ABSTRACT

What was the race from which Christ sprang? Victorian artists, ethnographers, and theologians were preoccupied with locating Christ’s racial origins. Evidence of this religiously motivated genealogical search can be found in portrayals of the so-called Jewish race in nineteenth-century paintings of biblical scenes, such as William Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–55) and Edward Poynter’s Israel in Egypt (1867). A close examination of these artworks, along with the theological and scientific texts that informed them, uncovers an image of Christ as a temporal and racial hybrid, standing at the uneasy juncture of the Orient and Occident, Judaism and Christianity, the Semitic and Anglo-Saxon races.

摘要

基督从何而来呢？维多利亚时代的艺术家，人种学家和神学家都忙于寻找基督的种族起源。在十九世纪的圣经场景绘画中，所谓的犹太种族的刻画可以找到这种出于宗教动机的家谱搜索的证据，例如威廉·霍尔曼·亨特（William Holman Hunt）的《在圣殿中找到救世主》（1854–55）和爱德华·波因特的以色列在埃及（1867年）。对这些艺术品以及为其提供信息的神学和科学文献进行了仔细的研究，发现了基督是一种时空和种族混合的形象，站在东方与西方，犹太教和基督教，闪族人和盎格鲁-撒克逊人的种族。