White Christian leaders have for years pronounced that a belief in a melanated Black Jesus is either unimportant or a viewpoint that signifies a radical faith without content; a faith which encourages believers to attentively listen for the personalized divine call echoing within their own unique experiences. But isn't that what 400 years of whitewashing Jesus in Europe was. it was called the iconoclast movement because ALL EUROPEANS OF ANTIQUITY WORSHIPPED A BLACK JESUS WHO WAS DECOLORIZED IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY SLAVERY OPPRESSION AND THEFT!
As images of a Black Christ, Black Mary, and Black saints based on illuminated manuscripts from the Holy Land AKA North Africa called "the Orient" at that time appeared increasingly in churches in the sixth and seventh centuries, European religious leaders and officials questioned their legitimacy, fearing that the veneration of Black images the icons was tantamount to idolatry. Iconoclasts (“image-breakers”) also emphasized the impossibility of depicting Christ's divinity unless he was depicted as a European.
In Spain images of a white Jesus reinforced a caste system where white, Christian Europeans occupied the top tier after the systemic removal, torture, imprisonment and execution of Blacks (called Blackamoors) Sephardic Jews (Black Jews not European Khazarian converts), and Gypsies (the Romani and Cale or Gitano (Meaning Black) called Gypsies because their dark skin from Indian and North African lineage made Europeans believe they were from Egypt the land of Black people. Most people with darker skin were separated and placed in enclaves that we would call ghettos today were dissuaded from intermixing with native populations ranked considerably lower. The standards of racial purity in Spain were not abolished completely until 1870.
There is no doubt that the Italian Renaissance occurred within a patriarchal society, scholarship also reveals the oppression racial and religious minorities and other marginalized groups encountered during the Renaissance. Whereas once people argued that racial prejudices and race-based slavery occurred only after the Italian Renaissance had ended, recent scholarship convincingly illustrates that that was not the case. As Stephen Epstein reveals in Speaking of Slavery, racism and slavery were present in Italian communities long before the transatlantic slave trade of the 17th century. Black Europeans were present in Italy and beyond before, during, and after the Renaissance, as recounted in Olivette Otele’s African Europeans and in T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe’s edited collection Black Africans in Renaissance Europe.
According to the traditional view, Byzantine Iconoclasm was started by a ban on religious images promoted by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian, a lot of the art made under his reign depicted black skinned religious figures. Leo was of Syrian origin, his original name was Konon, was born in Germanikeia in the Syrian province of Commagene (Commagene, was historically inhabited by melanated Iranians.). Konon's family had been resettled in Thrace, where he entered the service of Emperor Justinian II. Leo was fluent in Arabic, possibly as a native language, and was described by Theophanes as "the Saracen minded". The works created at the time of his power were later subject to widespread destruction of religious images and persecution of supporters of the veneration of the black images.
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