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The ‘Real’ Children of Israel
As Christianity spread from Israel to other parts of the world, artists would often portray Jesus, not as a Middle Eastern Jew, but as one of their own. This is why we see European looking Jesuses, African Jesuses, and Asian Jesuses. In the first picture, you can see a Chinese John the Baptist baptizing a Chinese Jesus. After this Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted and John went home and cooked up some General Tso’s locusts.
Making Jesus into someone the locals can relate to is not a bad thing in and of itself. No doubt the artists had to work with the models they had. Sometimes, however, there is another reason to make a non-Jewish Jesus. Anti-Semitic bigotry forces some to recreate Jesus.
In the painting “Christ Among the Doctors” the young Lord appears to be blonde, fair-skinned, and might actually be a chick. But notice how the other Jews in the Temple are made to look? Here the point was, “Jesus wasn’t one of those people.”
With the recent resurgence of the BLM movement, I am seeing more and more folks wanting a Black Jesus (not this one), and it seems to be based out of anti-semitism.
When there was a Black Lives Matter rally in my town, the lead speaker explained that Jesus was Black and had dreadlocks, Moses was Black, and the Sphinx was also a Black guy but people cut off his nose to cover up that fact. Evidently the Black Moses freed the Israelites from the Black Egyptians and the people we have been calling Egyptians and Jews for the past few thousand years are all covering up the fact that they stole their identity from western Africans.
Then I saw a BLM activist on TV explain that Jesus was Black because the Bible said he had hair “like wool” which he took to mean as having a similar texture to wool. Unfortunately, the full quote from Revelation says, “The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire.” So the wool reference here was describing the color of the Lord’s hair in John’s vision. It was not talking about whether Jesus had an Afro or not. The BLM activist also explained that Jesus was killed because “that’s what they do to Black activists,” which really misses the point of the cross.
After that, football player DeSean Jackson put a quote on social media saying that “Negroes are the real Children of Israel” and that Jews are trying to cover that up because it will mess up “their plan for world domination.” Jackson didn’t come up with that idea on his own. Instead, he was offering up a quote from Hitler. Here is a pro-tip to you kids on social media, if the best quote you can find to support your position comes from Adolph Hitler, you might want to give a little more thought to the issue. Nick Cannon said more or less the same thing as Jackson, but he had the good grace to not mention Hitler by name.
So, what is this about? Not just disliking Jews but claiming you are the “real” Jews? Why?
2,000 years in diaspora and one group of people kept the faith, the culture, traditions, and language alive. Now we are being told they are the fake ones? Sorry, I’m pretty sure the real Jews are . . . you know . . . the Jews.
Published in General
To be fair, maybe she was confused with Saint Moses, the black?
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Moses_the_Black
The French shot it of in 1798. Or a Fatimid sheikh named Mohamed Saaem el-Dahr knocked it off in the 15th century. (It grew back in time for a Danish ship’s captain to paint it in the mid 1700s). Or it was erosion.
I say we blame the French. Saves time.
In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye asked G-d if He would mind choosing someone else for a while. I have a feeling that the someone else probably wouldn’t like it.
There were drawings from before 1700 with the nose already gone. The French have much to be blamed for, but are innocent on this charge.
Can’t say I’m surprised by black Nazis. I occasionally rode buses in DC in the 60s. Ran across a few black supremacist flyers. Also met actual Nazis and Jewish supremacists and Muslim supremacists (some of whom were also black supremacists, others not). If they assault someone, lock them up. If they set fire to someplace, lock them up. If they loot someplace or rob someone, lock them up. If they are engaged in a conspiracy to commit felonies under or not under a veil of civil disorder, lock them up. I think you get the idea.
Napoleon’s troops. They were bored.
We’re not talking about who did it. We are talking about assigning blame.
Right, but I’m blaming you.
Now we’re getting somewhere! Will that be cyber cancellation or the full service?
I have a Christian picture book about Jesus that I bought in China. The art is done in a semi-Chinese style. Jesus is weirdly blond and Satan looks like a fox-demon. In Chinese lore, Fox demons are known as the trickiest and most cunning of all the wild spirits.
I’m not sure why Jesus is blond though but the drawings are beautiful.
I was once served in a MacDonald’s restaurant in Kentucky by a black man with an Adolf Hitler/Charlie Chaplin mustache. It was…a unique experience.
When we were in Peru, we saw a huge portrait of the last supper in a very ornate Catholic church. In the painting, the main course was guinea pig, which is common in Peru.
Nevermind the blame, we need to apply a retroactive motive through the magic of historical presentism!
Some religious people (I hope very few) claim that the mark of Cain was making people black and similarly the curse on Canaan (I think, memory hazy). The point is that there is a lot of first and last in the Bible and black people have been told they come in last, or that they don’t really count quite a lot.
And the Jews come in ‘first’, though it is well noted that they mess up a lot and suffer a lot.
I don’t pretend to know what this is all about, I’m an outsider myself. Nevertheless, a lot of people want to think that their group is the most favored, whether it is Jews-stole-our-birthright Muslims, or Black Liberation Theologists, it is hard to separate whether they want to be ahead of the Jews because they hate the Jews or they just want to have G-d’s Most Favored Ethnic Status for themselves. Maybe these two things are inseparable.
I suppose no one ever lost money by reinterpreting the Bible to advantage; Brown made quite a pile.
But when you mix theology, already murky by nature, with conspiracy theory, you are trading in the most weak tea of nonsense known to man.
I think many blacks consider themselves the descendant of Ham, one of Noah’s children.
Also: claims that the Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt, and that those Egyptians were black: See Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz. See also Higher Superstition by Levitt and Gross for further discussion of Afrocentric claims (and feminist claims and postmodern claims) which run counter to scientific and historical evidence and whose purposes are deeply racist.
The Ethiopians have their own story: God made people in an oven. The white folks were underdone. The folks further south were overdone. The Ethiopians were done just right.
Everyone considers their own experiences and being to be normative, and everyone else is the problem.
That sounds like some strong coffee nonsense to me. Be it black or white coffee.
I heard a similar story told in China where the yellow people were just right.
This black supremacist nonsense is as wacky as all the white supremacist nonsense as Nick Cannon so aptly demonstrates.
Wasn’t that claim made by Joseph Smith
Not sure. I heard it from a preacher who was tangental to Greek Orthodox, as far as I could tell.
With all the Hamans and Hitlers in the world, I am okay with not being a chosen people.