![]() ![]() Just as it was time for slavery to end, it was also time for women and men of colour to refuse the language and images that associated darkness with evil, and whiteness with good All the pictures of Christ by the great artists are mere fictions.’ The world owns no material portraiture of His physical person. ‘It is a remarkable thing in the history of Christ that nowhere have we any clue to His physical identity. One Presbyterian minister in New York City cautioned his congregants in the 1880s not to trust the imagery of Jesus they saw in picture-book Bibles and on stained-glass windows. Throughout the 19th century, as new technologies allowed for the mass production and distribution of Bible images, some religious teachers worried that they could hinder the mission of the Church. Photo courtesy Lightworkers Media / Hearst Productions Inc Moroccan actor Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni plays Satan in the History Channel’s The Bible mini-series. But to see the devil or one of his minions in the flesh was a terrifying experience, and one that could get you executed in the colonies. ![]() Satan, moreover, was sometimes represented as a horned, winged, and emaciated dark figure (he was, after all, the ‘prince of darkness’). Puritans were not absolute in their iconoclasm: they were fine with other representations, and regularly used small figures in educational books. In colonial New England, Puritans differentiated themselves from Catholics by refusing to display Jesus, God, or the Madonna in their churches or on printed materials. ![]() Historically, many religious teachers in the US have been keen to downplay the physical characteristics of figures in the Bible, warning that such attention to the merely manifest might divert one from true spirituality. To understand our contemporary obsession with the actors’ bodies in The Bible mini-series, we need to consider why something that is so silent in the Bible has become so salient in our approaches to it. But for the most part, the Bible is pretty quiet about the colour of those bodies’ skin or the tone of their hair. The ancient texts have sick bodies and healed bodies, pierced bodies and resurrected bodies. In the Bible itself, bodies matter, but not the way they do now. In previous decades, people asked Martin Luther King Jr what Jesus looked like, and during the 1920s, Americans debated whether it was appropriate to show Jesus in films at all. In that film, Jesus never spoke English, but his brutalised body was on display front and centre. In 2004, they flocked to movie theatres to watch Jesus tortured and killed in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. This is not the first time US audiences have fixated on the portrayal of Biblical bodies. Whether discussing the darkness (and Obama-ness) of Satan or the ‘sexy whiteness’ of Jesus, the ethnic ‘look’ of the characters has been just as important (if not more so) than what they have said or done on screen. One of the reasons for its popularity is that Americans care deeply about how biblical figures are represented in the flesh. With more than 10 million people in the US watching each episode, The Bible has been the biggest cable TV hit of the year. The controversy hasn’t hurt the ratings for the 10-hour series. Complaints sounded so loudly that the producers of the show were forced to respond, calling it ‘nonsense’ that they purposefully cast the Moroccan actor Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni as Satan to look like Obama. Responses were quick, and they came on all types of media from Twitter and Facebook to CNN and Fox News. Last month, American television audiences were shocked: when Satan showed up in the History Channel’s new mini-series The Bible, he looked strikingly like President Barack Obama. ![]()
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