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.
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!"
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.
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?
Since when is everyone in the middle east "brown". Depending on where in the middle east you are you can find a lot of white passing people. If Jesus existed then he would have been born in the levant. Most people there (not exactly everyone however) are white passing. Here is a school in Lebanon for reference
I don't completely disagree with you about not everyone being brown, but comparing a photo of modern people to those 2000+ years ago is disingenuous. A lot has happened to the gene pool since, not to mention living conditions and skin protection have improved dramatically.
People just don't realize the actual history when they comment on stuff like this.
Like most people tend to disbelieve when they see redhead and fair skinned Lybian Bernbers that they represent an indigenous African population from pre-history (though technically there's evidence they came down from Europe during the tail end of the ice age).
In fact, Ramses II's forensic report from when they shipped his body to France for examination reported he had red hair and fair skin like a Lybian Berber (which is particularly interesting given the Greek story of Danaus, Lybian brother to the Pharoh who had 50 sons, given Ramses II also had 48-50 recorded sons).
The Mediterranean was much more of a giant melting pot than most people realize. Heck, it was more of a melting pot than most scholars realized given some of the surprises just in the past two years regarding genetic export from North Africa across much of the Mediterranean as opposed to the previous view of mostly import to North Africa from the Phonecians.
I'd recommend most people set aside their preconceptions, because relying on them will almost certainly lead to misinformed positions.
Just a side piece to the discussion: many of the surviving paints of Christ are biased by the author towards appearing more like the people of the area, in addition to symbolism of the era. Christ Pantocrator of St. Catherine's Monastery is one of the oldest depictions of Christ and deviates from the modern European style.
I'm so proud of this place that there's not a single comment in here for a mod to even consider looking at.
Idk man I see something else in this picture entirely
Jesus was black tho
thatsthejoke.jpeg
