BBC NEWS | Magazine | So what colour was Jesus?

BBC NEWS | Magazine | So what colour was Jesus?

Not that it matters theologically, but much of the effort to prove Jesus was a "person of color" or a Black man is just nonsense in terms of history and ethnography.

Consider this quote from the BBC article:
"And Jesus probably did have some African links - after all the conventional theory is that he lived as a child in Egypt where, presumably, his appearance did not make him stand out."
Assuming for the moment that the Israelites in Palestine 2,000 years ago were not Africans, why was it more likely that he would be a dark child who would not attract attention in Egypt yet be dark enough to excite some comment in Palestine? The idea that his tribe was of Nigerian ancestry flies in the face of the New Testament genealogies and the history of Israel in the Old Testament.

This nonsense also assumes that the population of Egypt were uniformly dark skinned. If you look at the very ancient depictions of Egyptians you see people of several very different hues. This is in part due to the modern political effort to define the entire African continent as African in the sense of having dark skin as if Hannibal must have been a Black man since he came from Africa, even though Carthage was a Greek colony. It also expresses the racism of British and other colonial powers who were often as intolerant of Mediterranean peoples. Even in modern Italy, it is not unknown for Lombards to describe Sicilians as n-----s.

The Arabs, being descended from the same stock as the ancient Israelites were also not Black Africans even if some of them lived on that continent, although over the millenia intermarriage with Black Africans (often slaves) has produced varying degrees of mixed blood in most of North Africa and Southwest Asia, as well as Arabized cultures almost wholly of Black African stock as a result of the spread of Islam in northern Africa. Still, I seem to recall that the late King Hussein of Jordan had blue eyes (this is a recessive trait and must be inherited through both the paternal and maternal lines), a feature I understand is not uncommon among the Tauregs and the Kurds.

The ethnography of modern Jewry is a similarly complicated study, embracing as it does ancient communities in such farflung locales as Ethiopia and NE India. A large part of the ethnic stock of modern Jews came from the conversion of the Khazars, a central Asian people, about a thousand years ago. But whether they were fair or more Mediterranean in appearance, it is unlikely that there was any significant portion of Black African ancestry. Even the ancient Hebrew community in Ethiopia explain their own origins as the related to the return of the Queen of Sheba from her pilgrimage to see King Solomon, after which they continued to worship in the manner of the Israelites although separated from any regular contact with Israel for millenia.

The photograph of a reconstructed ancient Israelite which accompanies this article looks suspiciously like illustrations I have seen of Cro-Magnon man.