Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a White man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact,” a remark she later said was meant in jest.

First, while the classic Nordic Jesus remains a popular image today in some churches, a movement to replace the White Jesus has long taken root in America. In many Christian circles — progressive mainline churches, churches of color shaped by “liberation theology,” and among Biblical scholars — conspicuous displays of the White Jesus are considered outdated, and to some, offensive. In a rapidly diversifying multicultural America, more Christians want to see a Jesus that looks like them.

But in some parts of the country, the White Jesus never left. The spread of White Christian nationalism has flooded social media feeds with images of the traditional White Jesus, sometimes adorned with a red MAGA hat. Former President Trump is selling a “God Bless the USA Bible” with passages from the Constitution and Bill of Rights — a linking of patriotism with Christianity that reinforces a White image of Jesus that is central to Christian nationalism.

Blum says the image of a White Jesus has been used to justify slavery, lynching, laws against interracial marriage and hostility toward immigrants deemed not White enough. When Congress passed a law in the early 20th century to restrict immigration from Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, White politicians evoked the White Jesus, he says.

“One of the arguments was, ‘Well, Jesus was White,’ ‘’ Blum says. “So the theme was, we want America to be profoundly Christian or at least Jesus based, so we should only allow White people in this country.”

The MAGA movement uses the image of a White Jesus to weaponize political battles, he says, pointing to signs at the January 6 insurrection displaying a White Jesus, sometimes wearing a red MAGA hat. To Blum, some Christian conservatives see a White MAGA Jesus as “an anti-woke symbol.”

  • gregorum@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Imaginary mythological creatures can look however you like.

  • Skkorm@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    In what world would there be a blonde guy in the middle East, what a crazy ass conversation to keep having.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Unbelievable this question is even being asked and just goes to show how little thought people engage in when it comes to religion. If he existed at all of course he would look like any brown/dark skinned person living in the area thousands of years ago.

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
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      8 months ago

      White skinned, blonde, blue eyed phenotype occurs in Middle East for ages.

      The idea that Jesus couldn’t be white because he was from Palestine is just an extension of a common US racist worldview that makes “muslim” a race and views Middle East as a valid non-white target. It’s nearly as stupid as the idea that Jesus’ skin color matters.

      • Breezy@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Holy shit you just brought to my attention that Jesus was in fact born in the Palestinian area. I knew that but it didnt click till now. That means Jewish people, who killed Jesus, are now trying to destroy and take over what wouldve been his homeland. How can any Christian who believes in Jesus side with Israel as they’re trying to take over and kill everyone. Im not religious but fuck man thats twisted how the whole world got brainwashed to allow such a thing to happen.

        • Breezy@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Wow ive gotten at least a couple down votes. I saw this at 3 and now it’s back down to 1.

          Theres no debate anymore, the people who killed jesus are now trying to destroy his homeland and take it over. Thats a fact.

          • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
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            8 months ago

            the people who killed Jesus

            This is clear-cut Christian antisemitism, the justification for more than a millenia of discrimination and ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. You are implying present day Jews have the collective responsibility of killing Jesus.

            Also, you are equating Judaism with Israel, which is done by both zionists and antisemites.

            are trying to destroy his homeland and take it over

            Palestine the country is not Palestine the region. Israel has control over large parts of Palestine, the region. Palestine, the country, does not. Jesus lived in Palestine, the region. Jesus did not live in Palestine, the country or modern-day Israel, the country. His “homelands” have not existed for nearly two millenia since they have been taken over countless of times, be it the British, the Ottomans, the Crusaders and everyone before that.

            • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              This is silly. Why is there such a a high burden of proof for Palestinians but not for Europeans? For example, the people of “France” used to speak a Celtic language. The people of “Poland” used to speak a Germanic language. Yet, no one tells the French they are not real or need to go back to the Latin homeland of Rome. The French are the people who’s ancestors lived in France. Regardless of what it used to be called. No one talks about the French never existing before a certain date.

              The region’s name may have changed but the people belong to the region. You can see people who lived the same lifestyle with an extremely similar language live in Palestine and Syria since 2300 BC (that’s pretty close to the beginning of written history). Assyrian description tell us that the Amorites were Arabs in everything but identity. Even the old testament says the people of the region descend from Amorite fathers.

              Jesus, Israelites, Judahites, Itereans, Edomites, Phoenicians, Qederites, Amorites, Anatolians (Hittites) are Palestinian. The name of the country is just a distraction from the freedom Palestinians deserve.

              • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
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                8 months ago

                I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make. I responded to a comment stating:

                “The JEWS™ are destroying Jesus’s homelands just like they killed him, why is any Christian supporting the Jews™???”

                Additionally, the comment conflates Palestine (region) with Palestine (country). Israel is currently destroying and invading Palestine (country). Israel has controlled large parts of Palestine (region) for many decades and has ethnically cleansed those parts of many non-Jewish Palestinians (region) who have mostly fled into neighboring countries, including Palestine (country).

                What I’m trying to say is: It’s a contradiction to argue Israel is destroying Jesus’s homelands because Israel has controlled large parts of Palestine (region) for 80 years. They would’ve either destroyed his homelands already or they wouldn’t have. If it’s the former, Israel cannot destroy “Jesus’s homelands” anymore. If it’s the latter, you’re implying that the current borders of Palestine (country) is “Jesus’s homelands” - which is false, as Palestine (country) only controls a portion of Palestine (region).

                • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Jesus was born in Bethlehem which is part of occupied West Bank. He was supposedly raised in Nazareth, which is Palestinian/Arab; who are always going to suffer some form of discrimination.

        • relevants@feddit.de
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          8 months ago

          Just wait until you hear what’s going on in Jerusalem, a city with sacred meaning to all abrahamic religions. The hypocrisy knows no bounds.

  • RedFox@infosec.pub
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    8 months ago

    I like the recent estimates of his appearance. This artist renders him even less good looking than probably most imagined when they think of someone from that region of the world, which makes me believe it’s closer to appropriate.

    Jesus wasn’t a rock star. In Christianity and the new testament, God didn’t portray himself in any way other than meager and a bit of a communist. That’s the beauty of part of the story.

    Edit, I think Jesus would have been easy to put on the no fly list, or walk by without a second thought, which is a challenge to our ways of thinking.

    • SuiXi3D@fedia.io
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      8 months ago

      He was a dude from Jerusalem. Yeah, he was brown, and looked like… a dude. Because he was a normal-ass human being like everyone else.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    TL;DR: White Christians can often be ignorant racists who stubbornly cling to wrong ideas because they were told it makes them special.

  • GrymEdm@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I grew up heavily Pentecostal/Evangelical Christian - speaking in tongues, demons are real and possess people, God strikes down the wicked and regularly works miracles, etc. My whole childhood I was surrounded by hundreds of people who did not care about proof. They actually believe the universe is 6,000 years old, that God killed every person, plant, and animal on dry land in a Flood that covered even the highest mountain (~9km) and more nonsense.

    So believing that Jesus was literally an impeccably groomed, attractive blue-eyed white man with a bodybuilder’s physique in the Classical Era Middle East is well within the limits of these people’s credulity. They believe things because they are told to do so from childhood, not because they’ve done their homework.

  • SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    If Jesus was born as a blonde haired blue eyed viking spawn in what is now fookin Palestine, where the Sun is a deadly laser and the only whites are the occasional albinos, that would’ve been the miracle instead of Mary’s “virgin birth”.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Not really. Look closer at the tzaraat ‘leprosy’ where they are performing skin checks regularly looking for irregular and spreading marks:

      https://www.thetorah.com/article/tzaraat-as-cancer

      You can see there was a white ancestral minority population in ancient Judea given 2 Kings 5:27

      Therefore the skin disease of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever.” So he left his presence diseased, as white as snow.

      But when we look at accounts before the captivity, a different picture emerges given Lamentations 4:7

      Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.

      In fact, in one of the Dead Sea scrolls (4Q534) it claimed Noah was a redhead.

      What’s probably going on is a revisionary rewriting of history shortly before the Bible as we know it is finalized. Josiah is allegedly introducing reforms opposing the traditions of Jeroboam (described as the son or grandson of a maternal leper), but the reforms appear anachronistic for Josiah given the communications between Elephantine and Jerusalem a century after his reign that don’t reflect them.

      We can even see that in between the time the LXX (Greek version) is written and the later Masoretic version that there’s been rewriting of history around Jeroboam in 1 Kings 11-14 which has events attributed to him (sometimes doubled up) in the earlier version attributed to others in the later version. As Idan Dershowitz’s book on the topic discussed, early Biblical edits may have been literally copy and pasted together, and one of the tells are duplicate stories.

      Personally, I think there’s something to Hecateus of Adbera’s claim that the history of the Jews had recently been edited and changed under Persian and Macedonian rule.

      In particular, we’re now finding rather extensive evidence of sea peoples settlement and cohabitation around the early Israelites, with the Denyen as actually a great fit for the lost tribe of Dan, and there may well have been an endogamous matrilineal minority population in Judea that persisted throughout the ages.

      And in general, you might be surprised at how ancient peoples might have looked in antiquity. Ramses II in his forensic report was described as having pale skin and red hair (not just dyed with henna but at the actual root), like the neighboring Libyan Berbers. Or the indigenous Ganache of an African isle.

      We tend to mess up how we think people looked or underappreciate how diverse populations may have been because of anachronistic back projections.

  • corroded@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I seriously doubt that “Jesus” from the Christian bible actually existed. Most likely a man with the same name existed and eventually morphed into a folk hero of sorts. That being said, the individual whom the Jesus myth is based on was absolutely from the Middle East. Even Christians won’t argue this. He had to have been some shade of “not white.”

    • RatBin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      A man by his name existed. But remember we’re talking about middle east, some 2000 years ago.

      But wait a second, there is also this:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna Among christians, the cult of dark skinned Mary statues existed long before conservative american christians were a thing. I have seen a couple of these statue and you can see them immediately. Important, notable, detailed and often precious. They sit in their niche, silent.

      Another suggestion is that dark-skinned representations of pre-Christian deities were re-envisioned as the Madonna and child.[3]

      I think the whiteness is often associated with purity, but in many cases that isn’t the whiteness of the skin colour (see the aformentioned examples). Even in the mediterranean are as a whole skin tones can be varied, often confusing the american representation of what is black and white.

      • dirthawker0@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        In Monterey CA, there are angel decorations that go up every year at Christmas. The designs were originally painted in the 50s and the artist made them brown skinned, inspired by Native American artists’ depictions of angels.

  • nocturne
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    8 months ago

    I have never met a white Jesus, they have all been varying shades of brown.

  • Gabu@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Short answer: Yes.
    Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeees.

    Serious answer: It doesn’t really matter - not only because religious organization is a cancer that should be removed from society, but also because at this point Christianity has splintered, evolved and reformed beyond idolatry of a guy from the desert.