j reacts to speculation on what jesus may have actually looked like

"If sheep, aud swiue, and lions strong, and all the bovine crew, Could paint with cunning hands, and do what clever mortals do, Depend upon it, every pig with snout so broad and blunt, Would make a Jove that like himself would thunder with a grunt; And every lion's god would roar, aud every bull's would bellow, And every sheep's would baa, and every beast his worshipped fellow Would find in some immortal form, aud naught exist divine But had the gait of lion, sheep, or ox, or grunting swine." - xenophanes fragment, from a long time ago in what is now turkey.

additionally.

"Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed and black
Thracians that they are pale and red-haired"

see, i just came across an article criticizing white europeans for the representations of jesus as white. but, everybody does this. the book claims god created us in it's image. but, even the greek philosophers knew that in truth we constantly create our gods in our own image.

the truth is that there have been as many jesuses as there have been cultures that worship him, and they've all reflected, in some way, the indigenous cultures that the localized syncretic concepts of christianity have been constructed around. you get jesus as warrior-king, jesus as sage, jesus as fire-breathing zealot - it's a kind of blank slate to scrawl over.

if you actually trace the different representations of jesus through time, you get a variety of different representations. jesus seems to get a little whiter from the medieval period into the renaissance, as he becomes less italian looking. the byzantine jesus looks pretty greek. and, before that? well, he looks pretty jewish - that is, kind of tanned, but ultimately pretty caucasian.

i'm just pushing back against the idea that jesus would have looked like an arab, because it's pretty ahistorical. the arab migration into the region didn't happen for a few more hundred years. rather, at the time of jesus, migration into the levant would have been mostly moving from the north and the east: iranians, greeks and italians. and, so, it's not particularly strange that 4th or 5th century depictions of jesus make him look more iranian than arab.

i know. modern historians want continuity. but, this doesn't work with the full scale of evidence, it's just an ideological attempt to reject racism. see, i don't think we need to make shit up to reject racism - i think the evidence in front of us is strong enough.

the three different types of jews that exist today are all of various mixed ancestry: the ashkenazi have absorbed a lot of turkic and slavic, and the sephardi and mizrahi have both absorbed a lot of arab. if you work out the genetics, the closest thing we have to an ancestral population of jews is actually the kurds. this is a complicated and contested thing to try and sort through and understand but just about everybody agrees that it's actually true.

the conclusion is that jesus probably didn't look like an arab or a palestinian jew but actually probably looked something like this guy.