Roger Pearse

Try reading my comment, rather than reiterating your own. Learning starts with opening your eyes.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

figuer

That from someone who goes around with his eyes wide shot.

Roger Pearse

Probably best not to make assertions like that about strangers.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

figuer

Self-identified Christians are not strangers to me.

show_no_mercy

You might want to look a bit beyond the KJ bible in order to participate more fully in conversation here.

Toto

Hi all - let's try to avoid the personal sniping and digressions that just create more work for the moderators and get back to this interesting question of why Athanasius, described up to the 20th century as a short, fair, red haired, vertically challenged person (a "dwarf", according to Julian), is now almost universally referred to as the "black dwarf."

The first identifiable source for this is a popular textbook written by the Cuban born Justo_Gonzalez, a Methodist trained at Yale. Gonzalez is retired, but I don't see an indication of an email address. He appears to be bilingual - was this phrase a translation from the Spanish? Was he reading a source that he did not footnote? Did an error creep in that has been repeated on countless web pages?

figuer

I apologize for my misbehaviour...

gentleexit

Could you give more details? (and how you got it!) I couldn't find anything before "The Holy Fire" (1957) you mention above.

Toto

I am just using the information on this thread. Andrew Criddle suggested that Gonzalez was the source, and this seems credible - he wrote a textbook that appears to be in widespread use.

The "Holy Fire" does not use the term "black dwarf." It does say that "his skin was blackish," and that "more than one commentator refers to the unusual darkness of his skin." But all previous books that we can find call him fair complexioned. The only source mentioned is Gregory of Nazianzen, who does not comment on Athanasius' skin color.

And the author of Holy Fire seems to be novelist and poet Pierre Stephen Robert Payne. The Amazon reviewer notes: So as a historical source, this should probably be ignored, until its sources can be discovered.

gentleexit

Me bad. Scan on the run.

But it (originally 1957 but rereleased in 1980) seems to be the first to say "enemies" (vs an enemy i.e. Julian) called Athanasius a dwarf. This brings "called 'black dwarf' by his enemies" one step closer. Then, as Andrew said, 1984 has Gonzalez who ties "black" in.

Search for "black dwarf" and Athanasius on google books and the next book is from 1995, when the "respected black leader" Tony Evans (using Gonzalez?) turns Athanasius into a black hero. He's backed up by 1997's "Defending Black Faith".

Conclusion?: one enemy Julian became enemies in 1980. Dwarf became black dwarf in 1984 and in the mid nineties, an African-American hero is born. All done in "respectable" books, before the internet and its creative ability.