When I was a kid I didn’t like Jesus.
I was baptized as an infant and brought to church every Sunday, and I didn’t doubt the existence of God, God was a fact, as were Heaven and Hell, and I feared all three: God who was always watching, Hell for the obvious reasons, and Heaven because I imagined it to be a Lutheran church service that had no end. I’d sat through grown-up church, had watched the adults stand and sit, had heard the organ thunder, and I’d come to believe that what God demanded was absolute obedience—no mistakes, not ever—and that Jesus, like a heat shield, was the only thing standing between me and God’s wrath.

Jesus I was leery of. In Sunday School, we sang “red and yellow, black and white, we are precious in his sight,” but I didn’t buy it. Behind that smiling cartoon face on the flannel board, Jesus was harboring some serious ­passive-aggressive tendencies. He was coming again to judge the living and the dead, and his forgiveness was conditional: Jesus really only liked nice people. Doodling on the back of the bulletin during church was okay, but spreading out a pack of cards and playing solitaire on the pew (I quickly learned) was a good way to get on Jesus’ bad side. What Jesus liked were wholesome-looking children of assorted skin tones and baby lambs that he could cuddle. He was not an anything-goes sort of guy, and he looked just like Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ.

What I know now is that he would have looked like what he was: a working-class Jew from ­first-century Palestine. That he was not immediately recognizable to his captors—that Judas had to identify him with a kiss—tells us he was, at least in the minds of the Gospel writers, an average-looking guy. He had dark skin and curly hair, and drawings from the first-century suggest he would have kept his hair cut short. The average height of a Jewish man in his day was only 5’1”, but it is not hard to imagine that he would have been broad-shouldered and strong; he was working class, the son of a carpenter or stonemason if we accept what Matthew tells us. He addressed crowds of thousands long before the invention of the microphone, and according to Mark he spoke with more authority than the established religious leaders of his day. According to the Gospel of John, he drove the moneychangers from the temple with a whip. He was not a soft-skinned weakling; he was executed as an enemy of the state. He was dangerous. He was also probably dirty and tattered and more than a little scraggly, as he walked almost everywhere. His weather-beaten face would have made him look older than his years, but I imagine he had a good smile. The Gospels make it clear that he was hugely popular, especially at parties, and that he was not against a little bit of wine. He had compassion and patience, and he liked people, especially the down-and-out and unimportant. He gave priority to children in a culture that routinely practiced infanticide, and he did not smite his disciples when they bickered with each other. According to Luke, as he was dying on the cross, he cried out, “Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” He would have looked nothing like the anemic, effeminate figure we find in much of Western art. As my friend Corinne once put it, “He probably looked a lot like Bin Laden.”

It did not occur to me that Jesus was not a white guy until I was a sophomore in college. I was doing research for a paper on the Gospels, standing in the stacks at the library flipping through the second volume of J. P. Meier’s Marginal Jew: Rethinking The Historical Jesus when I noticed that the Jesus on the dust jacket was a Semitic man whom I’d at first mistaken for Moses. In the moment this epiphany felt deceptively small—of course Jesus wasn’t a white guy!—and it wasn’t until I returned to the Gospels to read them not with the critical eye of a religion major but with the devotion of a believer that I felt the full force of this discovery. The problem was—and remains—this: When I try to immerse myself in the stories of the Gospels, to really absorb them, it is all too often the petty white Warner Sallman Jesus of my childhood whom I see healing the leper, teaching the disciples, crossing the surface of the sea. No matter how carefully I piece together the kind, scruffy person I know he must have been, that image is always shattered and it starts with his skin. I want to see it copper brown, the way it surely must have been, but that image is exploded with white, not just Caucasian white, but a fluorescent white that I’m sure would have made Jesus stand out to his captors on the night of his arrest.

Warner Sallman’s famous 1940 oil painting The Head of Christ has been reproduced over half a billion times, on plaques, bookmarks, church bulletins, funeral cards, Christmas cards, calendars, buttons, coffee mugs, stickers, billboards, key chains, and, in the 1950s, on glowing “Inspira-Clocks” and “Inspira-Lamps” (Grimes 1994; Prothero 2003, 116). A copy hung in my grandmother’s apartment, and I saw it after church every Sunday.

The painting’s first printing in 1941 produced a hundred thousand copies that sold out in two months. By the end of the year over a million copies had been purchased, and the following year sales tripled (Prothero, 117). Many of these first prints were wallet-sized copies that were mailed to American soldiers fighting overseas or, later, distributed domestically through the “Christ in Every Purse” program, an initiative that aimed to counter the influence of “­card-carrying Communists” by creating “card-carrying Christians” (117).

By the time the appeal of the painting began to wane in the 1960s, American culture had grown too divided for any one image of Jesus to displace Sallman’s, so Sallman’s Jesus became the Jesus, the Jesus of our culture’s collective imagination, the one we regularly spot on burnt food, stained surfaces, fuzzy x-rays, and Family Guy episodes. The painting is, in the words of historian Stephen Prothero, “a twentieth-century version of the Shroud of Turin,” an image that purportedly reveals not only Jesus’ personality, “but also the shape of his nose and cut of his beard” (118).

Sallman himself allegedly claimed that the image came to him in a dream; there he was, seated at his drawing board, the picture already complete. When he woke he went to work recreating what he had seen, and while I don’t doubt Sallman’s heart was in the right place as he sketched, I am troubled by the way Sallman, his admirers, and his distributors have so readily removed Jesus from the world he actually inhabited. Gone in Sallman’s work are the details of time and place that help us understand who Jesus really was. The painting came to Sallman in a dream, and its accuracy was attested to by people who encountered Jesus in dreams of their own.

In America we have always been good at taking Jesus out of context and refashioning him in our own image. Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson did it with scissors. He sat down with four copies of the Bible, clipped out all the Gospel passages he deemed “authentic,” and created the first draft of what would eventually become known as the Jefferson Bible (Prothero, 23). The task, he later wrote to John Adams, was “obvious and easy,” the authentic passages “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill” (Jefferson, 1813). Jefferson’s redaction omitted 90 percent of the verses found in the Gospels—no healings, no miracles, no resurrection—and instead presented Jesus as a moral philosopher (Prothero, 25) who probably would have felt more at home with Jefferson in the Age of Enlightenment than in first-century Palestine where, as even some of today’s most skeptical scholars have pointed out, magicians and miracle workers who healed the sick and cast out demons were accepted as facts of life.

Similarly, during the ruggedly masculine era of Teddy Roosevelt American Christians published books that placed a heavy emphasis on Jesus’ virility, books with titles like Manhood of the Master and The Manly Christ: A New View. In The Masculine Power of Christ, Jason Noble Pierce told his readers that Christ possessed “virile power which every man may share, which makes every man great” in much the same way that Laurie Beth Jones, during the prosperous, politically correct mid-1990s, told her readers in Jesus CEO that Christ had “many feminine values in management” and that “his approach with his staff often ran counter to other management styles and techniques” that she had encountered (Pierce 1912, 2; Jones 1995, xiv). Even more recently, four days before the 2012 presidential election, CNN published an online article titled “Do You Believe in a Red State Jesus or a Blue State Jesus?” The piece came complete with a ten-question Cosmo-style quiz: “Do you believe Jesus was a healer who provided free universal health care?” (Blake, 2012).

It was at the end of the “manly Christ” craze that a teacher at the Moody Bible Institute encouraged a young Warner Sallman to take up the subject of Christ in his art. “Make Him a real man!” the teacher reportedly told him. “Make Him rugged, not effeminate. Make Him strong and masculine, so people will see in His face that He slept under the stars, drove the moneychangers out of the temple, and faced Calvary in triumph” (quoted in Doss 1996, 80). It’s not bad advice, grounding Jesus within the narrative through which we are able to know him, but it’s advice Sallman seems not to have taken.

While critics over the years have skewered Sallman for the androgyny of his Jesus, Prothero argues that the broader contextual ambiguity of the image may actually have been the key to the paintings’ incredible popularity:

Sallman divorced his subject entirely from the biblical narratives. Instead of interacting with his disciples or his mother or even with God, Sallman’s Jesus engaged the viewer directly, and he did so in a way that was inviting, reassuring, comforting, and intimate... Different Americans could read different Jesuses into it, and apparently they did just that. The picture sold spectacularly well among evangelicals, who claimed Sallman as one of their own. It was also popular among liberal Protestants and some Roman Catholics, in part because… it was not identified with any one denomination or any particular theological stance. (119)

Untethered from his historical context and narrative framework, Sallman’s Jesus was pliable enough to support or oppose any cause, including Communism. The painting sold well, as Prothero points out, not only among conservative evangelicals like Sallman himself, but also among Catholics and liberal Protestants who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were both eager to set aside denominational differences in order to present a unified front against godless Communism. The “Christ in Every Purse” program drew praise from both Dwight Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover (Prothero, 117).

The pliability of Sallman’s Jesus, however, can be seen even more clearly in the smaller behavioral “miracles” attributed to the painting. In Virginia, a businessman reported to Newsweek that no one in his office had cursed since he’d put the picture on his desk (Morgan 1996, 188). In the Midwest, one pastor’s wife made her son, whenever he acted out, stand before the portrait and “tell Jesus you’re sorry” (188). One copy even reportedly saved its owner from being robbed at gunpoint. “Lady, I can’t do it,” the thief said, “not with him behind you” (188). In essence, by presenting Jesus apart from any sort of narrative or cultural-historical backdrop—and thus apart from any specific claims about who Jesus was and what he did or didn’t stand for—Sallman created the perfect banner for American Christians to rally beneath: a nice Jesus.

In the Bible Jesus is called “the image of the invisible God,” “the exact imprint of his very being,” a living symbol, a synecdoche with legs (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). Christianity has always maintained that by looking at Jesus we glimpse God, and so for Christians the quest for a deep and true historical understanding of Jesus is, in the words of New Testament scholar N. T. Wright (1999), “part of, indeed perhaps the sharp edge of, our exploration of God himself” (15). His skin color matters not because skin color should matter, but because accuracy matters, or should when we’re picturing someone as important as God.

During the Reformation, many Protestant leaders attempted to do away with religious imagery altogether. Calvin reasoned that since it is impossible to picture God we shouldn’t try, and he banned all representations of God in human form from his churches (McGrath 2006, 210). According to the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, the ideal church was to be free of any and all distracting and potentially idolatrous art, its walls whitewashed and unadorned to prevent believers from becoming distracted from the reading and preaching of the Bible (209). Such intense caution, however, as well-intentioned as it may have been, is not a solution to the problem of misleading religious images, but an error in the opposite direction. If a Jesus without context is ultimately meaningless, so too is a God who cannot be pictured. After all, isn’t the God of Christianity a God incarnate, a God fond of parables and metaphor, a God who descends to meet us where we are? “It is a small step,” writes historian Alister McGrath, “from declaring that God cannot be pictured to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity” (212). He argues that the “failure of the Protestant imagination” helped give rise to the functional atheism (i.e. Christians living their daily lives as if God’s existence didn’t particularly matter) that contributed to the rise of outright intellectual atheism in the centuries that followed.

And so I choose to cast my lot with those like novelist Madeleine L’Engle, who shares with the Orthodox iconographers the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth “did not walk around Galilee faceless” (1980, 26). Though she’s no fan of paintings that portray Jesus as a “tubercular, fair-haired blue-eyed goy,” L’Engle still believes that a faithfully rendered image of Jesus can act as “an open window through which we can be given a glimpse of the love of God,” and I agree (26). The images of Jesus I’m drawn to, the ones I choose to hang on my walls, are the images that somehow ask for my surrender, the images that draw me through themselves into a place where I am invited to contemplate who Christ really was.

In 2002, a forensic anthropologist named Richard Neave created a digital reconstruction of Jesus’ face, that is, a reconstruction of the face of a typical first-century Galilean man (Fillon 2002). After examining period artwork, taking CT scans of skulls uncovered near Jerusalem, and studying the accounts of the Gospel writers, Neave confirmed what should have been obvious: Jesus was not a white guy. The face of Jesus, he concluded, would have looked something like this:

Which is to say that, for me, the face of Jesus is the face of a stranger. He is not someone I would recognize if I passed him on the street or sat next to in a pew, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it is the mystery that keeps me leaning in when I read the Gospels. When the two disciples on the road to Emmaus encountered Jesus they didn’t recognize him. They spent the afternoon walking and talking with him—­telling him about the rumors of his own resurrection—but they didn’t recognize him, not even when he interpreted for them the things written about himself in their scriptures. It wasn’t until he took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them that he suddenly fell into context and they saw who he was. His identity was revealed to them, and he disappeared.

Ryan Rickrode studied creative writing and religion at Susquehanna University and in 2013 earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Identity Theory, Lalitamba, and The Common.

Works Cited

Blake, John. “Do You Believe in a Red State Jesus or a Blue State Jesus?” CNN Politics. November 2, 2012. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/02/do-you-believe-in-a-red-state-jesus-or-a-blue-state-jesus.

Doss, Erika. “Making a ‘Virile, Manly Christ’: The Cultural Origins and Meanings of Warner Sallman’s Religious Imagery.” Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman. David Morgan, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996.

Fillon, Mike. “The Real Face of Jesus: Advances in forensic science reveal the most famous face in history.” Popular Mechanics. 7 December 2002. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/1282186.

Grimes, William. “The Man Who Rendered Jesus For the Age of Duplication.” The New York Times. October 12, 1994. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/12/arts/the-man-who-rendered-jesus-for-the-age-of-duplication.html.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (October 12, 1813).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. December 14, 2012. http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org.

Letter_from_Thomas_Jefferson_to_John_Adams_October_12_1813.

Jones, Laurie Beth. Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership. New York: Hyperion, 1995.

McGrath, Alister. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. New York: Galilee, 2004.

Morgan, David. “ ‘Would Jesus Have Sat For A Portrait?’: The Likeness of Christ in Sallman’s Art.” Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman. David Morgan, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996.

Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.

Pierce, Jason Noble. The Masculine Power of Christ. Concord: Rumford Press, 1912.

Sallman, Warner. The Head of Christ. 1941. The Warner Sallman Collection, Anderson University, 2014. http://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/head-of-christ.

Wright, N.T. The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999.