I don’t care if he was purple, his message was be kind to each other and we’ve failed to grasp even that simple philosophy.
We have an American commercial illustrator named Warner Sallman to blame for the canonical Jesus’ melanin deficit.
i think it goes back a little further than some dude from the US…
I have family, DEVOUT Christians, that live in the actual holy land. I asked them “who is that?” in response to their posting a picture of white-as-fuck Jesus on the Facebook page for the family village. They have yet to respond
If I learned anything from all of the Sunday school my parents forced me to go to it’s that Jesus was a white dude with amazing abs.
Levantine people don’t have very dark skin, they definitely aren’t as white as Western Europeans though
Modern Levant and Levant people three thousand years ago are both different in appearance. You can thank the Romans and Crusaders from Europe for changing this.
To expand on this with some small context albeit way older than the Romans. Egyptians gave the Peleset land in the Levant. Theorised that they were warrior peoples of the sea and the Philistines of biblical text somewhere in the late second millennium BC before the bronze age colapse. There is an incredible documentary by Pete Kelly (History Time) on youtube. Well worth the watch. Another great video he did about the Akkadians called The first Empire. He also did a great video about the Hittites. His whole channel is a goldmine of knowledge of the ancient world.
Any way the ancient world is filled with peoples from all over, moving around. Trade was a major factor. War was another. People from all over the Mediterranean and beyond mixed knowledge, their trades, their crafts, blood on battlefields and likely genes. Probably long before there was a written word pressed in clay.
Were all muts.
All the applying of modern ethnic categories here is making my head spin.
I mean, rendering Jesus as a blonde guy is weird, but the way the pushback is parsed is just about as weird in the exact same way.
He rode into battle on his noble T-Rex named Herbert. He can be any color he wants.
If he actually lived it might even matter.
There are historical records of somebody named Jesus that lived at the time. The Bible story is just horse shit. He was an apocalyptic preacher just like today, and probably had undiagnosed schizophrenia, thought he could talk to God, and was the son of God. Plenty of people think that today, and we put them in Institutions instead of create a whole ass religion out of their life.
I will say this, I can’t think of a thing Jesus says in the Bible that isn’t pretty based. He prioritized pragmatism over rules and protocol, compassion and understanding over judgment, generosity over greed, forgiveness over scorn, acts over words. Everyone following his death like Paul seem to be the ones that start to miss the point.
The desire to control people who follow compassionate teachings is what turned sound advice into the dogma we see today. It’s an unfortunate history, not unique to Christianity.
It’s the institutionalisation of religion that’s a problem.
If everyone would just focus on finding their own connection with god/the universe/whatever, nobody would have a problem.Fuck churches and using religion for politics.
That’s why we have the separation of church and state at least - although not enough and currently it’s backpedaling…
I agree he said a lot of cool stuff for sure but ultimately he was an apocalyptic preacher. I think it’s immoral to tell people they need to accept your God or you’ll go to hell, personally, so that’s one not cool thing.
“Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Pretty messed up given that belief is not something you can even really choose.
Yup. Born and die in a place where it wasn’t possible to believe because knowledge hadn’t spread yet? Believe it or not straight to hell.
Fucking paulists ruined Christianity
Knew a theology professor (ended up in his class for credits somehow) who went with the “multiple Jesus’s” theory. Apparently it’s quite possible that stories of a variety of healers/figures got combined into the Jesus mythos. Explains a lot of the time and geographical inconsistencies with the historical record iirc
Could be, it always interesting to get theology professors take on it. A lot of times they were preachers who went into it to understand “god” more, or historical Jesus, and rhen come out of it an atheist or agnostic at least.
I feel like this professor pissed off a lot of students who joined his class expecting sermons or something. Did more to reinforce my atheism than anything else. He was a good dude
The best argument for Jesus’ existence comes from Christopher Hitchens.
It goes like this: We know the nativity story is made up because of the census. There was a census near the time, but it was after Harrod’s death and cannot fit the story. But why fabricate the nativity? Probably because Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to be born in the “city of David”: Bethlehem. So then, if Jesus was invented whole cloth, why not make him Jesus of Bethlehem and save the aggravation?
Yeshua of Nazareth is a historically confirmed individual. He was real, really the son of a god? Probably not.
Since it was a fairly common name, you might as well say John from Richmond is a confirmed individual.
Yes, because historians were like “yeah there was a guy named that, so this religious book must be right about him existing.”
Don’t be daft.
Right, that’s kind of what I’m saying, the book mentions a person with a name and location (ish). Then finding a guy there when the name is fairly common does not equate all things said about him to be true. Far from it it seems. Especially if the book has fantastical claims outside the realm of reality about said person and is inconsistent on his story.
At best you get a King Arthur story, was there a king or ruler in said period for (part of) England? Probably. Did he become king because he pulled out a magical sword from the rock? I would assume not.
There are even stories that Arthur never died and will return one day…
There are historical accounts that align with some of the events that as recorded in the Bible. The person existed and went around claiming to be the son of a god. This we know. The rest of it is myth and legend.
diabitus american in Alabama needs him to be white as a cope
Yeshua Hamashiach, the person modern Christianity knows as Jesus, rumor according to records that have been found, show not only did Yeshua actually exist, they were likely light skinned. That doesn’t mean they were white, and since we have no living person to question, and assuming the romans were being correct in their documents(I think romans, I’m being lazy and not looking it up, also it might be buried in a tome somewhere, or a history journal where they classified someone known as Yeshua Hamashiach as roman inflection or some such meaning lighter skinned), Yeshua might have been somewhere between Ricky Ricardo and the Weekend. Also I’ve never found a lick of evidence for turning water into wine, so not saying the miracles are true or not(miracles can happen, tho I do wonder how many miracles would actually be miracles if we just understood the actual process taking place), but Yeshua Hamashiach, aka Jesus seems to have actually existed. Probably a granola eating hippy type that preached about equality, and freedom for all, and was the first to do so and melted everyone’s damn mind…
He was surely not white like in the images and sculpture but we don’t know how much darker his skin was. Skin color is a big spectrum
Yeah, for all we know he was full on albino
He had albinism, next question
These days it is way more widely accepted
Before it was problematic since religion was used to justify hate crimes against people of color
The original whitewashing
“Too many,” or is “far to many” a new phrase that the younger folk are using? I’m trying to keep up with the changes to language.
There used to be more diversity in the middle east. But there’s been a bunch of genocides since then.
