Th1nk3r

Would anyone care to ellaborate on this matter?

I am asking because I recently participated in a debate on the skin color of Jesus and, unfortunately, the discussion did not touch many historical arguments, remaining more on the side of bible based assertions. Since i have no extensive knowledge of ancient greek and hebrew, I was unable to verify some verses in the Bible on the tribe of Juda and some of the apostles being black people...

Doctor X

He WAS PURE WHITE ARYAN!!! [Stop it!--Ed.]

Right . . . sorry . . . anyways, Th1nk3r, everyone tries to makes their founding figure exactly what they want.

If a historical figure existed, he was Jewish. He was not black, he did not have blue eyes, he did not have long-straight blonde hair, . . .

I am unaware of any biblical versus that describes any of them reliably, if at all. Of course, this does not mean people cannot read whatever they want into a text.

--J.D.

Th1nk3r

Then i guess this will become a debate about the way jewish people looked back in 33 AD.

To have a starting point on this debate, i will mention some biblical arguments mentioned by the supporters of a black Jesus (and some historical ones as well) that i encountered so far:
I was told that the word jew is actually a transliteration of a name in Genesis and using it for the "chosen people" falsely describes this population as homogenous. The twelve tribes were presumably different, and someone even interpreted the original hebrew version of Jeremiah 14:2 to prove that Juda's tribe were black.
Acts 13:1 says of Simon that he is called Niger, which in greek is not a name as translators let us to believe, but it is an adjective meaning "black-skinned". I can't say for sure, but i tend to agree that niger is the greek source of the latin "nagra" meaning black.
Someone said Simon from Acts 13:1, which was black, is the same one from Mathew 13:55, which was one of Jesus' brothers.

Historically speaking now:
On the hair, it was said in the debate from which i got the idea of opening this thread, that there is a coin in the British Museum from the times of Justinian II and Jesus has thick curly hair that could not be of any caucasian. It resembles an afro cut more than anything else.
There is also the matter of the early statues discovered in the catacombs of Rome, where he was depicted as black as well. Early churches, such as the Ethiopian Coptic Church and some european cathedrals have paintings of a black Jesus.

Do any of these arguments make sense? Are they valid, can they be used in sustaining a black Jesus?
Are there other serious arguments either way that i did not mention yet?

Doctor X

Th1nk3r:

Well, "Jew" comes from from Judah, as in the country. I would have to search the derivation, but--and this will piss off your audience--chuck Genesis as history.

Jeremiah is a fairly late text, but I have in the RSV for 14:2

. . . okay . . . I am not sure where they get that from.

Checking my Greek Nestle NT, the word is Niger and the Criticus Apparatus does not list a variant. The word is not listed in the Liddel-Scott-Jones lexicon. Wandering through other sources it means "black." Now does that mean "black" as in "African" or "black" as in "dark complexion" I have no idea from context. Much of Lk-Acts is a justification for teaching to Gentiles rather than Jews. However, even if an African, that does not say anything about Junior or anyone else.

[quote]Historically speaking now:

Well these are all late depictions . . . and calling curly hair an Afro . . . people will see what they want to see. There are no depictions contemporary to him of him--or else we would not be having these "myth versus historical arguments." In fact, you could read some of the "myth" threads such as the one on Earl Doherty. That will rather quash them.

--J.D.

StillDreaming

According to his followers Isaiah spoke of him:
"He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." (Is 53:2)

So he must have been really ugly.
But I don't know about his skin color.

Doctor X

StillDreaming:

Though Isaiah is not trying to describe Junior.

Maybe he is describing Michael Jackson . . . prophecy is TRUE!!!!

--J.D.

beanpie

You probably already know that Christ was a Black man....

.... according to the Bible, called the "Lamb" of God, with kinky hair
compared with lamb's wool, feet the color of burnt brass (Rev. 1:14,15) and a
likeness resembling jasper and sardine stone (sard / sardonyx), which are
commonly "brownish" stones. (Rev. 4:3). ALL the earliest pictures and statues
of Christ depict him as Black. In the catacombs of Rome where images of Jesus
appear for the first time, black paintings and statues of Christ, the Madonna,
Apostles and Biblical characters still survive from early Christian worship.
The most sacred icons of the Catholic Church and also, prominent cathedrals in
Europe are the Black Madonna and Christ child. In the British Museum, a gold

FOR PIC OF "JESUS" ON ROMAN COIN http://www.ibiblio.org/nge/blacked/bl1.html
coin struck in the time of the Roman emperor Justinian II, shows Christ with
tightly curled, wooly hair. J.A. Rogers reports in Sex & Race Vol. 1, p292
that the Cambridge Encyclopedia Co. says that this coin places beyond doubt
"the fact that Jesus Christ was a Negro."

slept2long

14 His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; 15 And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters

Revelations 1:14-15

I am not familiar with this subject so I guess there could be other descriptions of him in the Bible.

beanpie

sounds like a description of a Black, to me.

The Evil One

If Jesus existed, then his racial type was doubtless pretty much the same as the inhabitants of that area today - ie the Palestinians and those Jews whose ancestors did not spend the intervening centuries in Europe.

However, the art of every single Christian group through history, so far as I am aware, has depicted Jesus as being of their own racial group.

A broader point is that the question is fallacious. The contemporary notion of "race" did not exist at the time, and to impose our notions of race onto a time which ahd no such notions, is an anachronism. The same fallacy can be found in afrocentric history.