Would Jesus really have joined the Bristol bus boycott?

St Mary Redcliffe church, in Bristol, has removed four stained-glass windows dedicated to the slave trader Edward Colston, he whose statue was recently toppled and sunk. So far, so good. It is set to replace them with four new images of Jesus. Sort of. Most of them are not exactly images of Jesus, but modern scenes in which he is present, identified by a halo. In one, he is a child on an overloaded migrant dinghy. In another, he is hanging out in Bristol with some multicultural neighbours. In another, he is joining a racial justice protest – Bristol’s famous 1963 bus boycott. The fourth is more traditional: he is on a ship calming the storm.

Depicting Jesus in a modern setting is not necessarily a bad idea, but it’s risky, and one of these windows gets it a bit wrong. In fact, the use of modern settings is something that Christian art has always done: the average Renaissance painting features clothes and architecture from around 1500.