A portrait of Jesus in a school? Seriously?

[Christian Liberty]

Neither is a picture of the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

Yes it is. Read the section from the WCF.

 

[jgarden]

A portrait of Jesus in a school? Seriously?

This portrait is a European version of how the artist envisioned Jesus and probably has very little basis in reality.

In addition, Moslems are adverse to any pictoral representations of Mohammad and Allah because they feel that it promotes idolatry.

Since we had no records describing Jesus' actual physical appearance, how much moral outrage should we expend on one artist's mental image that in all probability is historically incorrect?

 

[patrick jane]

A portrait of Jesus in a school? Seriously?

This portrait is a European version of how the artist envisioned Jesus and probably has very little basis in reality.

In addition, Moslems are adverse to any pictoral representations of Mohammad and Allah because they feel that it promotes idolatry.

Since we had no records describing Jesus' actual physical appearance, how much moral outrage should we expend on one artist's mental image that in all probability is historically incorrect?

imaginary or not - everybody knows who the picture is portraying

 

[jgarden]

The Pretty Jesus
March 19, 2011

In 1940, commercial artist Warner Sallman created the oil painting Head of Christ. This image has since been reproduced hundreds of millions of times, on prints, plaques, bookmarks, greeting cards, funeral announcements, church bulletins, buttons, calendars, clocks, lamps, coffee mugs, stickers, billboards, and key chains. Stephen Prothero, author of American Jesus, says that the wide dissemination of Sallman’s Head of Christ transformed Jesus from a celebrity into a national icon, making him now instantly recognizable by Americans of all races and religions. And, more than that, Prothero says, the picture became the most common religious image in the world (out-popularizing Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and dozens of other works of religious import) .....

In a 1994 New York Times article entitled “The Man Who Rendered Jesus for the Age of Duplication,” writer William Grimes is so bold as to call Sallman the “best-known artist of the [twentieth] century,” outranking even Picasso and Warhol. Best known? I don’t know about that, but Sallman’s art was certainly the most widely reproduced and distributed of any other twentieth-century artist’s. His Head of Christ immediately became a staple of every American Protestant home, church building, and funeral parlor. Sallman’s publisher, Kriebel & Bates, apparently had an excellent marketing team.

Head of Christ is an object of both personal devotion and scholarly study. In the 1990s, the Lilly Endowment funded a major study of the impact of Sallman’s art on religion in America ... requested and received more than 500 personal responses to Sallman’s work. Respondents overwhelmingly stated that the picture appealed to them because it shows “just what Jesus looked like.” In other words, they believed it to be the most accurate pictorial depiction ever created—a rather odd claim, seeing as no one from the ’90s was around in the first century to have seen Jesus in the flesh. Morgan attributes these claims of authenticity (and general likeability) in part to the photo-like qualities of the portrait, which give it the appearance of realism and make it seem like a personal keepsake. The blurred contours and soft back lighting, he said, are reminiscent of the studio photographs of family members and loved ones that people so often carry around in their purses and wallets.

Another possible contributing factor to the public’s widespread fondness for Head of Christ is the fact that in it, Jesus is close-cropped and alone, shown only from the shoulders up. Because Sallman’s Jesus has been extracted from the context of time, place, and narrative, we can place him into our own context, and because he is not interacting with other figures inside the frame, we are free to interact with him more personally and intimately. The Jesus that gazes outward appears to be warm, gentle, and compassionate, the beautiful Savior so many people long for.

The image does have its detractors, though, many of whom consider it to be too soft and effeminate a portrayal of Christ. Robert Paul Roth, a Lutheran evangelical and New Testament scholar, wrote in a 1958 Christianity Today article entitled “Christ and the Muses” that Head of Christ is a “pretty picture of a woman with a curling beard who has just come from the beauty parlor with a Halo shampoo.” Another man compared Sallman’s Jesus to the Breck Girl.

Writer Alan Devoe’s criticism was much harsher. In the November 1948 issue of The American Mercury, Devoe wrote that the portrait inaccurately portrays Jesus as “actorishly barbered . . . a pale and posturing person with immoderately long, silky hair . . . who clutched a kind of diaphanous drapery gracefully about him with an expression of simpering vapidity.” He lamented that Sunday school teachers all over America were teaching little children to hold the “limp and clammy hand” of this sissified Jesus.

I’ve definitely seen more effeminate depictions of Jesus. But I do tend to sit on the side of the detractors on this one. I look at the portrait and see “Pretty Jesus.” A too pretty Jesus. The real Jesus walked through dusty streets and had no razor or hairdryer with which to groom himself. I mean, maybe this Jesus got all cleaned up for picture day, but somehow I think that he was never quite this neatly combed and sparkly clean. And, considering the words of the prophet Isaiah in chapter 53, verse 2 (“he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”), I also think that Jesus wasn’t as handsome or “pretty” as so many artists make him out to be. As if in blatant refusal of Isaiah 53:2, artists try to attract people to Jesus precisely by making him look beautiful and majestic. That’s because we like to stare at what is beautiful. Hollywood knows this and casts only beauties in leading roles. Because for some reason, we tend to invest ourselves more heavily in characters who look good.

http://thejesusquestion.org/2011/03/19/sallmans-pretty-jesus/

- the most common religious image in the world

- shows “just what Jesus looked like.”

- believed it to be the most accurate pictorial depiction ever created

- the Head of Christ is a “pretty picture of a woman with a curling beard who has just come from the beauty parlor with a Halo shampoo.” (Robert Paul Roth, a Lutheran evangelical and New Testament scholar, Christianity Today 1958)

- compared Sallman’s Jesus to the Breck Girl.

- inaccurately portrays Jesus as “actorishly barbered . . . a pale and posturing person with immoderately long, silky hair . . . who clutched a kind of diaphanous drapery gracefully about him with an expression of simpering vapidity” ..... Sunday school teachers all over America were teaching little children to hold the “limp and clammy hand” of this sissified Jesus
(Alan Devoe, The American Mercury, November 1948)

- ... the “Pretty Jesus.” A too pretty Jesus. The real Jesus walked through dusty streets and had no razor or hairdryer with which to groom himself. I mean, maybe this Jesus got all cleaned up for picture day, but somehow I think that he was never quite this neatly combed and sparkly clean.

Sallman's Jesus reinforces many of the stereotypes which are inconsistent with Isaiah 53:2 - “he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”

The Moslems may be right about refraining from creating religious images - the universal and uncritical acceptance by Christians of Sallman's "Head of Christ" as “just what Jesus looked like” has become a form of "idolatry."

 

[Cruciform]

Yes it is. Read the section from the WCF.

As a mere expression of one of the myriad recently-invented, man-made non-Catholic sects that have been concocted over the past five centuries---and therefore decidedly not of that one historic Church founded by Jesus Christ himself in 33 A.D.---the WCF carries no doctrinal authority over believers whatsoever, and thus may simply be dismissed as nothing more than the sectarian traditions (opinions) of men.

Regarding images of Jesus, see this , this, and this.



Gaudium de veritate,

Cruciform
+T+

 

[Jose Fly]

Is your statement that I should "drop my black/white thinking" itself to be taken in a black/white manner?

Of course you're free to ignore it if you wish.

You're smuggling in terms, concepts, and question-begging principles now.

I'm still trying to imagine an average high school student gazing up at a painting of George Washington and thinking the reason it's up there is because of Protestant deism.

Nope....still too ridiculous.

 

[Cruciform]

Of course you're free to ignore it if you wish.

Done.

 

[Jose Fly]

This Jesus painting issue has provided a pretty good example of how right-wing Christian news outlets distort facts to generate outrage and feelings of persecution in their fundamentalist readers.

Recall, the school took the painting down on the advice of their lawyers.

“I conferred with legal counsel and both of them told me to be in compliance with state and federal law that we had to have it removed,” Chanute Public Schools Superintendent Richard Proffitt told Reuters.

But how does a headline at the Christian Times depict it?

Forced? Um.....if by "forced" you mean "voluntarily on the advice of their legal staff". :idunno:

Then there's the Christian Post's headline...

Oh my goodness! Those atheists must have come into the school and ripped the painting off the wall!!!

Seriously, how is this at all defensible?