by Witness 007 24 Replies latest watchtower scandals
I do remember the old pics of Jesus being clean shaven, and the surprise that the Bro's felt when they changed to showing him bearded. I believe that they did not have a standard representation of him because they did not want a standard image of "our Jesus"..I am sure that I recall sometimes he was shown fair haired and of course clean shaven
I guess they were just so determined to be different to "Christendom" that they went along with it............
love the ''recent careful review'' excuse they used! Like, ''we all had to do deeeeep bible research here at bethel''
Any twit could have told them that as a jewish male Jesus would have a beard!
i think there reason were two fold
one,
the 1933 letter to hitler placed them squarly as anti jew and well they couldnt very well have a jewish jesus ,
and second, they found it a good way to control the 'look' of the organization coming out of the 30s.
thats what i think anyway!
oz
Jesus was beardless and had short hair in all my Witness years (and for a long time before I was born). Masterpieces of Medieval Art and into our own time portray Jesus, esp. at the crucifixion, in strikingly different ways. Italian art wins the award for over the top suffering of a gnarled body. What annoys me is all the time the Witnesses spent demeaning other Jesus depictions. They were true b/c God told them how Jeus looked. The world was bonkers for depicting Jesus any other way. Only they had the monopoly on truth. Personally, Jesus stories, sayings as in Q, actions, teachings, philosophy, and,most importantly, his death and resurrections matter to me. I don't care what kind of hair he had. Besides, we all know Jesus was a Royal Shakesperean actor who spoke Oxbridge English and had blond hair. His eyes sparked with Hollywood drops.
The Society hammered its image all the time. Enough! They had no sources open to the public. One I've forgetten. The second was on a relatively early chalice. In our first trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a family which followed a school trip I took, we saw said chalice. It may have been on loan for a Vatican exhibit. The chalice did not emit special rays as in Hollywood films. It was one piece of art among hundreds of pieces of art, dating from the same period. Jesus was beardless.
Now I realize all the legwork (particularly before the internet) that had to go into this reasoning. It illustrates something I realized about the Witness. My family was working class and descended from Witnesses for generations. I was quite the history student and poured over National Geographic. The WT and Awake adopted a similar style to National Geographic, esp. in opening paragraphs to any article. For someone with no sophistication, the WT and Awake sounded so impressive. Never attending a Bablyon the Great place for fear of immediate death, I was never exposed to other reasoning. I assumed the world was stupid and vacuous. My Roman Catholic friends believed they were wearing relics of the Virgin Mary's robes at the crucizion. There was not a middle class Protestant in my domain. Of course, since the trip to the Cloisters Branch of the Metropolitan Museum in upper, upper, upper Manhattan, I was fascinated by Medieval Art. I heartily recommend the Cloisters. Nelson Rockefeller assembled European monasteries and convents to act as a museum. It is chock full of Medieval Art. The centerpiece is the Unicorn Tapestries he had in his main home. The panaromic views of the Hudson are untarnished by commercial development. Looking at the Met (my hometown), the British Museum, the Vatican, and the Louvre collections proved to me that the Witnesses are idiots. The mind control involved in this manipulation of data is not idiotic. It is calculating.
Further, someday someone is going to believe that religion needs consistency, even more than law needs consistency. Once clean-shaven, what difference does it make? I'm not aware of a single canonical, Gnostic or other gospel where his grooming is portrayed. Jesus would still be Christ with a bald head and body piercings (tho he would not be Jewish then). If Jesus' appearance were so important, why not mention it up front, right in the beginning of the Synoptic gospels. Why isn't similar attention paid to his fashion sense? This is slink down in your chair material. Since the gospels don't mention it, neither does Paul, even the chalice I eventually saw and the other "proof" were just figments of the artist;s imagination.
This is off-track but I am also fascinated by depictions of the Virgin Mary in what can only be called Virgin Mary Blue. She is always in blue in art. I don't know when it started. I assume the color had a virtue assigned to it. It is so ha ha when Catholics do it and so spiritual when the Witnesses engage in it?
I am buff of historical Jesus films. Maybe we could assign a former JW Oscar to the best actor portraying Jesus. I like the Italian actor in the The Passion of Matthew by the communist, Wilem Defoe in the Last Temptation of Christ and the film Jesus Christ Superstar.
Did the brother who came up with clean-shaven have hurt feelings when his depiction was dumped? Maybe people could comprehend their main message if they did not always run off on tangents. They need a marketing consultant.
When Rutherford took control of the WBT$..
Rutherford wanted no Influence of Russel,left in the WBT$..
C.T.Russel had a Beard..
Not even Jesus was safe..
........................
...OUTLAW
The evidence for no beard was so weak.....surely someone at bethel should have said something, it seems like a radical idea.
My mom encouraged me to express my views after we left the Witnesses. I purchased a poster of a bored hippie in a middle class church and placed it on my wall. It wasn't as cool as other posters. He had long hair, sandals and was dressed in white garb. Months elapsed. One day we were discussing the poster and I referred to it as my hippie bored in church poster. My mom responded what hippie? Don't you realize that is Jesus? I ran upstairs and saw it in new light.
My other poster I grabbed from the grape workers' union. It showed a bunch of grapes and a boycott logo. I was proud of it b.c it was hard to obtain in the East. I looked at it daily for years. One evening around twilight I had an epiphany. Those grapes had a skull inside! It had been hiding all the time. I was petrified of demons. As quickly as humanly possible, I asked my bro if he wanted my poster. He relied yes. The whole awareness and transfer took less than two minutes. He could not believe his good luck. I don't know if he saw the skull.
Jesus and the skull are excessive. Perhaps my teenage brain had not matured enough to make such distinctions. My mom threw out my Woodstock poster that we were given in Bethel, NY one week before the event. Later, I showed her the going price for such posters in New York magazine. Shoe took my friend and myself to Woodstock since I was too young to drive through a couple of NY counties.
I kept David McCallul's eye photo in my wallet for years. The joy and fun of being a teenage girl. All hard fought for against the Witnesses.
I remember helping out an older brother in the hall clean out his basement and he had an old witness calender on the wall showing Jesus with short blond hair and no beard. I actually went over to check out what religion it was and was stunned to see it was put out by the WTBTS.
Jesus probably looked like Chuck Norris, LOL !
I think they are using this guy as the model. After all, his family are the official Bankers for God.
From book "Things in Which It Is Impossible for God to Lie" (1965):
