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Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a White man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact,” a remark she later said was meant in jest.
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First, while the classic Nordic Jesus remains a popular image today in some churches, a movement to replace the White Jesus has long taken root in America. In many Christian circles — progressive mainline churches, churches of color shaped by “liberation theology,” and among Biblical scholars — conspicuous displays of the White Jesus are considered outdated, and to some, offensive. In a rapidly diversifying multicultural America, more Christians want to see a Jesus that looks like them.
But in some parts of the country, the White Jesus never left. The spread of White Christian nationalism has flooded social media feeds with images of the traditional White Jesus, sometimes adorned with a red MAGA hat. Former President Trump is selling a “God Bless the USA Bible” with passages from the Constitution and Bill of Rights — a linking of patriotism with Christianity that reinforces a White image of Jesus that is central to Christian nationalism.
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Blum says the image of a White Jesus has been used to justify slavery, lynching, laws against interracial marriage and hostility toward immigrants deemed not White enough. When Congress passed a law in the early 20th century to restrict immigration from Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, White politicians evoked the White Jesus, he says.
“One of the arguments was, ‘Well, Jesus was White,’ ‘’ Blum says. “So the theme was, we want America to be profoundly Christian or at least Jesus based, so we should only allow White people in this country.”
The MAGA movement uses the image of a White Jesus to weaponize political battles, he says, pointing to signs at the January 6 insurrection displaying a White Jesus, sometimes wearing a red MAGA hat. To Blum, some Christian conservatives see a White MAGA Jesus as “an anti-woke symbol.”
Imaginary mythological creatures can look however you like.
Which is why Korean Jesus is best Jesus.
And ripped AF
There’s no way that dude fell three times while carrying the cross
The cross could be nailed to HIM!
He felled three trees to make new crosses after he reduced the last one to splinters by accident.
It was three lunges, Jesus ahead of his time, , they just hadn’t heard of leg day back then.
Stupid sexy Jesus
You don’t want to run into a biblically accurate Jesus though. Those things are scary.
🥵
Ethiopain Jesus has nice eyes
Ethiopian Jesus looks like an emoji
Much like Bill Bailey, Ethiopian Jesus is a bald man with long hair.
1: Big believer in personal fitness
2: Minds his business. He’s busy with Korean shit.
Gotta save people from window fans.
this was posted by the actual Jesus so I think this is it
In what world would there be a blonde guy in the middle East, what a crazy ass conversation to keep having.
Unbelievable this question is even being asked and just goes to show how little thought people engage in when it comes to religion. If he existed at all of course he would look like any brown/dark skinned person living in the area thousands of years ago.
I could imagine the Romans bringing some blonde soldiers from Germanic tribes though.
White skinned, blonde, blue eyed phenotype occurs in Middle East for ages.
The idea that Jesus couldn’t be white because he was from Palestine is just an extension of a common US racist worldview that makes “muslim” a race and views Middle East as a valid non-white target. It’s nearly as stupid as the idea that Jesus’ skin color matters.
Holy shit you just brought to my attention that Jesus was in fact born in the Palestinian area. I knew that but it didnt click till now. That means Jewish people, who killed Jesus, are now trying to destroy and take over what wouldve been his homeland. How can any Christian who believes in Jesus side with Israel as they’re trying to take over and kill everyone. Im not religious but fuck man thats twisted how the whole world got brainwashed to allow such a thing to happen.
Wow ive gotten at least a couple down votes. I saw this at 3 and now it’s back down to 1.
Theres no debate anymore, the people who killed jesus are now trying to destroy his homeland and take it over. Thats a fact.
the people who killed Jesus
This is clear-cut Christian antisemitism, the justification for more than a millenia of discrimination and ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. You are implying present day Jews have the collective responsibility of killing Jesus.
Also, you are equating Judaism with Israel, which is done by both zionists and antisemites.
are trying to destroy his homeland and take it over
Palestine the country is not Palestine the region. Israel has control over large parts of Palestine, the region. Palestine, the country, does not. Jesus lived in Palestine, the region. Jesus did not live in Palestine, the country or modern-day Israel, the country. His “homelands” have not existed for nearly two millenia since they have been taken over countless of times, be it the British, the Ottomans, the Crusaders and everyone before that.
This is silly. Why is there such a a high burden of proof for Palestinians but not for Europeans? For example, the people of “France” used to speak a Celtic language. The people of “Poland” used to speak a Germanic language. Yet, no one tells the French they are not real or need to go back to the Latin homeland of Rome. The French are the people who’s ancestors lived in France. Regardless of what it used to be called. No one talks about the French never existing before a certain date.
The region’s name may have changed but the people belong to the region. You can see people who lived the same lifestyle with an extremely similar language live in Palestine and Syria since 2300 BC (that’s pretty close to the beginning of written history). Assyrian description tell us that the Amorites were Arabs in everything but identity. Even the old testament says the people of the region descend from Amorite fathers.
Jesus, Israelites, Judahites, Itereans, Edomites, Phoenicians, Qederites, Amorites, Anatolians (Hittites) are Palestinian. The name of the country is just a distraction from the freedom Palestinians deserve.
I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make. I responded to a comment stating:
“The JEWS™ are destroying Jesus’s homelands just like they killed him, why is any Christian supporting the Jews™???”
Additionally, the comment conflates Palestine (region) with Palestine (country). Israel is currently destroying and invading Palestine (country). Israel has controlled large parts of Palestine (region) for many decades and has ethnically cleansed those parts of many non-Jewish Palestinians (region) who have mostly fled into neighboring countries, including Palestine (country).
What I’m trying to say is: It’s a contradiction to argue Israel is destroying Jesus’s homelands because Israel has controlled large parts of Palestine (region) for 80 years. They would’ve either destroyed his homelands already or they wouldn’t have. If it’s the former, Israel cannot destroy “Jesus’s homelands” anymore. If it’s the latter, you’re implying that the current borders of Palestine (country) is “Jesus’s homelands” - which is false, as Palestine (country) only controls a portion of Palestine (region).
Jesus was born in Bethlehem which is part of occupied West Bank. He was supposedly raised in Nazareth, which is Palestinian/Arab; who are always going to suffer some form of discrimination.
Just wait until you hear what’s going on in Jerusalem, a city with sacred meaning to all abrahamic religions. The hypocrisy knows no bounds.
“White people” didn’t exist when Jesus was supposedly alive.
When someone’s existence is based on “faith” (faith that trump is good, faith that the bible was indirectly written by god, faith that jesus was white) logic has no place in their worldview.
I like the recent estimates of his appearance. This artist renders him even less good looking than probably most imagined when they think of someone from that region of the world, which makes me believe it’s closer to appropriate.
Jesus wasn’t a rock star. In Christianity and the new testament, God didn’t portray himself in any way other than meager and a bit of a communist. That’s the beauty of part of the story.
Edit, I think Jesus would have been easy to put on the no fly list, or walk by without a second thought, which is a challenge to our ways of thinking.
He was a dude from Jerusalem. Yeah, he was brown, and looked like… a dude. Because he was a normal-ass human being like everyone else.
You can imagine him as a corgi if it makes you feel better
Aww Jesus wants tum tum time
Dammit now the crucifix is gonna be asking for belly rubs at dinner.
Now I understand Christianity, thank you.
Nailing the goodest pupper to a cross makes you understand Christianity better?
I’d follow this doggo everywhere, no matter how stupid the path.
Welp thinking about Jesus’ butt wasn’t on my list today, but here we are I guess.
Thicc Jesus
I grew up heavily Pentecostal/Evangelical Christian - speaking in tongues, demons are real and possess people, God strikes down the wicked and regularly works miracles, etc. My whole childhood I was surrounded by hundreds of people who did not care about proof. They actually believe the universe is 6,000 years old, that God killed every person, plant, and animal on dry land in a Flood that covered even the highest mountain (~9km) and more nonsense.
So believing that Jesus was literally an impeccably groomed, attractive blue-eyed white man with a bodybuilder’s physique in the Classical Era Middle East is well within the limits of these people’s credulity. They believe things because they are told to do so from childhood, not because they’ve done their homework.
TL;DR: White Christians can often be ignorant racists who stubbornly cling to wrong ideas because they were told it makes them special.
There’s a deacription of what he looked like in the Bible (and newsflash: he isn’t white). But he would have to actually have existed for that to matter.
Jesus definitely existed. The real question is how similar his teachings were to the modern teachings of the churches.
Right, but he was actually called “Brian” and always denied being a holy man.
The only evidence the person existed is the Bible, and the Bible isn’t much proof of anything. There is no actual, tangible archeological evidence of Jesus’ existence as even an ordinary person.
While there’s no “archeological” evidence yet as that would involve literally finding a relic of Jesus or his followers from the short 10 year timespan that his ministry existed, there’s enough other literary and historical evidence to believe he definitely was a person, and the link I sent goes through all of that under the “reception” tab.
I haven’t found a single professor who still adheres to a Mythicist/Denialist view.
bros like “there’s no proof other than the book curated from antiquity”
And also the writings of the “enemies” (Mostly Jewish writers, some Pagan though) of the followers of Jesus 10-30 years after his death (Where his name starts in written records iirc). These are the more reliable sources to academics because it’d be odd/unlikely for the enemies of the followers of Jesus to act like Jesus was a real, historical, and existing person if he was actually just a mythological or figurative invention of the followers.
Is that a broadly accepted historical criteria, or just one of the many made-up ones used by biblical historians? Why would the “enemies” themselves have any reason to think that some dude a lot of people talk about isn’t even real? In a world with no photography, no printing press, no telegraph? How, was there not one single first-hand account? Evidence of belief is not evidence of existence. If it were, we’d have to acknowledge the historical reality of God, Satan, Zeus, Thor, and Bigfoot. At least there are contemporary first-hand claims from people who say they saw Bigfoot.
Is that a broadly accepted historical criteria, or just one of the many made-up ones used by biblical historians?
It’s accepted by literally everyone, there’s fantastical reports about Caesar and Augustus, and yet we don’t think they were just myths. Why? Because they’re well attested by multiple sources.
Why would the “enemies” themselves have any reason to think that some dude a lot of people talk about isn’t even real?
For the same reason you’re doing it now?
How, was there not one single first-hand account?
The closest thing we have to a first-hand account of the life of Jesus is the Gospel of Mark, a book of uncertain authorship (likely wasn’t the Mark the Evangelist or Mark the Apostle that the churches claim) written 30 years after the death of Jesus. The reason it took so long for a record we have to be written is of some debate, but the most agreed upon is that the followers of Jesus likely would’ve been illiterate, and likely so would’ve Jesus himself, and the first gospel was likely only written after decades of “playing telephone” across Hellenistic Jewish communities in the eastern mediterranean. It’s also possible that there was an earlier written record that Mark copied from, but if it exists we haven’t found it, which isn’t exactly surprising for what would likely be basically a 2000 year old pamphlet/small novel.
Evidence of belief is not evidence of existence
True, but it is usually the first step towards finding something that does exist, Jewish writers like Philo of Alexandria believed he existed and apparently had reason to believe he existed since him and all of his contemporaries never thought to question Jesus’s existence. That doesn’t mean that they believed the “divine son of God” Jesus existed, they clearly didn’t and thought of him as any other man.
There’s very few contemporary words attributed to Jesus. Paul, the first “apostle”, started writing about Jesus 40 or so years after his death. Supposedly he met Jesus after resurrection… That’s just a way to say there are no first hand accounts of the real Jesus.
Around 20 years, not 40.
Paul is writing around 50-60 CE.
And there’s definitely at least one alleged firsthand account of what he said, it just isn’t cannonical so you don’t hear much about that claim by the Gospel of Thomas.
Yet you can sort of see Paul referring to some of those statements in what he argued against, such as:
Jesus said, “Let one who has become wealthy reign, and let one who has power renounce it.”
- Thomas 81
Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you.
- 1 Cor 4:8
The Thomasine form of the saying is also very relevant to Pilate’s timeframe, given that’s when Tiberius, the first emperor of Rome to achieve it not by life accomplishments but by dynastic birthright has literally abandoned the position to party all day without renouncing the position of emperor to anyone else.
It’s also the kind of statement that might have ended up with the person saying it killed by the Roman state.
And yet miraculously it doesn’t end up cannonized after Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, converts and had the council of Nicaea decide on what made the cut. Instead the texts that reflected Paul’s schtick and also happened to promote the idea of dynastic monarchy as divine made the cut.
Very convenient for Constantine that the Gospel of Thomas wasn’t cannonized, despite it claiming to have contained sayings directly from a historical Jesus.
Bringing in the non canonical books is funny because you have to accept most the stories are made up, if they were so happy to make up stories what’s to stop them making them all up?
While it’s true that all versions of Jesus can’t all be historical, that’s a very different matter from the claim that all versions are made up.
In fact, it would be one of the only cases I’m aware of in all of history where a made up person had bitter schisms leading to the majority of surviving writings within the first century of making up those stories dedicated to trying to silence the different versions.
But that pattern of behavior is extremely common among sects and cults focused around a real person who then dies or is imprisoned, where the groups fracture and claim different stories or interpretations of the historical figure quickly after they are out of the picture.
If Jesus was made up, we should probably expect one official story of him, similar to Mithrism which emerged around the same time, which had none of the Christian bitter schisms.
Basically, what Paul writes here only twenty years after Jesus’s alleged execution is extremely unusual if Jesus as a figure was entirely made up:
For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. I think that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles.
You basically have an official cannonized version of Jesus that’s dedicated to claiming the women around Jesus “totally saw the empty tomb but didn’t tell anyone” or that women should stay silent (1 Clement) and that women shouldn’t teach (1 Cor), and then a heretical group discussing Jesus’s teachings to female disciples to whom he basically says the men disciples are idiots and claim their female teacher had said Jesus’s sower and mustard seed parables were talking about Lucretius’s “seeds of things” (writing in Latin 50 years before Jesus was born he used the word ‘seed’ in place of the Greek atomos in discussing how randomly scattered atoms were the cause of life where where survived to reproduce is what multiplied).
A parable that btw is also the only one provided a “secret explanation” in the earliest cannonical versions.
I don’t see that level of nuance occurring if the entire thing is made up from scratch only decades earlier.
Corinthians 10 through 13 are widely considered to be written later than the first half of the letter, all Christian documents are heavily edited to try and prove their faith which is one of many reasons to acknowledge they could easily have rewritten early history of spiritual belief to apply to a fictional person.
plus he even sounds like he’s talking about a spiritual Jesus from heaven not a born son - receiving the spirit is how you meet spiritual Jesus, the only Jesus Paul knows - isn’t it weird he doesn’t say ‘other people talking about Jesus are liars, we have living people who knew him in person’… but actualy, where are those people? Why don’t the apostles establish the religion? Peter might have existed maybe for a bit but really in actual history there’s no sign of any affect from any of them - Paul is the first significant figure we can really see and feel in history nut he never met him - all the churches and gospels come from his actions.
We know why there are 12 apostles, no one actually believes Jesus met the magic number of guys and they followed him instantly, they’re not real people and they don’t act real either - but surely Jesus would have had followers so why don’t they run the religion instead of someone who doesn’t even pretend to have met a physical Jesus?
Paul went far far away from anyone that would know the truth and told his story, Christianity developed from these places, highly educated Greek scholars write the books of the Bible from Paul’s teaching - a man who never met Jesus, who only claims to have met James (inconsequential meeting) and Peter though mysteriously doesn’t even mention Peter when writing his letter to the Roman’s…
The bits of the early church we have historic evidence for all come from Paul, if Peter existed the biblical version of him certainly isn’t true and there’s no roman record of him until it’s invented much later and sites are ‘found’ for his resting place - again even the Vatica scholars n accept this.
When you really look at it there’s no room for a historical Jesus but a perfect pathway for a man we know invented his part of the story for personal gain (maybe he had an episode that put the idea of Jesus in his head but it wasn’t based on physical reality)
He didn’t definitely exist and pointing to an outdated consensus does nothing to prove it.
Scholarship is evolving as religious institutions lose control of biblical academia and we’re seeing the envelope get pushed further and further back. Go through a list of things the Bible says about Jesus and modern academics can demonstrate where they came from and that it’s not history. Scholars accept that virtually every aspect of Jesus life and acts is made up so it’s actually a tiny step to accept he was invented as a spiritual being just as the early writings seem to talk about him.
He didn’t definitely exist and pointing to an outdated consensus does nothing to prove it.
Scholarship is evolving as religious institutions lose control of biblical academia and we’re seeing the envelope get pushed further and further back.
Lol alright bud, you got a source for that? Literally every class or professor I’ve ever talked to has said the mythicist view is a minority, and most likely not correct.
lol wat
What are you confused by?
Your response is completely unrelated to the comment you replied to.
Yes it was?
But he would have to actually have existed for that to matter.
The second part of the comment I was replying to implied that Jesus didn’t exist. Which is what I was responding to?
If Jesus was born as a blonde haired blue eyed viking spawn in what is now fookin Palestine, where the Sun is a deadly laser and the only whites are the occasional albinos, that would’ve been the miracle instead of Mary’s “virgin birth”.
Not really. Look closer at the tzaraat ‘leprosy’ where they are performing skin checks regularly looking for irregular and spreading marks:
https://www.thetorah.com/article/tzaraat-as-cancer
You can see there was a white ancestral minority population in ancient Judea given 2 Kings 5:27
Therefore the skin disease of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever.” So he left his presence diseased, as white as snow.
But when we look at accounts before the captivity, a different picture emerges given Lamentations 4:7
Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.
In fact, in one of the Dead Sea scrolls (4Q534) it claimed Noah was a redhead.
What’s probably going on is a revisionary rewriting of history shortly before the Bible as we know it is finalized. Josiah is allegedly introducing reforms opposing the traditions of Jeroboam (described as the son or grandson of a maternal leper), but the reforms appear anachronistic for Josiah given the communications between Elephantine and Jerusalem a century after his reign that don’t reflect them.
We can even see that in between the time the LXX (Greek version) is written and the later Masoretic version that there’s been rewriting of history around Jeroboam in 1 Kings 11-14 which has events attributed to him (sometimes doubled up) in the earlier version attributed to others in the later version. As Idan Dershowitz’s book on the topic discussed, early Biblical edits may have been literally copy and pasted together, and one of the tells are duplicate stories.
Personally, I think there’s something to Hecateus of Adbera’s claim that the history of the Jews had recently been edited and changed under Persian and Macedonian rule.
In particular, we’re now finding rather extensive evidence of sea peoples settlement and cohabitation around the early Israelites, with the Denyen as actually a great fit for the lost tribe of Dan, and there may well have been an endogamous matrilineal minority population in Judea that persisted throughout the ages.
And in general, you might be surprised at how ancient peoples might have looked in antiquity. Ramses II in his forensic report was described as having pale skin and red hair (not just dyed with henna but at the actual root), like the neighboring Libyan Berbers. Or the indigenous Ganache of an African isle.
We tend to mess up how we think people looked or underappreciate how diverse populations may have been because of anachronistic back projections.
I don’t know. The Kurds are pretty pale and have light colored hair. Thats not too far off.
He was literally middle eastern so yeah.
I seriously doubt that “Jesus” from the Christian bible actually existed. Most likely a man with the same name existed and eventually morphed into a folk hero of sorts. That being said, the individual whom the Jesus myth is based on was absolutely from the Middle East. Even Christians won’t argue this. He had to have been some shade of “not white.”
A man by his name existed. But remember we’re talking about middle east, some 2000 years ago.
But wait a second, there is also this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna Among christians, the cult of dark skinned Mary statues existed long before conservative american christians were a thing. I have seen a couple of these statue and you can see them immediately. Important, notable, detailed and often precious. They sit in their niche, silent.
Another suggestion is that dark-skinned representations of pre-Christian deities were re-envisioned as the Madonna and child.[3]
I think the whiteness is often associated with purity, but in many cases that isn’t the whiteness of the skin colour (see the aformentioned examples). Even in the mediterranean are as a whole skin tones can be varied, often confusing the american representation of what is black and white.
Melville spends a chapter comparing the different interpretations of whiteness in Moby Dick. This article talks about that, but I recommend reading the chapter if you get a chance.
In Monterey CA, there are angel decorations that go up every year at Christmas. The designs were originally painted in the 50s and the artist made them brown skinned, inspired by Native American artists’ depictions of angels.
How is this even a question? Of course he was.
I have never met a white Jesus, they have all been varying shades of brown.
Korean Jesus is the best Jesus.
He busy doing Korean shit
