Do you also get sick looking at buddha statues from east asian countries, where he doesn't look at all indian??

It's evolution of an icon, refined over centuries. It's not racism to forget jesus' original color anymore than it's hypocrisy not to remember the original intent of christmas trees.

Mind you, it's an interesting footnote, but "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

It wasn't my point to say there are no black egyptians :thumbsup:

As for a lot of other posts, I look at this question from a historical stand point, I could care less what color he was, but its an interesting question. What Jesus taught doesn't matter when you are just wondering what color he was. You can ask the question of his race without belittling his message.

His message was to keep yourself in check from a moral standpoint without overly focusing on all the traditional rules and to love your fellow man. That's fine and dandy, but has anyone ever heard of an ebionite? Do any of you know that Nazarenes wear their hair in dreads.
This is a little off topic but I think the John of revelations was a false prophet. There aren't supposed to be any more prophets after jesus, yet this guy has visions from god while banished on the island of patmos. I also heard that the mark of the beast is a numeric/alphabetical translation of nero caesar. Hebrew and Greek letters also have numeric value and somehow he added up the letters of nero's name and came up with 666. I saw this on the history channel.
Also, zoroasterism played a major part in forming the semitic religions but thiswas the religion of the romans before constantine converted it to catholicism. Maybe this played a part in his decision to convert.

Who said there weren't supposed to be any more prophets after Jesus? Doesn't Paul say that God appoints some to be apostles, some prophets, some teachers, etc.?

Jesus was not white until he became Irish.

Who cares what color one of the greatest magisters this world has ever known was? He wielded power, and his message was one of love. That's all that matters.

every culture makes 'Jesus' in their image... he has appeared as asian, 'white' or european looking, dark skinned, light skinned, very dark skinned and anything in between.... It's natural for cultures to make their leaders in their image.

historically though, there is no way he could have been light skinned due to the geographic region he was born in.

Sweetpea

You and I are in agreement. To bad that Bush doesn't hear this when he gets his daily briefing from Jesus every morning. :rolleyes:

I have a question to ponder to all of you...

Assume for a minute that Jesus was black. How would that sit with all of you? From what I've read in this thread, you all seem to be shocked at the idea. I believe that this goes back to the fact that there is still prejudice in all of us and since we were all taught that Jesus was white, anything else is just unacceptable.

Example...

Excellent point. Although I'm not so certain that many were actually shocked at the thought of Jesus being black, because geography seemed to rule out that possbility (or at least didn't rule it in), and thus the question didn't need to be addressed. For example, there is a large percentage of blacks in America who pray to Jesus, and it doesn't seem to have occurred to most of them that Jesus could have been black. The irony is that most don't seem to have seen him as brown skinned either. It seems that in a choice between seeing Jesus as white, and non-white (but other than black), white is preferable. So prejudice is indeed alive and unwell among us.

Sweetpea did you know there were a lot of white people living all over that region, including all of northern Africa?

Greeks, Romans, Phoenician just to name the big ones were all white, and lived in all parts of the mediterranean world. This is prior to the arab invasions which changed the skin tone of the area quite a bit.

Which arab invasions?
You mean the Moors?

Don't confuse arabs and islamics.

At the time Isreal was a Roman protectorate and therefore had a HIGH percentage of roman citizens and soldiers present. One doesn't normally class the Romans as 'non-white'.

The Roman Empire only really started to collapse and withdraw from distant regions around 400AD.