This has been bothering me every since I was enrolled in CCD classes by my parents. It seems to me that in all likelyhood Jesus could have been black or some shade close to that. Seeing as how he was from the Middle East and all I believe there to be a possibility in it. I don’t want to take the time to read the whole bible to search for my answer so I was wondering if you could help. Also just because I’m 14 does’nt mean i should be just brushed off. My IQ is 143 so take me seriously would you?
Um, who says He didn’t have a typical Middle-Eastern complexion? As it stands, the folks in that part of the world have a normal shin tone, and do not easily fit into the black / white paradigm. Most people are some shade of tan.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
Jesus who?
“I don’t know…I don’t know.” – St. DooDah
Someone already asked this same question about a year ago. Jesus was born to Jewish parents in the land that is now Israel. Find an Israeli and you’ll know what type of complexion Jesus had. He wasn’t black. He was Middle Eastern and I think that is technically Caucasian, although I personally think that it’s a mix between the two.
(Apologies if this doubles. My server claimed that the submit page could not be found.)
sxe dopefiend, the next time you see news photos of events happening in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, etc., look at the people who are present. They are (generally, and with allowances for some subsequent invasions and the later return of the Jewish Diaspora) the descendants of the people among who Jesus was born and lived. It is extremely unlikely that Jesus was a blue-eyed blonde. It is extremely unlikely that Jesus resembled someone from sub-Sahara Africa.
Why do you care?
(By the way, you are welcome to post here, but we are not interested in either your age or your IQ. If you post intelligent questions and provide intelligent reponses you will be accepted, perhaps even welcomed. If your posts are silly, you will be mocked. This one was borderline. I would hope that a fourteen-year-old (especially with an IQ of 143!) would be able to determine the ethnic background of Jesus without a lot of effort (hint: Jewish), but you may have led a sheltered life or you may have inadvertantly asked a different question than you meant to.)
Tom~
This question will be more answerable sometime during this century when a large DNA data base has been built up. There will be amazing discoveries of where distant ancestors are scattered. I wouldn’t be surprised if North American aboriginals tie in with the Mongolians. Considering the amount of conquest and war, with the inevitably accompanying mass rapes and slavery, that has occurred over the last 2000 years, tribal movements have become a little scattered.
2000 years ago in the Holy Land Jesus was Jewish. Their physical appearance (“white” or “black”) can only be guessed. Because the Bible and the Old Testament is full of so many warring tribes, including even the Babylonians, one can assume that there was a lot of intermixing going on long before Jesus hit the scene, so one can assume that 2000 years hasn’t changed that much in that part of the world. Therefore one could probably assume that Jesus was dark of hair and skin like the other natives of the area.
On the other hand the ancient Greeks are assumed to have been fairer than the present day. The Spanish are assumed to have gotten a lot darker and a lot less European in appearance after the Moorish conquest of Spain. Remember the wisdom of Dennis Hopper in the Movie “True Romance” - “Sicilians used to blonde you know…”
After the birth of Islam there was a Moslem conquest and a great Islamic civilization. The crusaders from Europe tried to take back Jerusalem and a Balkan battlefield stretched from Vienna to Constantinople for more than a thousand years. If there was a blonde blue-eyed tribe in Israel it was eradicated.
In central Asia there are a lot of different blonde or red-headed blue-eyed tribes.
If you are only 14 years old now is a good time to learn that labels like “black” are simplistic. A vast central DNA data base is going to shock cultural foundations in the years ahead. People are going to resist it but that just will delay it. Knowledge is often Pandora’s Box. Einstein and Enrico Fermi agonized over the morality of splitting the atom but the atomic bomb got built. I read that there is discrimination in Israel against darker Israelis by a fair elite. A DNA data bank might indicate that the fair Israelis are more kin to Germans and the purest Jewish race has black curly hair.
In any case, don’t make an issue out of this until all the data is in.
“Appearances are deceptive.” - Aesop
I understand that Jesus appears to be Caucasian in pictures. But really how accurate can pictures that are based on 200 year old facts be? It seems quite possible that these could be fabracated by any artist. Although such things aren’t really dove into for reasons of faith and such. Never the less I suppose that he could be green if you really want to get technical about because all the records from back then (i.e. The Bible) could be complete books of Fiction. Whether this is true will be contemplated till the end of time when, if indeed Jesus does come again, we’ll see him, or the world just dies and then we aren’t here to wonder anymore. Either way when dealing with isues of religion and heavenly bodies, you can fathom nearly anything.
i had put 200 year old facts due to a typo my bad. I meant 2000 year old facts, roughly.
sxe dopefiend wrote:
The question has nothing to do with how old the facts are, but whether or not they are facts.
If you want to get `technical’ about it, Jesus couldn’t possibly have been green.
And I’ve got three words for you, if you’re worried about whether assholes like us will give you the haircut:
Strunk and White
er, the pictures aren’t based upon any facts at all. If you read through the Gospels, which is something that you probably should consider doing in light of the ignorance your posts demonstrate, you would notice that Jesus’ physical appearance is not described, ever. He was Jewish, this we know, but thats all. Drawings of Jesus are often of the same race as the person doing the drawing.
I’d forgotten one last thing…
Race as a concept separate from nationalism/ethnicity was pretty much invented from scratch in the 1600’s. So Jesus couldn’t have been “black” because there was no such thing at the time.
Sure. But you understood what he meant. That’s what’s really important.
Should sxe have asked is Jesus was on African descent? That would have been wrong, because it would inquire if his racial line was from Africa, not if it might share a skin-color trait with the people we currently think of as African. If he wanted to know the skin color of Jesus, asking if he was ‘Black’ is a good way of asking that. He could ask if Jesus was brown, but brown isn’t terribly well defined whereas black and white are both widely understood wrt racial colouring.
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TomnDebb: Why do you care?
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Perhaps because it seems a bit ridiculous for someone’s race to be misrepresented in pictures, just because it’ll make people less upset.
If I was a believer in the bible and/or words of Jesus, I’d be interested in knowing as much about him, from as accurate sources as possible. Accepting the party line may be a way to fit in, but it doesn’t often lead to a real understanding.
Would you complain if MLK was portrayed as white? Would you ask “Why do you care?” if a student inquired about this inaccuracy?
Actually, the age of the ‘facts’ is very important. If they are 2000 years old and the book you’re reading them from isn’t, then chances are good that they’ve been copied a few times, and probably revised along the way.
There is no way of being sure that something is a fact. You can be more sure about something, but you can’t ever prove it. (Brain in a jar type thought experiment.) So technically there are no facts, just very likely possible fictions.
I doubt many people would question the existance of someone named Jesus, at that time, who preached. Too much of an influence was made, and too many people wrote similar records of his presence. What is in question is the accuracy of what that person said, and if it has any relation to reality. Being that the person most likely existed, and little was said about his appearance (if anything) we can assume that he either looked much like anyone else, or that there was a conspiracy to hide his true appearance. I find the conspiracy angle a bit hard to swallow, so it’s likely that he looked much like everyone else around him.
Why not? You have as much proof as to his non-green skin as anyone has that he had green skin. If he was the son of god, then anything is possible right? Maybe he went around painted green because that was the fashion at the time, for messiahs.
(This reminds me of a Grandpa Simpson quote about the onion on the belt…)
I have a word for people who are fanatical about minor grammatical errors in other people’s posts… sic.
If you have to show your superiority, just post your dick size. The guy admitted to being 14, that means he’s probably not been exposed to many rules of grammar. Hell, for all you know, he’s not a native speaker of english.
If you want to offer him constructive advice, send email with a link to a reference page. If you want to wave your dick, go find someone who cares.
‘They’ didn’t know about the Americas, Antarctica, or Australia. Does this mean those continents appears just before the first ships carrying Eurasian explorers found them? Similarly, the concept of virus was unknown, should we assume that people didn’t catch colds?
We can use terms we’ve developed to discuss the past. And it’s a perfectly acceptable practice.
Imagine in geologists could only use the word ‘granite’ to talk about stone less than a thousand years old, and to talk about geological formations older than 30k years, they had to grunt and make cave paintings. Astronomers can talk about stars, and events happening to them, that occured many millions or billions of years ago. Does that mean that a star never went nova just because we didn’t have a word for it?
Seriously people, the idea of this message base is supposed to be stamping out ignorance, not slamming some newbie for grammatical errors, and perpetuating ignorance just because the question wasn’t PC.
Good question. In all likelihood, the common pictures of Jesus that we see in North America (and likely in Europe) were modified to make Jesus look more like the local population and their idea of the ‘proper’ skin color. This has probably happened all along, making him resemble any local population.
To the extent that we can know that Jesus existed, we can be fairly sure that he wasn’t “white” because it would have been noteworthy, and even if not mentioned directly, the reactions of people around him to his unusual skin color would most likely have been mentioned.
But, it’s unlikely that he was “black”. He was probably fairly close in colouration to the people who inhabit the area today.
I too would question something like this, it’s a good example of the authority figures hiding the truth because it doesn’t fit their agenda. It’s good that you spotted this, it means you’re less likely to just accept what you’re told.
But, this wasn’t a terribly hard question, and some research might have been a good idea. If you post a question and describe how you failed to find answers, you’re more likely to get a good answer because people won’t figure you’re just dodging a homework question. The SDMB helps those who help themselves.
Pacifism kicks ass!
Who cares? I don’t care if he had a beard either, or wore trendy clothes!
sxe dopefiend,
You write:
> I understand that Jesus appears to be
> Caucasian in pictures.
You also write:
> I’m 14 . . . My IQ is 143.
There’s something that I find very hard to believe here. sxe dopefiend claims to be an intelligent 14-year-old, and yet he doesn’t know that any picture of Jesus couldn’t possibly be based on anything except the artist’s imagination. Now, the only way that could happen is if he was brought up in an extremely narrow-minded religious family who told him at one point that some picture of Jesus was accurate and that he was never to question them.
But if that’s true, why would he take that screen name (a misspelling of “Sex Dope Fiend”)? There’s two possibilities here. One is that he was brought up in that sort of narrow-minded family, but recently he’s fallen in with a group of dope smokers at school. In that case, sxe dopefiend, all I can say is that, yes, your parents can be wrong about some things, but quit hanging out with your new friends. The dope is starting to affect your mind. The other possibility is that this post is just a troll.
WhiteKnight:
I can think of a number of reasons for wanting to know the answer. The reason I asked sxe for his (her?) reason is that it will help us determine the answer s/he is really seeking.
For example, I doubt that Jesus’s picture has ever been misrepresented in a picture. Every culture tends to portray him as most like themselves. Since such portraits are universally intended for religious edification and inspiration, that is a very appropriate method of portrayal.
The only “historic” portrait we could claim to paint, based on the written record, would be a painting of the Transfiguration with his features obscured from the viewer by a blinding light. (This would be unhelpful to most believers and ridiculous to most unbelievers.) There is no historical description of Jesus, so no image can attempt to present an historical reproduction of his features.
Knowing why the OP cared to know the answer s/he sought can help us identify whether s/he is seeking a general description of 1st century Eastern Mediterranean ethnic features, or whether s/he has recently encountered one of the various groups (some of whom have posted on this MB in the last few months) who claim that Jesus was not Jewish, but “really Ethiopian” or “really Aryan.”
While a mild tweaking of someone proclaiming both youth and genius would seem to be well within the model set forth by Cecil, you will note that the OP did receive a number of serious replies, as well.
sxe, your original statement about images being based on 200 year old information is actually closer to the mark. I believe that the oldest painting or mosaic we have dates to the late Second Century (I’m trying to find my reference). Of course, in keeping with the general trend of such portraits, the person portrayed looks basically the way we would portray a generic Greek or Italian, today. He was painted to look like the group for whom the image was created.
Tom~
Anyone remember that episode of Good Times where JJ paints a black Jesus and Michael hangs it on the wall despite Florida’s protests, and the family starts having good luck? Anyone?
He probably looked just like Osama bin Laden.
Actually my name is spelled correctly. you see, the “sxe” stands for “straight edge” which is against drugs, alcohol, etc. the dope was not as in a drug merely the straight dope. (gimme a break im not exactly a person of much creativity)
Well, sxe? Did you get the answer you needed or not?
Tom~
Hello, troll. Got a new on-line persona, eh?
I know who you are M.M.! :mad:
Not too clever, posting the same question in General that you put in Great Debates, is it?
Bad manners? How should I know? I was raised by wolves.