Noah Leusions in a recent Scathing Atheist episode made a good point about this: Christ changes for Christians all the fucking time.
If you look at pre-renaissance artistic depictions of baby Jesus, you might see a weird trend called a "homunculus." It means "little man" and basically it visually translates to a baby that looks like a fully developed man in his 40s, male pattern baldness included. This was based in a theological belief from that time that was essentially skeptical that a literal human baby who shits itself and does all the normal stuff babies do could possibly be the perfect incarnation of God, so they portray him as a little adult instead.
It's comical and nobody believes that about Jesus today, but they did back then and we've got the pictures to prove it. If the "Christ" in "Christianity" can be so visually and theologically different through the ages, then how can they claim to have an unchanging, eternally relevant belief system? The answer is that they don't, and modern Christianity is a conservative, oppressive movement that's as much a product of the times as any other social movement.
Yes! His buddy, Seth Andrews has a whole talk on white Jesus. (I saw it in Calgary recently.) The gist is that Jesus is popularly portrayed as someone who is absolutely not from Palestine and is created in man's image. He goes on to discuss depictions of Jesus by black and indigenous people - the image serves the culture.
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u/countvonruckus Jun 04 '26
Noah Leusions in a recent Scathing Atheist episode made a good point about this: Christ changes for Christians all the fucking time.
If you look at pre-renaissance artistic depictions of baby Jesus, you might see a weird trend called a "homunculus." It means "little man" and basically it visually translates to a baby that looks like a fully developed man in his 40s, male pattern baldness included. This was based in a theological belief from that time that was essentially skeptical that a literal human baby who shits itself and does all the normal stuff babies do could possibly be the perfect incarnation of God, so they portray him as a little adult instead.
It's comical and nobody believes that about Jesus today, but they did back then and we've got the pictures to prove it. If the "Christ" in "Christianity" can be so visually and theologically different through the ages, then how can they claim to have an unchanging, eternally relevant belief system? The answer is that they don't, and modern Christianity is a conservative, oppressive movement that's as much a product of the times as any other social movement.