Damn ya’ll.
Anyway… we don’t know for sure Jesus (Yeshua) existed at all, correct?
I figure if Yeshua ben Yosef looked much different than his disciples or peers, one of the Gospel writers might have mentioned it.
What I wonder is if He returned today would he call himself Josh Josephson or Josh Carpenter?
Yes, but also per the Hebrew scriptures, Ruth accepted the God of the Israelites as her God and the Israelite people as her own.
Also, we need to stay true to the OP that asked about a “white” Jesus, which would be non–Middle Eastern in nature.
Post #60 is a hell of a time for the OP to bring up this question.
Anyway, Jesus probably looked pretty much like everyone around him, or someone probably would have mentioned it.
Unca Cecil’s take on that question.
Topics debating that very question.
The Moabites were close relatives of the Israelites, and probably looked similar.
From the Wikipedia article:
According to the biblical account, Moab and Ammon were born to Lot and Lot’s elder and younger daughters, respectively, in the aftermath of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Bible refers to both the Moabites and Ammonites as Lot’s sons, born of incest with his daughters
Lot was Abraham’s nephew. The nations of Judah and Moab were often at war, but they recognized each other as distant cousins.
More to the point, “Roman” was a matter of legal citizenship, not race or ethnicity. There was certainly prejudice, with the Romans looking down on the Italian Allies during the Republic, and the Italians looking down on the Cisalpine and Iberian Gauls during the early Empire, and so on. But Rome had powerful people of all sorts of heritages; Emperor Septimus Severus came from Libya, and was what we today would call black.
To add on to this, a name very close to Philistines appears in the Egyptian record that describes the invasion of the so-called Sea Peoples. So a theory I have heard, but of whose strength I am uncertain, says that the Philistines along with other Agean peoples participated in some kind of “armed migration” along the lines of those we associate with Germanic peoples at the end of the Roman Empire, and that this is the “Sea People” event that seems linked to the Bronze Age Collapse.
According to Wikipedia he was born into a Roman family though, not a native Libyan family. So I don’t know if he would have exactly been what we today call “black.” He did have Punic (Phoenecian) ancestry from his father’s side though.
Here’s an attempt at a realistic reconstruction of his face (how accurate it actually is, I don’t know.) If anything, he looks South Asian (Indian, Pakistani etc) to me.
His father was Punic and his mother was Latin but born to a family that had been settled in Libya for several generations. See here for more detail, and many more examples of the varied ethnicities of Romans, both high ranking and otherwise:
For example, the linked blog notes an ‘Aethiopian’ (likely not actually Ethiopian, but Black certainly) soldier serving in Roman Britain during Severus’ reign.
Those pages of begats leave out all the women. And there are certainly mentions elsewhere of women born outside the group being brought into it; whether voluntarily or by force of conquest.
So, even aside from questions of accuracy, I don’t think this question can be settled by the begats. I wouldn’t expect the people in the groups the women came from to have looked particularly like modern Europeans, however. And if Jesus had been light haired and/or blue eyed, I’d also have expected that to have been remarked upon.
European art made Jesus to match their standards of handsome, based on their ideas, not on evidence. And during a chunk of that time there was a lot of anti-semitism; so they probably specifically didn’t want to make Jesus look their idea of Semitic, even though the evidence in the Bible they claimed to be following makes it utterly clear that the Jesus being described was an observant Jew.
They did and he does.
They had some trouble getting believed, until DNA evidence became available.
Not just Jesus, but ancient historical, religious, and/or mythological figures in general. My understanding (though I am no expert) is that much of European art through the ages was not particularly concerned with historical accuracy or photographic realism. Artists used people around them as models, and the people, clothing, architechture, etc. in their works might be influenced more by where they were painted than by where they were set.
Septimus Severus lived about 200 years after the supposed time of Jesus. The appropriate comparison is to the reign of Augustus. Roman culture was still heavily weighted toward the ancient families at the top, with massive prejudices against foreigners, especially easterners, seen as particularly un-Roman.
My understanding also, though I’m also no expert. Except for the antisemitism note, I didn’t mean to imply that they only did this with Jesus; but I can see how my post may have come off that way.
Well, he was kind of smitten with Jonathan.
Mary in European art often wore clothing more appropriate to the time the art was done than when she lived, and stood in front of European buildings.
Pretty standard, like one of the Canterbury Tales which involved jousting in ancient Greece.
Jeff’s too tall. Rather few men in that era would have been as tall as Mr. Goldblum. 
True, likely Darker skin, black hair. But most people consider people from that area as “white”., not Black" or “Hispanic” or etc.
Or Josephus or Tacticus, etc.
That is not John the beloved disciple, but another, who quite possible never met Jesus.
One of those looks kinda heavy set, and who know Jesus fasted a lot, so likely He was thin.
Or his brother.
Cecil says so. and we have a few sources.
But until recently, we didn’t know for sure that Pontius Pilate existed either. And he was the Governor. Records from that period are very scarce.
But this issue is a hijack, we have had at least a dozen threads on the subject.
Paul was a Roman citizen, for example.
All this discussion about whether Jesus was white before we’ve even nailed down what “white” means?
If “white” means Caucasian (as either the 3-race scheme of Linnaeus or the 4-race scheme of Blumenbach posited), then Jesus was Caucasian and Caucasian meant white. With the human need to divide and conquer, “white” has been defined differently depending on who was making the distinctions.
Until one sets out what the word means, all the other discussions are going to be fruitless.
Given that I feel confident in asserting that Jesus was not lavender or fuchsia, I am not sure where the question even comes from.
John the “beloved disciple” wrote the Gospel of John, I, II, II John, and Revelation.
Probably true - but they were considered socially very different. My point is that not only was Jesus not white (the socially accepted appearance in Europe and the USA), he was descended partially from a group that wasn’t socially acceptable among the people he was born into.
Of course some modern-day Arabs look much like Europeans.
Compare Tariq Aziz
with David White (“Bewitched”'s Larry Tate)
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