths, producing intrigue and controversy. A recent Facebook thread presented a common trope regarding race and the historical phenotype of Jesus of Nazareth.

The FB discussion attracted commenters from different parts of the world. One of the contributors, Amàr Mbeŋ, a world-class athlete from a Central African nation, explained that he’d learned with surprise that many Eastern Europeans, including his own mother-in-law who is Ukrainian, are accustomed to religious iconography depicting a Black crucifix and a Black Madonna as common place in their worship. His wife explained that the issue of the color of Jesus was never of paramount importance. Well-travelled and a cosmopolite, Mr. Mben was led to deduce that the fixation of many Western, and particularly American, White people on a White Jesus are historically and culturally and normatively established in Western Europe and America as sacrosanct. Yet many of the earliest depictions of Madonna and Child and Jesus on the cross come from early Egyptian Coptic Christianity.

In December 1995 I visited Russia with a group of American writers assigned to report on life in Russia after the breakup of the USSR. The project was, in part, conceived by the Presbyterian Church of America.

Once a behemoth of a nation, the USSR had been infamously disparaged as the “Evil Empire” by US President Ronald Reagan during the height of the Cold War. Yet despite Communist rule for nearly eight decades, the Christian faith, through the Underground Church, managed to survive and sustain its faith traditions as anathema to the official atheistic policies of the Communist state. The personal risk and sacrifice endured by these courageous believers, determined to sustain their faith community, is a story of valor, imprisonment, death, and alienation that shatters any political trope of Russian people as sycophants of a godless nation.

This period in post-Soviet Russia, known as Glasnost and Perestroika, included policies that encouraged greater openness in the new Russia. Central to our mission was our effort to learn about how the Russian underground church survived during decades of Soviet suppression of Christianity and the State policy espousing atheism. The Russian Orthodox Church was allowed to exist marginally with only nominal influence while evangelical gatherings of worship were forced to gather in clandestine settings, warehouses, homes, abandoned farm barns, and caverns on the outskirts of cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Many devout followers of Christianity were imprisoned or killed. Some were released from prison after Mikhail Gorbachev became president of Russia. One of our group’s outings was an early-dawn trek to a forest located 40 kilometers outside Moscow. Led by one of the trusted Muscovite church elders, we walked nearly a kilometer deep into the woods with flashlights. We arrived at a bunker covered by shrubbery and brush. Our Russian hosts cleared the foliage and assisted one another in unlocking the solidly built double doors that led into a steep stairwell to a cavern that barely accommodated the two dozen or so human beings who had walked lockstep in the wee hours of the Russian night to assemble for up to eight hours of worship and songs of praise.

We had entered a church replete with altar and communion artifacts, but without pews or seating. Visibly displayed on the altar was an object that I could not take my eyes off of: a crucifix hewn in ebony black as coal. The figure on the cross was a muscular, compact figure of a man with a loin cloth or shroud wrapped at waist level. His body, black and taut with facial features revealing a full-lipped mouth and a nose most typically represented as an African phenotype. The man’s hair was short-cropped and simulating curls rather than locks, not shoulder-length as it appears in the iconic, ubiquitous images of Jesus commonly adopted by the West since the 18th century.

We were told by the officiant that the crucifix image was that of Jesus the Christ and it had been taken from the Church of the Sepulcher by occupying Russian soldiers engaged in the Mid-eastern theater of the remaining days during WW II and brought to Russia, representing one of the oldest religious artifacts of its kind. Our Russian church hosts seemed very matter-of-fact about the matter. Yet, as the only African descendant and African American among the group experiencing this visit to this cite that possessed one of the oldest known remnants of early Christian iconography, I felt stunned, and could barely contain my sense of awe.

I shall never forget the reactions to this shared experience of my White American colleagues tasked with reporting on Christianity after communism in post-Soviet Russia – reactions that I oddly felt as alienation and intellectual detachment. There were six of us; four white females and a white male project photographer. During our return trip to Moscow, I remarked about the amazing experience we’d all witnessed. There was no response from a single member of our entourage of reporters. I knew that the depth of recognition that I felt in encountering Jesus there on that altar transcended race, phenotype, class, and nation.