I recently visited a church with a painting of John the Baptist and Jesus and, well…
Holy shit that’s amazing.
“What colour was John the Baptist?”
Well, most people there are brown, so brown!
“Uhh, then what colour is Jesus?”
The fuck you mean by that? He’s Jesus!
I mean there are white arabs/people in that area, but yeah very selective in their portrayal of christ
He knows. Doesn’t want to admit it, but he knows.
Jesus is the son of God, not of Joseph. Of course he is white.
You mean Juan the Baptist?
Juanito the Baptisto
That’s his Mexican Luche name
I had someone on reddit argue that the icons show “white” people on their gravestones, so he was probably white. I think he really believed it and it was pretty hilarious to see them do brain exercises to get Jesus to be white. Never mind that the coloring was probably adjusted on the screen, the pigment was falling off and they were 2000 years old. Also, it’s encaustic, which is painting with wax and has a sheen.
This is the one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encaustic_painting#/media/File:EncausticPortraitWoman.jpg
Who looks at that painting and thinks that woman is white?
I love this, the picture looks very not-western-european (caucasian), and everything “not allochtoon”.
Looks like Stallone.
brilliant photoshop
Ever see how close Italy is to Tunisia? It’s crazy to think there wasn’t a little something going on.
Should’ve used Rice Christies.
Wdym? Of course everyone named jesus here is white, blond and blue-eyed. Don’t you know how the middle east works?
Don’t you know how the middle east works?
Violently?
The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it’s totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.
Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews.
Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.
So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.
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So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian
Who were, incidentally, also not white untill very recently. Even a hundred years ago, a lot of people didn’t consider Italians to be white people.
Except that theory is flawed if you consider the ramifications of the Islamic conquest followed by European crusades, and then you have the Ottoman, French, British, and most recently, Israeli occupation. A lot of rape/interbreeding happened throughout.
I live in Egypt and whole providences here are full of green/blue eyes and blonde/ginger hair as a consequence.
Edit: also forgot the Mongolian hordes. It’s the Middle East, a lot of shit went down tbh
Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it’s important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of “white genes” to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don’t think it’s a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That’s not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.
So they are basically Palestinian?
A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn’t call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don’t speak Arabic.
Sorry what? Palestinian Arabic is what people no matter if Jewish, Christian, Druze, Muslim, … have been speaking in Palestine. People haven’t been speaking Hebrew there since some thousands of years save for religious purposes. This is equivalent to Italians not speaking Latin, Orthodox people not speaking Old Church Slavonic in every day life. This got only changed in the course of the colonization of Palestine. I recommend Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who wrote a very informative book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine where the language topic and demographics before Zionist colonialism are also discussed.
That’s correct. The Samaritans used to speak Samaritan Hebrew, then Samaritan Aramaic and then Palestinian Arabic which was then the main language for at least 800 years. However as I understand they have now mostly switched to Hebrew as they have integrated into the isreali state. This is however a very modern phenomenon.
Just to be annoying, first you could argue that Jews were a separate ethnic group with distinct characteristics, or that modern people in the Middle East are descendants of Turkic tribes that came to occupy Anatolia after the fall of the eastern Roman empire
You’re right, that is annoying!
So, you’re saying the people in the middle east were a lot more brown in the year 0 right?
There’s no year 0. There’s year 1 BC, followed by year 1 AD.
I’m saying I have no idea what the Romans found when they conquered that part of the world. Wonder if there are any historical Roman records
There probably are records, but I would be very suspicious if they mentioned skin colour.
Oh, no, the Romans were quite prolific in their criticism of anyone who wasn’t also Roman. Especially when it came to both their language and their physical characteristics. The shit they said about the Gauls was absurd.
And from pretty much every area they conquered, they took a gigantic amount of slaves.
Everybody took slaves from prisoners of war in any conflict, not just the Romans. Slavery was ius commune, it had nothing to do with ethnicity and it fit in very different social and anthropological functions across all societies of the period. Everybody stop it with the application of modern, anglocentric concepts to ancient Mediterranean cultures. It was cute when you were just building a whole bunch of anachronistic white marble columns, but that’s as much as I can tolerate.
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Tunisia is an overnight ferry ride from Sicily
Idk about the Romans, but pretty sure the Portuguese did report with surprise the existence of dark brown people in sub Saharan Africa during the age of discovery
Frankly, way less annoying than Americans trying to apply a concept of “whiteness” to first century social dynamics.
