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18 - The Racial Jesus

from Part IV - The Global Jesus Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2024

By
Jonathan Tran
Edited by
Markus Bockmuehl
Markus Bockmuehl
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter discusses the racial Jesus in relationship to the historical Jesus. It begins with several examples of the racial Jesus, allowing in each case advocates of the racial Jesus to express in their own words the theological work done by racializing Jesus. It then considers objections and counter-objections, both of which turn on valorizing the historical Jesus against the racial Jesus, a valorization which itself turns on valorizing the historical Jesus against the Christ of faith. The chapter concludes by arguing that the counter-objections have reasons to “throw away the ladder” on the valorizations but do not, oddly giving new life to the secular history the racial Jesus teaches us to distrust.

Keywords

racial JesusidentificationJesus of historyChrist of faithsecular history
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge Companion to Jesus , pp. 299 - 312
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Appiah, Anthony. 1992. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Blum, Edward J. and Harvey, Paul. 2012. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Byung-Mu, Ahn. 1983. “Jesus and the Minjung in the Gospel of Mark.” In Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History, edited by The Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia, 138–52. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
Cone, James H. 1997. God of the Oppressed. Rev. ed. Maryknoll: Orbis.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora. 1988. “Throwing Away the Ladder.” Philosophy 63.243: 5–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, Kelly Brown. 1994. The Black Christ. Maryknoll: Orbis.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kelley, Shawn. 2002. Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Park, Wongi. 2017. “The Black Jesus, the Mestizo Jesus, and the Historical Jesus.” Biblical Interpretation 25: 190–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poinsett, Alex. 1969. “The Quest for a Black Christ.” Ebony 24.2: 170–78.Google Scholar
Reddie, Anthony G. 2016. “The Quest for a Radical Black Jesus: An Antidote to Imperial Mission Christianity.” In Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna and Child, edited by Clark, Jawanza Eric, 285–300. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siker, Jeffrey. 2007. “Historicizing a Racialized Jesus: Case Studies in the ‘Black Christ,’ the ‘Mestizo Christ,’ and White Critique.” Biblical Interpretation 15: 26–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sugirtharajah, R. S. 2018. Jesus in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tran, Jonathan. 2022. Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

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