MAIN QUESTION 1: Why is Jesus portrayed as a white man in western civilization?
RHETORICAL YET 'FEEL FREE TO ANSWER' A FOLLOW UP QUESTION 2: Isn't a blatant misrepresentation of the figure of Christ wrong?
I've had people tell me that "We are all made in God's own image" and therefore Jesus can be any color.
RHETORICAL AND COMPLETELY OPTIONAL FINAL AND RELEVANT QUESTION TO QUESTIONS 1 AND 2 - QUESTION 3: Then in that case, can Jesus be female?
This is just an idea, but it sounds plausible: People in western civilization are white; they imagine Jesus as being like themselves (or more probably, like the community they live in). I suspect that if westerners didn't influence some other (ethnically different) people's visual conception of Jesus, they would imagine him as "normal," which to them would mean that he looks similar to the other people in the community.
If you knew what he looked like and "drew" him a different way, that might be wrong, but it would probably depend on your motives. If you don't know what he looks like, then no matter what, you'll probably draw him incorrectly, but whether it's right or wrong depends on your motives. To call an inaccurate drawing a "blatant misrepresentation" suggests (to me, based on how that phrase is often used) that the artist is attempting to deceive the audience. That is a function of the artist's motives, not the work itself.
Here are some questions I ask myself when I consider such a thing:
Discerning something about the artist's motives would lead me to conclude one way or another about the moral value of the work.
Because we know for certain that Jesus was male, it would be a deliberate (though not necessarily malicious) misrepresentation of the facts to portray him as otherwise. I don't know if I could say that this is morally wrong, but in most cases, I would be leery of doing so. There's enough "based on a true story" fiction around that I'd prefer not to fudge known facts for the sake of making a political statement.
Why was Jesus male? That might be a useful question to answer, but it doesn't change the fact that he definitely was a male.
God is neither male nor female. He is whole. Humans are not "whole" in this sense. God has made us "half," for whatever his reasons are. I don't think he prefers any gender over the other. Jesus was born a man, but that doesn't need to be a slight to women.
Historically speaking during the Roman empire, Rome itself was the center of the world, but by virtue of governmental rule and also after Constantine. Artists who depicted Jesus likely did so according to the norms of their societies. Once the pattern was established, it seems to have carried throughout the centuries that have followed. So, why is Jesus depicted as white? Probably because Roman artists originally depicted Him that way.
Was Jesus white? Well, He certainly was not Anglo-Saxon, if that is what we are asking? Jesus was Jewish in a middle-eastern civilization, and it is of extreme significance that He was so. Prophetically speaking, He had to be of Abraham's and David's seed. As such, His skin color was perhaps a bit darker than that of Europeans and lighter than that of Africans. Jesus was most definitely not American or British or German.
So, is it wrong that Jesus is often depicted as an Anglo-Saxon in Western civilization? Of course it is, if we are asking whether or not it is accurate. Whether or not it is morally wrong is another issue altogether.
It should be noted that the 2nd commandment (or 1st for the Catholics) specifies the prohibition of making images to look like God (or man or beast) as objects of worship. Thus, any depiction of Jesus should at least be questioned to some degree.
Again, Jesus was Jewish and had to be so. His ethnicity in the flesh, however, is in no way a slight to any other ethnicity, as from the very beginning throughout the entirety of Scripture, God loved the entire world.
