Bible Question: We know that Jesus our Lord was not white in complexion, why then do we portray Him as being white with blue eyes and blond hair? Where did this brain-washing started? |
Bible Answer: Hi, wesharal... Welcome to the forum! There is a kind of brainwashing today that looks back through time and interprets everything that people did as brainwashing. People do not automatically choose how to portray others pictographaically based on some kind of racial prejudice. Pictures, in particular, tend to be stylized based on practices given rise to the culture in question. The Egyptians, for example, tended to paint themselves a copper color, slaves a black color, Cannanites a yellow color, etc. It would have been absurd to them to paint the Pharaoh yellow -- regardless of his actual skin color -- yellow was the color of servants. Other cultures, interested in greater realism, would paint people the color of those around them. Go back and look at the ancient paintings of Alexander the Great, for example. After all, which of those painters had actually seen Alexander? Medieval art was highly stylized, too. The painter was communicating to his own culture in ways that would portray a story. To my understanding, realism as an art form came out of the Renaissance, a cultural movement boosted into existence by the Reformation. Only then did the question of what people actually looked like come to be asked. Then it became a matter of what they actually knew about the past. Again, most of them assumed that things were pretty much like the world they saw before their eyes. In Him, Doc |
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Questions and/or Subjects for Bible general Archive 4 | Author | ||
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myseaton | ||
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johnrg | ||
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TFW@PWH | ||
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Godsglory | ||
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wendyb | ||
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ReaditBelieveit | ||
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aworth35 | ||
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wesharal@hotmail.com | ||
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DocTrinsograce | ||
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Tanka | ||
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kuni |