Who Should Play Jesus?

In art, literature and film, depictions of Jesus are many and varied. How the man Jesus is portrayed is dependent on the artist’s, writer’s or filmmaker’s religious upbringing and personal beliefs, their geographical location and culture, and the era in which they lived. This makes sense as there is little historical evidence to suggest what he really did look like.

In the bible it is suggested that “his body was like beryl”, (Daniel 10:6), a clear mineral that may also vary in colour, currently described as crystals or precious stones. This description is possibly the origin of the auric glow that is often emanating from Jesus’ body in paintings and murals.

In this verse (Daniel 10), Daniel is seeing Jesus as a vision that others cannot see, including “his face like the appearance of lightening” and “ his eyes like torches of fire” so not actually the man himself. He describes Jesus’ “arms and feet like burnished bronze in colour” as does John in Revelation (1:15) envisioned the spirit of Jesus with feet “like fine brass“. John also describes hair “white like wool” and “white as snow”, and “eyes like the flame of fire”.

For descriptions of Jesus, the man, and not as a vision, the only information the bible provides is that “he has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him” (Isaiah 53:2). In context, this is more about the peoples’ view of him under certain circumstances than how the man himself actually appeared.

The Jesus in film’s produced in Europe and the USA is more often than not played by an actor with light brown hair, fair skin and attractive features, influenced by the Jesus of the renaissance art movement. It is unlikely that this image of Jesus is accurate, and forensic anthropologists have suggested how he might have looked (Fillon, 2002):

An actor with these physical characteristics is unlikely to be an attractive option as a leading man for a major Hollywood production therefore what is required is an actor somewhere between this image and his fair skinned predecessors-an actor of Jewish or Middle Eastern appearance who is attractive and charismatic, but who is not the usual Hollywood type. May I suggest Adrien Brody?

References

Fillon, Mike. The real face of Jesus. 2002. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/1282186

Holy Bible: New King James Version. Thomas Nelson Publishers: 1994

Image sources

 http://www.printsofchrist.com/jesus_wallpaper.php

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/forensics/1282186

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/adrien-brody/images/19659392/title/adrien-brody-photo

Linde Ivemey:Transcendence of Childhood

As curator of the imaginary mini exhibition of works chosen from works from Linde Ivemey's If Pain Persists exhibition at the UQ Art Museum, I have selected the following: Sitha (2007), a bunny figure kneeling in front of a three room doll's house full of furniture made from bones; and, Off with her head! (2012), depicting a bunny as Alice defying the queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

A common thread through Linde's works is her use of recycled materials, predominantly bone, animating the images with something once living. The works I have chosen, contain the bones of sheep, turkey, duck, chicken, quail, fox, cow and fish, as well as other materials such as dyed cloth, laundry lint, seed pods and human hair.

Although many of Linde's figures are faceless, the two bunnies in these works have eyes and a nose, indicating their reference to a real person, Linde herself, having been nicknamed "Bunny" by her sisters as a child.

I chose these particular works due to their references to childhood and the transcendence experienced when a child immerses herself in play. In Sitha, the bunny child has found a gateway to another existence--the imaginary lives lived in the doll's house. In Off with her head!, the bunny child is totally immersed in the lives played out in the story, becoming a character herself.

Each work represents the childhood sacred rituals of play and literature, allowing us a momentary backwards glance into the rabbit holes of our own childhoods.

Popes and Twitter

Tonight on Channel Ten’s The Project, secondary school students interviewed regarding the selection of a new pope in the Catholic Church, suggest that a pope with a “fresher, modern” and a more innovative and “forward thinking vision…would get more people involved in the church”. One student even suggesting tweeted jokes might be “good to hear” from the new pope.

Pope Benedict XVI had over 1.6 million twitter followers, to whom he regularly tweeted and answered questions. His first tweet on 12 December 2012 read: “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”

Although met with “mockery” as well as enthusiasm (The Australian 13 December 2012), the pope continued tweeting, and considering one the earliest advances in communication, that is, from oral to written form, were met with criticism, so he should.  In Writing Restructures Consciousness, Ong (79) states that Plato objected to expressing ideas in written form as the memory is destroyed due to lack of use and that attempting to “establish outside the mind what can only be in the mind” is “inhuman”.  Early literate cultures continued to rely heavily on oral history and knowledge long after the practiced of writing was established.The introduction of print was also met with opposition due to an assumed threat that mass produced works would have on memory. (Ong, 96)

The reality, however, is really quite different--the more written and printed work, the more knowledge that can be obtained. And, if this knowledge is not remembered by the reader, then it can simply be located again.

The inclusiveness resulting from the pope’s use of twitter and twitter’s association with popular culture may be effective in drawing people to the Church. As Ellen Graham states in What We Make of the World, “people turn to the sources and resources of popular culture as a means of rehearsing and examining questions of belief, meaning and spirituality” (68). The Catholic Church’s use of so an obvious tool of popular culture may well attract these people back.

Graham, quoting Tom Beaudoin in Nickel, 2006, (p 18-19), also states that if the church is to communicate with the people in a way that they understand, then it is necessary to use the language they are using.

Considering this, should the next pope’s first tweet be in the language of the youthful masses?

“dEr friends, I M plsed 2 git n tuch w U Thru Twitter. thk U 4 yor generous response. I bless aL of U frm my hart.”

References:

Graham, E., (2007). What We Make of the World. In Lynch, G. (Ed.) (2007) Between Sacred and Profane  London: New York: I B Tauris.

Ong, W. J., (1982). Writing Restructures Consciousness. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London; New York: Routledge.

https://twitter.com/Pontifex

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/mockery-outweighs-piety-after-popes-twitter-debut/story-e6frg6so-1226535898504

The Project, Channel 10, 12 March, 2013