Comment on May Christ be with us
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it’s totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.
Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews. Image
Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.
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So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.
Except that theory is flawed if you consider the ramifications of the Islamic conquest followed by European crusades, and then you have the Ottoman, French, British, and most recently, Israeli occupation. A lot of rape/interbreeding happened throughout.
I live in Egypt and whole providences here are full of green/blue eyes and blonde/ginger hair as a consequence.
Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it’s important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of “white genes” to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don’t think it’s a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That’s not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.
So they are basically Palestinian?
A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn’t call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don’t speak Arabic.
Sorry what? Palestinian Arabic is what people no matter if Jewish, Christian, Druze, Muslim, … have been speaking in Palestine. People haven’t been speaking Hebrew there since some thousands of years save for religious purposes.
Historical records testify to the existence of Hebrew from the 10th century BCE[4] to the late Second Temple period (lasting to 70 CE), after which the language developed into Mishnaic Hebrew. From about the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century BCE until the Middle Ages, many Jews spoke Aramaic, a related Semitic language. From the 2nd century CE until the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language circa 1880, Hebrew served as a literary and official language and as the Judaic language of prayer.[5] After the spoken usage of Mishnaic Hebrew ended in the 2nd century CE, Hebrew had not been spoken as a mother tongue.
That’s correct. The Samaritans used to speak Samaritan Hebrew, then Samaritan Aramaic and then Palestinian Arabic which was then the main language for at least 800 years. However as I understand they have now mostly switched to Hebrew as they have integrated into the isreali state. This is however a very modern phenomenon.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Who were, incidentally, also not white untill very recently. Even a hundred years ago, a lot of people didn’t consider Italians to be white people.