A resurfaced video of Russian President Vladimir Putin looking at a 14th-century relic that contains iconography of Jesus of Nazareth has many people on social media up in arms. People are dumbfounded that this old video seems to show Christ as a Black man.
In April 2023, Putin visited Kherson, Ukraine. At the time, the Kremlin released a statement saying, “The supreme commander of Russian Federation armed forces has visited the headquarters of the Dnieper military grouping” the Kherson region in the south, and also went to the Luhansk region in the east where he toured Russian National Guard headquarters.
During the Orthodox Christian Easter season, Putin gave senior military officials an Easter gift: a religious icon from the tsarist era, according to the Daily Mail.
The antique was crafted as a sanctuary, which holds an image of a Jesus that showed him with dark brown skin.
Footage of this event has gone viral and become the subject of music discussion on social media just as Russia was grappling with the aftermath of an apparent terrorist attack on a concert hall outside of the nation’s capital of Moscow that saw at least 60 people killed and more than 115 wounded by several camouflaged gunmen on March 22.
The mythology around the clip suggests that Putin revealed that artifact from the secret that Europeans were hiding from the world in Africa and proof that Jesus was Black.
Jesus is never an African man
— Winnie Schola (@WinnieSchola) March 22, 2024
“I wanna believe in black Jesus as much as the next guy, but this n—a, Putin has been lying about winning a war that the whole world’s been watching him lose for 2 years,” one person tweeted.
“Putin/Black Jesus collab is insane,” a tweet read. Another nostalgically said, “Somebody tell Vladimir Putin that black folk been hanging pictures up of a black Jesus in they house. You ain’t telling us nun we don’t know or need confirmed.”
Interestingly, Russia has displayed bronze-skinned representations of Jesus and other religious figures for years. In 2009, The Pushkin Museum curated a rare collection of 130 religious icons from the 14th to 16th centuries, highlighting Russia’s golden age of religious art.
During the Soviet era, a larger collection, of which these pieces are a part, was destroyed. While there are currently 50,000 icons housed in various Russian museums, the number was originally in the millions.
Remarkably, this exhibition marks only the third occasion that such a collection has been assembled. The pieces have been pulled from all over the world. One country that has not problem depicting Jesus as Black is Ethiopia.
“Ethiopia has some of the oldest Bibles and depictions of Yeshua in the world. Even the Virgin Mary is depicted as having dark skin,” one person tweeted.
So….. Not Caucasian.
— Cheshire Squire (@Enkidu40) March 22, 2024
The oldest bible and mention of Jesus is found in Israel and is from the first century, close to the time the historical Jesus is believed to have lived.
The modest limestone burial box, owned by Oded Golan, is called an ossuary. On the side of it, the following words are chiseled on the side: James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” according to The Guardian.
Tel Aviv antiquities collector Golan bought the box in the 1970s. He said in 2013 that the box had not been shown publicly, except for a 2002 Toronto showing. He claimed, “This is the oldest evidence that mentions the name of Jesus Christ.”
While many scholars still believe the ossuary is not authentic, no one can prove that Golan’s box is a fraud.
