Newsflash: Artist Suggests Jesus Was a Jew

[morgan_dhu]

I am totally boggle-minded. The paintings of an American artist, Clara Maria Goldstein, have been labeled controversial because they depict Jesus as a Jew.

Goldstein has created a series of paintings showing such "controversial" images as: Jesus as a baby, being lovingly prepared for circumcision by Mary; Jesus as a boy, reading from the Torah; Jesus dressed as and in poses associated with being a rabbi; Jesus wearing a yarmulke pictured next to a menorah. Now I know that the contemporary evidence (outside of Biblical texts themselves) on Jesus is rather slim, but all the sources I know of seem to agree that Jesus was a Jew. Apparently it's even in the Bible, what with the whole being descended from the House of David, and debating with the wise men in synagogue as a child, and calling the Temple "my Father's house" when he was doing that bit of housecleaning, and other such events.

However, these paintings are being denied display because "Gundersen Lutheran [the hospital] is trying to be more patient-friendly and it doesn't want anything controversial to potentially upset patients."

Let me get this right - portraying Jesus as what he actually was, a Jew, is controversial and might upset people?


The stupid. It burns.

Comments

[guyindkny.livejournal.com]

Debates about the depictions of Jesus never fail to amuse me. The images we've grown up with and which some evangelicans take to be canonical are actually fabrications. Early Christian depictions of Jesus were actually based on the template of Apollo, like some sweet shepherd boy. When they found that the images weren't commanding the respect of the population, they decided instead to switch to a more imposing Zeus-like template, hence the beard and robes. Even in the ancient world, it was all about branding and marketing, and for people to get bent out of shape over an image which actually has little historical accuracy to begin with amuses me more than upsets me.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about my reaction to this, in the light of some other comments made. I agree with you that arguments over depictions of religious figures in general, and a good many other religious debates of a similar nature, are ludicrous.

What put the upset into this for me, I think, was the underlying anti-semitism. No one is coming out and saying it (and the bit about the paintings being rejected by the Holocaust symposium was surely put in there to persuade readers that there couldn't be any anti-semitism here becasue see, the Jews didn't like the painings either.

But I can think of legitimate reasons for a Holocaust symposium to decline the showing of these paintings, starting with a very simple "off-topic." I can't really think of any reason for Christians to get upset about these paintings that doesn't have at least some, and likely a lot of, anti-semitism behind it.

The thing is, I couldn't at first put my finger on the reason why this felt so much more wrong than so many other examples of stupidity one sees everywhere - blindness of privilege - but I knew it really bothered me.