Jesus Is Black. Get over it.: The Critical Race Theory of Christianity
Actually my favorite bit is the part in the description that says,
…This book is not another lecture to white people about race….
…after almost 400 words lecturing white people on race.
Right, ‘cuz, we’d all think that “Mark Wayne” is a black guy…
While I’m all for lecturing white people about race, I’m still almost 100% sure Jesus (if he existed) wasn’t a black man.
Well, I suppose he could be an Ethiopian Jew….
I expect he was indistinguishable from most of the other Judean Jews of that era.
Pretty much.
I think the point, though, is that he (probably) wasn’t the blue-eyed,light-skinned person that is portrayed in most American churches.
No, but historically, most communities of believers made him look like them. Europeans painted him as a European. Coptic Christians had him looking Egyptian. When Christianity reached the Orient, Jesus had a decidedly Asian look.
Nor do I think that “is portrayed” is necessarily true. Most contemporary renderings have him looking at least plausibly Jewish, and Jonathan Roumie of “The Chosen” definitely pulls off the Semitic look.
Light-skinned? Sometimes. Blue-eyed? Not in any American church where I’ve been (and I’ve been to both sophisticated urban churches and rustic little rural chapels). Modern depictions are mostly based on the imprints on the Shroud of Turin (the authenticity of which is hotly disputed to this day) and what are known (thanks to archaeological excavations) to have been common features on ancient Mediterranean Jews, particularly in Judea itself; exactly how pale or dusky Jesus’ skin might have been is not so easy to determine from any of those artifacts.
If by “black” the author means simply “not white” then we’d pretty much all have to agree; by the old racial “one drop” standard, up until Emperor Claudius conquered the isle of Britannia, pretty much nobody in the entire frickin’ Roman Empire was white! I suspect the gadfly wannabe who wrote this crap figured that Jesus Is Not White (Get Over It) would not have been so controversial and provocative a title, however.
Waaaalllll….honestly, there are a host of pretty dang “white” skinned folks, before Claudius decided that he had a yen for the UK. (yes, yes, people, I know, you needn’t say it.). The Germans, for one thing and anybody who has spent ANY time in northern Italy knows that blue-eyed blondes are rampant there. Let’s not forget the French, whilst we are at it. And I think that most Italians would bristle at the description of “not white.”
As I say, that’s according to the old “one drop” rule. French and German and Italian people tend to have pretty pale complexions now, but that’s mostly due to all those pale-faced barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire and settled its territory and interbred with the survivors of its collapse. Before that… and for quite some time after its downfall, actually… the vast majority of Romans were all rather well-bronzed at the very least; enough so that according to the Venerable Bede, Pope Gregory the Great considered a couple of pale-complexioned fair-haired Angles from Britannia a remarkable sight in his time.
Bottom line: Jesus was no African no matter what this author may pretend, but I’m also quite certain he was no pale-face either. In his time, my pale white ancestors were mostly up in the frigid northern wastes and the British Isles painting themselves blue and eating each other while people with duskier complexions were busy ruling the world.
I wasn’t talking about the one-drop rule. The Roman provinces of Germania extended well into modern-day Germany, Belgium, France, the northern border of what today is Europe…they manumitted captured slaves left, right and center, and then promptly interbred with them.
I won’t continue to argue the point, but despite the Venerable Bede, I suspect that lighter-skinned “Romans” and citizens of the then-Roman Empire existed long before Bede noticed. Just sayin’.
I do absolutely agree that unless the Bible as an historical document is completely cattywampus, Jesus was not a black person. Semitic, yup! Black as that is commonly understood today, nope.