Yesterday, I brought up the little spat arising from the fact that the Satan character in The History Channel’s The Bible mini-series looks remarkably like President Obama.
Which brings up the question: If the devil looks like Obama, what does Jesus look like? I think you can probably guess.
I was brought up in a small town in Missouri and my family belonged to the local Methodist church, where I went every Sunday for services and Sunday School until I left for college. Hanging on the wall of my Sunday School class was this picture of Jesus (or one very much like it). To this day, when I think “Jesus,” this is the image that arises in my mind’s eye: A vaguely Nordic-looking man with chiseled European features, smiling beatifically down upon us all.
Apparently, the “historians” at the History Channel went to the same Sunday School I did. Here’s their version of what Jesus looked like:
So, dude, Jesus sorta looked like Brad Pitt! Who knew? Actually, the History Channel producers surely knew that they were creating a Jesus that conforms to American Christians’ view of what their savior looked like, but is very unlikely to conform with what Jesus would have really looked like as a Middle Eastern man of 2,000 years ago. But the History Channel probably figured the viewers of The Bible probably weren’t ready for a Jesus who might have looked like this:
Here’s another interesting take on the “Jesus as Surfer Dude” phenomenon.
