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That's just factually wrong. The Middle East (and by extension the Levant) has always been a hotbed of diversity because its unique geography.
You would have found anything from black to pale white (but tanned obviously) skin, black to blond/red hair, brown to blue eyes. Most were darker skinned and dark haired like a modern Middle Eastener, but it wasn't a monoculture, like implied here.
Easiest counter example are the Scythians, but there are countless more.
While this is true, I feel like this is more a jab at how jesus is so whitewashed he'd make wainscoting blush, given that we have a pretty good idea that he would in fact, not be SO light skinned.
also jesus is a white name so…
Yeshua isn't
We just went over this, it's a Mediterranean civilization name which means anything goes
Jesus is a Mexican name, smh
Heh-zuz!
To add a bit to that: Greeks and Turks are pretty much physically identical, but one is seen as "whiter" than the other (guess which). The eastern end of the Mediterranean saw all sorts of people from northern Africa and southern Europe because of the ease of sailing across the coast, even with the relative low technology of ships from 3,000+ years ago.
If the jews of today, especially the ones that never left the Levant, are a faithful picture of their ancestors of ~2000 years ago, then it's not too much of a stretch to assume Jesus could've been white, or "white".
Side note: gotta love (/s) how much importance is still given to skin color. I'd love to see people throwing hex codes around instead of color names. "We don't like fceadc here!"
Kill #FFFFFF'ey!
I've never seen a #000000 before!
Tbh the only thing I have as a counter argument is that he was poor and likely had a tan
I mean, he was a carpenter. He was literally working outside on houses all day.
With days off working inside the workshop fixing a chair or a table, i'd wager
Carpenters have been able to support a family throughout history until the very recent present.
Yea I can see how it looks like I was calling Jesus a hobo when I was trying to say he simply wasn't a uber wealthy guy during his time like the dude was born in a barn I don't know much about Christianity but I do know the entire point of Jesus was that he was a normal dude with magic miracle powers
I get you. Let me introduce you to colourism.
Mixed-race and lighter-skinned Black people often benefit from colourism through their proximity to whiteness
https://news.yahoo.com/voices-thandiwe-newton-tearful-speech-173129185.html
There's literally a Dead Sea Scroll talking about how Noah was a redhead, 2 Kings 5:27 is about how the descendants of someone among them are all "white as snow," and the only sample of ancient Jewish hair from 1st century Judea was reddish brown.
The whole "there weren't white people in the middle east when Jesus was around" is one of the most misinformed popular "confidently incorrect" phrases to be thrown out these days.
There's a decent chance he was olive skinned and dark haired based on the demographics, but there was a much wider array of appearances in the region than most people realize.
Edit:
but tanned obviously
Well, I wouldn't be too sure about that either.
Take for example Lamentations 4:7
Her nazirites were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.
Considering this in light of things like Strong Founder Effect in Israeli Oculocutaneous Albinism Type I (OCAI) Populations, along with the modern consideration of Biblical leprosy as melanoma something that occurs at a 1,000x rate of the non-albino population in Africa (redheads develop it at a 10 to 100x rate), and there may well have been pale people in the time and place who just looked sunburned most of the time (until inevitably developing skin diseases).
The reddish brown haired fellow from the 1st century had been exposed to lepers, and the 2 Kings 5:27 reference also referred to the descendants with skin as white as snow as being lepers.
So even the assumption of having a tan may be out of touch with the historical reality.
Putting aside from the albinism.
their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.
I'm thinking this is referencing any usually covered parts of their body. By tanned I mean, the part of the skin exposed to sunlight, so mostly their hands, face and feet.
Just for additional context on the Lamentations 4:7 line, the Nazarite vow involved taking a cow that was entirely red, without a single hair that wasn't red, and sacrificing it.
And part of those vows involved being unable to cut one's hair.
With a number of people having been identified as being Nazarites from birth.
So putting aside albinism/redheads might not be prudent in analyzing this particular passage.
Easiest counter example are the Scythians
Never heard of them. Can you elaborate?
Think Huns, but they're Aryan (Indo-Iranians called themselves that).
Eurasian steppe people, so horse-warrior nomads, 2900 to 1800 years ago, spoke the Scythian language (member of the Eastern Iranic language family). Mostly Indo-European, more specifically Irano-Aryan, but mixed with Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) ancestry (think speakers of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic people) the further you go East. But the Scytho-Siberian world included some other peoples from Central Asia and Siberia, Eastern Europe.
Their way of life probably originated in the East in southern Siberia more on the ANA side of the spectrum and then it migrated west and picked up more Indo-European traits.
They like horses, gold, war, Phrygian caps, various hard drugs, weird sex rituals, animal&human sacrifices and possibly even cannibalism.
On their religion from Wikipedia: "According to Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the Scythians worshipped a pantheon of seven gods and goddesses (heptad), which he equates with Greek divinities of Classical Antiquity following the interpretatio graeca. He mentioned eight deities divided into three ranks, with this structure of the Scythian pantheon being typically Indo-Iranic:
- In the first rank was the head of the pantheon:
Tabiti, the Flaming One, who was the goddess of heat, fire and the hearth
- In the second rank were the binary opposites and the father and mother of the universe:
Api, the Earth and Water Mother
Papaios, the Sky Father
3)The third and final rank was composed of four deities with specific characteristics:
Targī̆tavah, the forefather of the Scythian kings
The Scythian "Ares," the god of war
Gaiϑāsūra, who might have been associated with the Sun
Artimpasa, a more complex goddess who was a patron of fertility and had power over sovereignty and the priestly force
An eighth Scythian deity mentioned by Herodotus was Thagimasadas, who was worshipped only by the tribe of the Royal Scythians.
This pantheon was a reflection of the Scythian cosmology, headed by the primeval fire which was the basic essence and the source of all creation, following which came the Earth-Mother and Sky-Father who created the gods, the latter of whom were the four custodians of the four sides of the world regulating the universe.[11] The world inhabited by humans existed between this celestial realm and the chthonic realm below the earth.[8]"
Here's a few illustrations:
WSH here is basically Indo-European, BMAC is Neolithic Iranian and ANA as explained earlier, like Mongols etc.:
The first chad meme, I guess?
Very interesting, thanks!