Or that Jesus had a white skin
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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What kind of skin did He have anyway? The Jews I've seen (admittedly not many) were pretty light-skinned (though with dark hair).
I'm definitely no experts but I believe the original Jews had the same skin tone as people around Egypt and Palestine, so Jesus would have looked like them (brown skin, black hair). I think the Palestinian people are Semites. Again don't take this as gospel because I'm just repeating what I read somewhere.
I have an Egyptian coworker (immigration laws, yay) and I'd not call his skin color brown (as in "brown bear" brown). More like a rather well tanned local person. I'd have a hard time calling him non-white, unless in comparison with an Irish person or something…
Yeah, the whole brown/Caucasian thing is weird because some southern Europeans like Spanish/Italians can be just as dark brown as some people who are acknowledged as brown or black (not white/Caucasian, anyway). I think the whole thing is really - are you/your ancestors from a country we'd look down on? So anyone in Europe is Caucasian because they aren't looked down on. Yay for racism and xenophobia I guess.
I'll tell you one of the ignorant things I thought, which was that the bible was supposed to have been written down by Jesus or disciples who were alive when he was and then stayed that way for 1000's of years. Its actually a collection of writings by different people who were Christians, which has been added to and pruned according to the fashion of the time to try to make Christianity more appealing to the masses.
In my view, the greatest, most profound, and most dangerous ignorance within the church is not the dumb things that people affirmatively believe (although there is plenty of that), but the ways that people in the church remain ignorant about the full breadth and depth of the Christian tradition, and about the harms that Christianity has wrought. Ignorance, for example, about how European colonizers and missionaries were instrumental not just in genocide and cultural imperialism, but also in the fundamental construction of pervasive modern categories like “race” and “religion.” Likewise, ignorance of the depth of the contemplative and mystical strands in Christianity have been extremely deleterious to individual Christians and to the church as an institution.
That the earth is 6,000 years old. That there is a dome above the earth, the firmament, that holds back the waters. That the stars are on the firmament. That there is a great wall of ice surrounding all the earth. That evolution is a lie started by Satan.