Painting or icon? That big hole in New York Times report on Catholic University controversy

Let’s start here: There is nothing new about artists painting images of Jesus as a Black man.

A few of these images may have been controversial at the time of their creation, in part because of the political motivations of some (repeat “some”) artists. But the vast majority are clearly works of Christian devotion showing reverence for the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. For many Christians, these images are way less problematic than the omnipresent Warner Sallman “Head of Christ” painting from 1940, depicting Jesus with light, wavy hair and very European features.

As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, the image of Jesus that I know best is the ancient Christ Pantocrator icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai. It is a complex icon of Jesus that, well, would be hard to label as one of the “surfer Jesus” images in some contemporary churches.

This brings me to that New York Times story that ran the other day with this dramatic double-decker headline:

A Painting of George Floyd Roils Catholic University
At the Catholic University of America in Washington, conservative students called for a campus ban on further displays of an artwork that depicts Floyd as Jesus.

This story does a pretty good job of describing the timeline of this controversy — which is described as yet another clash over race, art and religion. It’s clear that, for the leaders of private schools, controversies of this kind are especially complex.

The problem, for me, is that the image in question — “Mama,” by Kelly Latimore — is consistently described as a painting based on the famous Pieta statue by Michelangelo.

Thus, what we have here is a “painting,” based on one of the most famous statues in Western Christian art, but is clearly meant to be interpreted as a holy icon in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Did you follow that? The journalism question here is whether the Times team did an adequate job of describing why the term “icon” — which does not appear in the story — is so important, if the goal is to understand the thinking of some of the Catholics (the story contains zero input from the Orthodox) who believe that this painting is blasphemous. Here is the overture:

THE QUESTION:

Was Jesus white?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No.

But in these racially anxious times for America, there’s more to be said.

In a biblical dream-vision, presumably not meant to be taken literally in racial terms (Revelation 1:15), the feet of the triumphal Jesus Christ are bronze in color. In terms of actual 1st Century history, it makes the most sense to think that Jesus was neither north European white nor African black. As a man of the Mideast, he’d presumably have had a light brown or olive complexion like today’s Arabs or Sephardic Jews, with a good tan from all those outdoor travels.

Megyn Kelly assured Fox News viewers in 2013 of the “verifiable fact” that “Jesus was a white man.” In recent days, similar racial uproar was generated by Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King. After tweeting that memorials to “despicable” slaveowners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson must come down, he added obliteration of statues of “the white European they claim is Jesus,” seen as “a form of white supremacy.” A further tweet extended the ban to such “racist propaganda” in murals and stained glass of Jesus.

King did not specify that paintings should likewise be removed from display or destroyed, though that seems an obvious implication. Such iconoclasm would denude the world’s museums of countless masterpieces. In one example, so treasured is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Savior of the World” portrait of a Caucasian-looking Jesus that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia paid $450 million for it in 2017.

Moving to popular art, should we still watch those movies and TV productions where Jesus looks Caucasian, and more Gentile than Jewish? On that score, Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) gave Jesus a modest prosthetic nose and colorized the actor’s eyes to darken them.