Jesus, the brownish dwarf
Very amusing article by Candida Moss:
“Historically speaking, it is likely that the average first-century male from Roman Palestine would have had dark hair, brown eyes, and dark skin tone. In addition, physical anthropologists estimate that the average male from the region is likely to have been around 5’ 4” and 136 pounds.”
Full text: The Biggest Myths About Jesus Christ – The Daily Beast
My Mazamet 
Waiting for SOM . . .
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Makes two of us
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I’ll take the bait.
I was impressed by the fact that Jesus probably didn’t have blue eyes and blonde hair when I was 11 or 12. I had never thought of it, then I thought of it, thought I was clever, then realized everyone already knew it.
The author mentions this not because she is trying to educate the ignorant but because she is trying to flatter her audience: “look we have a secret knowledge that the unwashed mouth-breathers out there don’t know” when in fact the unwashed mouth-breathers probably do know the utterly banal, well known and obvious fact that Jesus was a first century Jew.
Congratulations to Daily Beast readers for knowing what thoughtful 12 year olds can figure out on their own. Slow clap. Bravo. Kudos.
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LOL 😀 Are you sure, though? There are people in little christian sects who believe only fellow members of their sect are the *chosen people*. Do you think they understand Jesus wasn’t like them?
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They doubtless think Jesus is in utter agreement with their doctrine, but race is not a matter of doctrine.
I did once run into a street preacher who thought Jesus was black. Nice guy, but a screwball.
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Don’t Mormons have some sort of race issue?
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They used to have some anti-black policies, not any more. I’m not an expert on Mormonism.
The Nazis promoted Aryan Jesus under the theory that he was the illegitimate son of a Roman, but I don’t think that ever had any real popular support in Germany.
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The trouble is DP, a lot of people do for some reason believe Jesus was a white man, despite everything. This is after all, the popular image put forward pretty much everywhere.
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A lot of people? Really? Who are they?
The fact that Jesus is portrayed as being vaguely European in Western art doesn’t mean anything. He looks Asian in Asian art and Latino in South American art, I’m sure the Asians and Latinos don’t think Jesus was from Korea or Brazil.
Protip: don’t project your own ignorance on others.
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seems like DP, who I believe is a Roman Catholic, forgets this image of his supposed savior, when he says “vaguely European looking”. Hmm, how vague is blond blue-eyed, tall and having pinkish white skin? http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/31600000/jesus-in-my-heart-jesus-31696640-1088-1200.jpg
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DP, where did you get this information: “The Nazis promoted Aryan Jesus under the theory that he was the illegitimate son of a Roman, but I don’t think that ever had any real popular support in Germany.”
It seems this is a confused reporting of how Jews wrote that Jesus was the illegitmate son of Mary and a roman soldier Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Julius_Abdes_Pantera
I would find it most curious if Nazis used a Jewish myth. I also found it most curious that I was given a bible that had blonde jesus on it when I graduated from high school. As has been pointed out, it’s nothing new for Christians to reform JC in their image. So, trying to claim that everyone should know that Jesus Christ would have been a little semitic guy is nonsense. Since there is no evidence for Jesus Christ,, son of God, it is only a possibility that there was a kernel of truth, an itinernant Jewish wannabe messiah, in the myth.
Mormons initially claimed that their version of the Christian god said no people who are too dark could be of any rank in the church. Then they changed their minds when it was obvious that the only way their church could grow is by accepting these people. So much for the claims of eternal moral truth from religion.
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Look up “Positive Christianity” which was pushed by the Nazis. Yes I’m aware of some rabbinical arguments of Jesus’ gentile ancestry but didn’t think they were relevant to the point at hand.
Illustrated Bibles are a great argument presuming no one ever reads it and discovers it is full of Jews.
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I’m familiar with “positive Christianity”, and I am unaware of where this nonsense ascribed to the idea that JC was the bastard son of a Roman. Martin Bormann is quoted as knowing this myth but disregarding it in his attempts to claim that JC was an Aryan. There are other attempts in PC to claim that Galileans were of a different race, etc. Perhaps you know of an actual reference to this in PC.
As for you not mentioning the source of the myth, it is not surprising at all that you decided it wasn’t “relevant”. Now, if there is a problem with not reading the bible and making up images, it seems that the RCC is first and foremost the originator of that. How many images of JC as blond and blue eyed did the RCC come up with?
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I guess I conflated the Jewish accusation that Jesus was Roman Jesus with Nazi attempts to Aryanize him. Both were efforts to deny that Jesus was Jewish.
In Latin American religious art Jesus often looks Latino or Spanish, in Asia he looks Asian. That doesn’t mean that Latinos and Asians are mentally deficient and think Jesus really looked like that, it is because of choices the artist makes, in this case to stress the closeness of Christ to his followers or whatever. Religious art is geared towards prayer, not historical accuracy.
But by all means keep congradualting yourself that you are such a genius for figuring out that Jesus was a Jew and probably looked like one too.
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Hmmm, weren’t you just congratulating yourself on how everyone should have known that JC was a small Jewish guy and insisting that “Congratulations to Daily Beast readers for knowing what thoughtful 12 year olds can figure out on their own. Slow clap. Bravo. Kudos.”? Funny how your own sect couldn’t figure this out like the 12 year old and went out of its way to depict Jesus Christ as anything but a Semitic man. They also persecuted Jews. Now, do you see the connection between the two actions? Who is trying to pretend that Jesus wasn’t a Jew?
Yes, I know that many Christians view JC as themselves, I remember reading a short story about painting Jesus as a black man when I was very young. Groups want to own someone who they admire. This is comparable to how Christians often try to claim that everyone is like them, that they really do believe in God and Jesus Christ, even though they say that they don’t. That Isaac Newton and Einstein were believers just like them (being either ignorant of the truth or intentionally lying, since Newton was a anti-Trinitarian and Einstein was a deist at best).
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I was’t trying to prove that I was a child genus – I wasn’t one – but that the realization that Jesus didn’t have blue eyes is entirely commonplace and unremarkable to the point that a child of middling abilities can see it with a little reflection. You are not smart for having thought of it and the purpose of the article repeating the commonplace observation is to flatter idiots.
You missed my point about religious art entirely.
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DP, you were trying to discount the idea that someone came up with the idea of JC being a Jew was important, and claiming that a 12 year old could have come up with it, thus implying that you think that since you know the idea, that everyone should.
It has been shown that everyone doesn’t known this or believe it. Even your church tried to make believe it wasn’t true with the bs of a blond blue eyed Jesus in that very common Catholic image of the sacred heart. And again, who all tried to make Jesus not a Jew and who persecuted them, DP?
And what was your point about religious art? That people make JC into their own image. I got that. Now the reasons for that are varied and most are based on the idea of making JC one of their tribe/group. It may be that they want to think that JC cares for them, but it usually is that they want to claim any “good” guy for their side, just like Christians who claim that Newton was a Christian “just like them”, Einstein believed in God “just like them”, etc. Jesus was “x” because people wan to believe in a commonality.
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You are asserting that the fact that Jesus was a first century Jew is some kind of arcane knowledge, rare among his followers and covered up in conspiratorial silence.
You argue your point from religious art: Jesus in Northern Europe is often represented as a Northern European. This, you claim, is proof positive that Northern European Christians are ignorant of where Jesus comes from.
When I point out that the ethnic characteristics of artistic representations of Jesus change from culture to culture, presumably because the artist and his audience know Jesus didn’t really look like that but because they have some spiritual or artistic motive, you CHANGE YOUR ARGUMENT and ascribe the representations not to ignorance of Jesus’ ethnicity but to something analogous to wanting to claim Einstein as a believer in God.
You then CHANGE YOUR ARGUMENT BACK and say “it has been shown” that Christians are dumb because they don’t know Jesus was a first century Jew.
It might feel good to look at a painting of a Chinese Madonna and Child and congratulate yourself on being so much smarter than that stupid Chinese artist who doesn’t know Jews who lived 2000 years ago didn’t look like that, but it just makes you an ass.
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Interestingly there was also a religiopolitical aspect to depictions of Jesus (and the saints). Doctrine heavily influenced different artistic movements within religious art. At times there were even instructions on what should/could be done.
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Well there wasn’t a sense that the art was a pure expression of the artist, it served a liturgical and educational purpose.
It is still that way in Orthodoxy, I don’t know if there are written rules but there are very strong traditions about how to paint an icon.
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In Catholicism there were “instructions”. Keep in mind that at the high-end of the market we’re talking about commissioned paintings and sculptures. The rules were within the commission itself. Consider the use of ultramarine blue (made from lapis-lazuli); it was absurdly expensive- and so the church often insisted on that colour for the robes of the virgin and/or the holy infant. And so it became a sort of trademark for those two figures.
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Oh, I never realized that was where Mary blue came from.
I think Trent had rules about what was considered an acceptable portrayal of the Trinity – Holy Spirit had to be a dove, the Father an older man, etc.
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First, DP, it isn’t a *fact* at all that Jesus Christ even existed. If there is a kernel of truth to the myth, there may have been a first century Jew that claimed/thought he was the messiah. That’s all. No magical god-man, no miracles, no resurrection. If we take the bible to have any truth, that’s all we have as possible or probable. You are trying a common Christian claim, that somehow people would never believe in claims if they weren’t true. That is a false claim, since humans often believe in false things, even to the point of dying from them (see People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, etc).
Again, Jesus, as you have admitted, can be portrayed as many different images for various reasons. The point of the article is that JC, if he existed at all would be a dark skinned small man of the time period. If there is some truth in the bible, why not simply portray him as such, if race/tribe doesn’t matter? Why is it so necessary to portray a semitic man as something else, DP? Why is it so important to Roman Catholic church to portray the sacred heart as a blond blue eyed tall European man?
You may lie about what I’ve said, DP. However, it’s pointless in a written medium where those falsehoods can be demonstrated. I never said it was proof positive that northern European Christians had no idea where JC came from (we have this lovely bit from Martin Luther http://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/primary-texts-from-the-history-of-the-relationship/272-luther-1523 about how Jews are of the lineage of Jesus and how they really need to be converted. Luther doesn’t like Jews and claimed many false things about them but has no problem in knowing that JC was a Jew. He attacks Catholics for trying to change JC). I have indicated that they went out of their way to ignore that part of the story to create a Jesus that wasn’t a Jews and they persecuted Jews. I didn’t change my argument at all; you can see that from my posts and you have chosen to try to make a false claim against me, despite that fact.
I have pointed out that the need to make JC “one of you” is comparable to Christians insisting that Isaac Newton was a Christian just like them (he was an anti-trinitarian, which you aren’t, are you?), that Einstein was a believer in the same god they worship, etc. Please do actually read what I’ve posted, and not make up nonsense in order to attack it. You again lie when you try to claim I said “that Christians are dumb because they don’t know Jesus was a first century Jew” Why is it that you feel the need to lie, especially when your bible says that lying is a bad thing?
You have admitted that the Nazis tried the same thing with Jesus, to make him “Aryan”, and you screwed up in your attempts to try to claim that this was somehow attributed to the Jewish myth that Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman. And we know that making JC something different from Jewish and then persecuting the Jews wasn’t limited to Nazis. The RCC did this with no problem. I know you don’t like that pointed out and you feel like you must call me names. Go ahead, DP. It certainly doesn’t hurt my points.
Again, nice strawmen, but you’ve done nothing more than showing that you have no problem in making false claims against others. I’ve seen Chinese Madonnas and child as well as African, African-American, Mexican, etc. The existence of these images does nothing to disprove my points, that humans like to make what they see as good/smart/valuable people part of their own culture by saying that those people can be/are of a different race than originally claimed, especially if they don’t like the original story and the race/tribe in that story. If you don’t like Jews, then it’s great to claim that Jesus wasn’t “really” a Jew and was of another group.
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The idea that there was a mass conspiracy afoot to hush up the fact that Jesus was a Jew is so absurdly ignorant that I can only conclude you are an idiot.
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Not hush it, but how well did the concept sink in to those people who put up the no dogs, no blacks, no jews signs but still went to church every sunday? There had to be some sort of disconnect.
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Ethnic hatred is a funny thing. As a kid I had encyclopedia called the New Book of Knowledge and I would read the history articles. I noticed that the Romans were the good guys until they persecuted Christians. The Franks were good until they became the French. The British were always good guys against the French and Spanish up until the Revolutionary War, then they were bad.
So for your antisemetic church-goer Jews would be the good guys until the first century, then the bad guys.
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… and the Irish objected to the arrival of Italian Madonna sculptures in East coast Catholic churches- because they were there first.
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Every New England factory town has its Irish parish, Italian Parish, Polish Parish… the American church was very practical about the realities on the ground.
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Wow, DP, so where did I, or anyone say that there was some “mass conspiracy to hush up the fact that Jesus was a Jew”? You seem to become stuck on that strawman.
I’ve pointed out the mechanism on why some people will try to change someone that they find good into the group that those some people belong to. They do it for different reasons, so no “mass conspiracy”. Again, DP, do you understand how the actions of changing the race of someone from a reviled group into an approved group works with the simultaneous persecution of that reviled group?
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You claim that the reason Jesus is presented as a N. European in N. European nations is to hide the fact that Jesus was a Jew. This is mind-numbingly stupid.
If the pre-Reformation church wanted to hide the fact Jesus was a Jew they did an awful job of it. First by letting it be known that his name was Jesus – a greek version of Joshua – from Nazareth in Galilee -a Jewish town in a Jewish region. They could have called him Manlius Germanicus from Padua or Lars Erickson from Stoclkhom, but they just screwed the pooch in naming the guy. Then the church made the error of copying and recopying the bible – written entirely by Jews – and then commanding that bible be read aloud from once a day at every church in the world, and six times a day in every monastery. Then the church gets in the habit of putting pictures of OT Jewish ancestors of Jesus on the walls of churches, putting INRI on top of every crucifix, and teaching little children songs about Jesus born in Bethlehem, city of David, and giving Jesus titles like Lion of Judah, Son of David, and of course “Christ”, a Jewish idea.
So if the church wanted to minimize the Jewishness of Jesus they constantly engaged in self-defeating behavior, I mean, those guys couldn’t turn around without stepping on their own dicks. They do almost the exact opposite of everything you’d think they would do to achieve minimizing the Jewishness of Jesus. It is like the fact that Jesus was a first century Jew was an integral part of the story they were trying to tell or something.
Sorry for calling you an idiot yesterday, that was rude. I stand by my assertion that you are absurd and ignorant, that is just a fact.
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But does that not sidestep the othering of Jews that’s been historically ever so present in Christianity?
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I don’t deny the existence of Christian antisemtism, I just think it is absurd to say 1) that Christians are generally ignorant that Jesus was a first century Jew and would have looked the part 2) antisemitism is the motive for N. European artists painting Jesus as a N. European.
What possible antisemitic motive could a Chinese Christian have in painting Jesus as Chinese? How many Jews are there in China to be “othered”?
In the church in my hometown there is a painting of Jesus and some of his followers at Emmaus: all the characters look like average small town central Massachusetts guys – because the models were all average small-town central MA guys.
What do you think the motive of the artist was in picking those men as models?
1) She is a drooling idiot unaware that Jesus was a Jew from 2000 years ago and he didn’t look like that.
2) She hates Jews and wants to cover up the fact that Jesus was one.
3) Other.
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Those are separate issues. And I don’t think you can put all Christians in the same boat. Just for starters traditional Catholicism was pro-education, pro-reading, pro-studying. Evangelicals deny evolution.
Anyway, have you read through Cum Nimis Absurdum?
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No but I am aware of the general contents. Jews were both protected and exploited by princes, and hated by commoners. Sometimes you got a populist ruler who wanted to make the commoners happy and that is the kind of law you got.
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…and for that populism to be effective the de-jew-ification of Jesus is necessary. “We worship a Jew and so we must kick all other Jews out of the country and seize their property” – doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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The justifying narrative was that the Jews rejected their proper Messiah and so deserve whatever they got at the hands of the good guys, which is silly of course but for that narrative to even work Jesus has to be a Jew.
It got even more absurd in Spain – Jews were cursed as a race and they had to be Christian for three generations before they could have the negative Jew influence purified. This is straight up racial hatred with only a tenuous religious excuse. The commoners 1) hated the fact that marranos got all the good middle-management jobs from the nobles, and 2) while you couldn’t hurt a nobleman you could hurt his employees.
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I suppose that puts Jesus in an intermediate category. Post-Jewish? Because in effect he has no Jewish stereotypes attributed to him. So in essence it’s as if he’s of different stock.
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He is in the NT presented a typically Jewish figure: compares immediately to Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, etc, and people have always recognized the parallels.
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What do you mean by “people”? You do realize that up until the 20th century mass was in Latin, right? Do you honestly believe the masses thought of Jesus as a prototypical Jew?
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Educated people would have seen Jesus as the fulfilment of the potentialities of Judaism. Ancient exegesis was almost entirely directed at reading the OT with reference to Jesus, and the late classical and medieval exegesis built on it. In today’s language we would say the church appropriated the history of Judaism and saw itself as in some ways continuing, in some ways supplanting and surpassing it.
You average person -illiterate – was educated in his faith through preaching, pictures, song, liturgy, plays, prayers, etc. The same content would have been more or less effectively passed onto him, sometimes quite effectively. He would have had a good familiarity with OT stories and the story of Jesus, probably no worse than people today.
But just like in my history book – the English were the good guys from Alfred the Great until George III and then they inexplicably became the bad guys – the protagonists of the story change. The simple answer is that Jews became wicked upon rejecting their Messiah.
NB I’m not trying to lessen the evils of Christian anti-Semitism.
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It’s rather absurd to presume the average Christian was educated in the way you’re implying. The us vs. them “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theories were still going strong well into the 20th century. In fact, the term Judeo-Christian only becomes popularized in the 2nd half of the 20th century. It’s a post-war phenomena.
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That’s right, you lived in Spain. Trust me you can still find pockets of “Masons and Jews” paranoiacs in Spanish speaking countries.
Your average person today does not read the Bible but has a vague awareness of Biblical themes thanks to TV, movies, sporadic church attendance as a child, Christmas songs, etc. He knows Jesus was a first century Jew because the story does not make sense otherwise.
An illiterate peasant or semi-literate burgher would have at least the same amount of knowledge, quite possibly more considering that the church exercised a near monopoly on things like popular art and the calendar.
If you ask him if Jesus was a Jew, he would say yes. If you asked him about David, Moses and Abraham he would have heard the stories about them. If you ask why Jews used to be good and are now bad and deserving of hatred, he would say ‘because they rejected Christ and are now cursed by God’.
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Sigh. Here we go again. DP, I have said that groups of people try to pretend that someone that they admire is part of their group. The Roman Catholic Church did this, with making up a blond blue eyed Jesus, your “sacred heart”. They also did the same thing to Mary, who was certainly not a blue eyed blond, if she existed at all. It is not “stupid”, it is what people, including Christians, do. It may be a bit silly.
Yep, Jesus Christ is a Greek name. How many people do you think knew Greek at that timeperiod, DP? How many knew Latin, the popular language with Christianity, especially when that movement from a Jesus that had no description in the bible, to a blond blue eyed man on very famous images from the Roman Catholic Church). Again, the change of Jesus from a Jew to a blond man wasn’t instantaneous, so we have a name, that there is no evidence that people would associate with a Jewish name (indeed, why change it to Greek at all, if Hebrew or Aramaic would be fine?)
People did read the bible, or had it read to them through most of Christian history, and what is the claim in the bible from the OT to the NT? The NT supplants the OT, right? And Jews are at fault for JC’s death and Paul goes hammer and tongs after Jews in his book “Hebrews”. Yep, that was read aloud every day, perhaps more than once a day, always stating this nonsense. It would be rather hilarious to see Christians trying to tell their story with none of the beginning bits, but again, this was a gradual change, where the Jews were accepted as precursors, but Jews who didn’t conveniently convert as Luther demanded they do, they were vilified and that is when JC became blond and blue eyed.
Again, no, DP, they did not constantly engage in self-defeating behavior, since, as I have pointed out, Christians constantly attacked Jews from Paul on and had reason to do their best to pretend that JC wasn’t Jewish. Your religion burnt Jewish people alive. Your religion tortured them to death. Your religion claimed that they used Christian children blood in matzoh. Your religion converted them by the sword. Luther, the various popes, all liars in their false claims about Jews.
Your apology is worthless since yes it was rude and you chose to say it without consideration. In this case, it isn’t easier to get forgiveness after being rude. It’s hiliarous to watch you make even more lies and rude comments about me claiming that they are a “fact”. So much for your apology. I don’t have to use such words as you use against me. I allow you to represent yourself.
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Neither blonde nor blue eyed…! 😀
Ummm how about the virgin part? That must be legit! LOL
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hah! indeed. if one can’t get some simple information correct, then why should anyone believe the fantastical?
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I know about Christian antisemitism and am discussing it calmly elsewhere. You know Spaniards hated Jews more than anybody but pictures of Jesus and Mary are brown-haired down there, I guess they were not in on the conspiracy to make him a Swedish blonde. D’oh!
More facts: you take a few pictures of Jesus with a limited geographical range, Northern Europe and North America, and turn it into a conspiracy to deny the Jewishness of Jesus when the fact he was a Jew was essential to the story the church was trying to tell and did tell a thousand different ways. Your notions of Christianity and your collections of facts are filtered through a series of biases by which believers HAVE to be stupid and evil to satisfy your world-view, the more cartoonishly stupid and evil the better. Because of this you have no sense of context and no sense of the whole. The fact the jewishness of Jesus is essential to the Christian story and is communicated a thousand ways is lost on you because a blonde Jesus in a few countries gives you an excuse to call people stupid and feel good about yourself.
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Hillary Clinton is 5′ 4″ and fighting like hell to get a stool to stand on during her televised debate with THE Donald.
She doesn’t want to look like a midget.
And isn’t it bigotry to make fun of someone by comparing him to a dark skinned midget?
And isn’t it religious bigotry to degrade the Christ by doing the same thing?
You people of the atheist Ruling Class just can’t hide your racist, ubermensch mentality.
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love the hypocrisy and the lies, SOM.
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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/clinton-debate-podium-larger-trump-report-article-1.2805846
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wow, and the NY Daily News, such a wonderful source.
However, SOM, where does the article support your hysteria that you wrote
“Hillary Clinton is 5′ 4″ and fighting like hell to get a stool to stand on during her televised debate with THE Donald.
She doesn’t want to look like a midget.
And isn’t it bigotry to make fun of someone by comparing him to a dark skinned midget?
And isn’t it religious bigotry to degrade the Christ by doing the same thing?
You people of the atheist Ruling Class just can’t hide your racist, ubermensch mentality.”
Funny how you attack Ms. Clinton’s size and then insist how awful it is to so something like that.
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Not what I’m doing in the slightest. The statement that there are people out there who believe Jesus was white is true. The statement a lot of people is true. It is certainly true of a great many Americans and Europeans. That’s where the ignorance actually lies.
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The images of Jesus sold in the bondieuserie shops here depict a bearded gentleman dressed like female film stars of the 1920s…goodness knows what effect that has on society…
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That we don’t have an actual physical description of the make believe god man makes any discussion about him quite risible. But Crispyians lover to dream do they not?
However in the spirit of the post.
I grew up in Chester which was once an old Roman fortress town that was called Deva.
Chester has a wealth of Roman artifacts as you would expect and in the museum there is a model of a fully caparisoned Roman soldier.
The armour is a replica of an authentic set.
The first time I saw it I was 13 and the soldier was about the same size as I was.
So, in all likelihood, if there was someone called Yeshua Ben Yusuf running around first century Palestine he was a scruffy short-shit for one thing and at one time in the USA would have had to sit at the back of the bus.
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OMG! WHEN WERE YOU IN FLORIDA?????
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeffrey-forrest-poole-criminal-alias_us_5796636fe4b0d3568f8419f5
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Damn! Frakking FBI drones.
Although to be fair, they didn’t catch my best side.
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*Typo*. love to dream.
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Mormons would have a bigger issue if you tell them that Jesus was only 5’4″. One of their modern prophets insisted that Jesus is tall by twentieth-century standards. As far as I know (30+ years of being deep in it), Mormonism doesn’t have a clear ruling on their Saviour’s exact skin tone (it changes based on our exposure to or isolation from ultraviolet light, after all), but he’s supposed to look exactly like that Del Parson picture, questionable racial features be damned.
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And 5’4″ is hardly a dwarf. It’s short, yes, but not abnormally so.
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I’m damned impressed someone was able to get that pic of Jesus Christ. I’m surprised there isn’t more media buzz about it. First picture of Christ EVER, and it’s not plastered all over every major news outlet in the world. Go figure.
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I know!!!!
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He was white with long flowing hair damn it!
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You’re thinking of Thor. Lots of people make that mistake, but always remember, Jesus didn’t have a magic hammer. He had a normal one, and he only used it to build chairs.
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Oooh no you don’t. Swedish Jesus is true. Just look at all the paintings!
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Also, Megyn Kelly of Fox News reported that Santa, and Jesus, are both white guys:https://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2013/dec/13/santa-white-jesus-white-fox-news-megyn-kelly-video. I’m confused now because I’ve NEVER known Fox News to ever be wrong about what they report.
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I remember that. The brains trust in that building is truly awesome.
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As is the ability for the Fox executives to sexually harass the females who work there.
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Any Swede will do if the only other choice is that ugly runt from the Game of Thrones.
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Fun read, Pinky. 🙂
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I love it when Christians smugly point out that they knew Jesus was Jewish and not white, forgetting that Judaism is a religion and not a race. Sometimes people should just quit while they’re behind.
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The term can be used interchangeably, which is why an atheist who is Jewish can call himself a Jew, or Israel can call itself the Jewish state and be non-confessional, while a convert to Judaism can also call himself a Jew. You obviously didn’t read your own website which says “Clearly, then, there is more to being Jewish than just a religion” and goes on to use the terms “nation” and “family”- ideas which imply ethnicity – when speaking of Jews.
Some people should quit when they don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
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“But setting aside the emotional issues, Jews are clearly not a race.
Race is a genetic distinction, and refers to people with shared ancestry and shared genetic traits. You can’t change your race; it’s in your DNA. I could never become black or Asian no matter how much I might want to.
Common ancestry is not required to be a Jew. Many Jews worldwide share common ancestry, as shown by genetic research; however, you can be a Jew without sharing this common ancestry, for example, by converting.”
I do believe here is the part where you should take your own advice about quitting.
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Your assertion Jewishness is only a religion is not only false it is quite dumb. People always refer to ethnic Jews as Jews as in “I’m 1/4th Jewish”. The article is attempting to use broader categories than race but it is clearly included as per the bullet points at the top.
“Judaism has been described as a religion, a race, a culture, and a nation
All of these descriptions have some validity.”
Work on your reading skills.
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So basically, the bullet points at the top of the article give you enough wiggle room to assert that “Jewish” is a race? You might as well quote Mein Kampf as a credible source.
Let me put it even more simply for you. Saying someone is racially Jewish makes zero sense. What ethnicity is the Jewish race? What genetic markers do they share? What’s the average description of a Jew?
The problem should be obvious by now. Someone can claim to be 1/4 Jewish, but it’s meaningless. Are they Eastern European? Armenian? Ethiopian? Being 1/4 Jewish doesn’t answer any of those questions.
Or, to put it more succinctly for you, just because other people use a term incorrectly doesn’t make you right. It just means someone else is as stupid as you are.
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So all those hundreds of thousands of people who call themselves secular Jews are stupid? Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders are a couple of morons (well, Sanders yes, but for other reasons) Einstein, being irreligious, wasn’t a Jew? Was he stupid? All those secular Zionists were what? Gentiles? The huge percentage of Israelis who are not religious are not Jews and are stupid for calling themselves Jews? Mendelssohn was a believing Christian and called himself an ethnic Jew. Was he stupid?
You are free to quibble about the shades of meaning we ascribe to word “race”. You are however being an idiot and an ass when you say Jewishness is only religion and not also race or ethnicity. Every secular Jew on the planet would disagree. You are making up your own vocabulary and calling millions of people stupid for not knowing your private language.
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I actually didn’t say Judaism was “only religion.” People can also identify with cultural markers of that religion, like having a family that speaks Yiddish or observes Jewish holidays despite not practicing the faith. What they’re not always doing is claiming that they share familial ancestry, common genes, or a common ancestry with all other Jews.
This brings me back to the fact that you conveniently ignored all those questions I put to you above. We both know you can’t answer them because you have no clue what a “racial Jew” looks like, or even how to define it beyond conflating cultural identification with actual racial indicators.
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You said “religion not a race” and that people who think it is a race are dumb and then you congratulated yourself on being sooooo much smarter than other people.
I’m using race the way it is normally used in reference to a distinctive group of people, interchangeably with ideas like ethnic group or nation. You can call someone “Irish” even though someone from the East of Ireland might be blonde and genetically 80% Viking, while someone from the West might be a black-haired Celt. A person can claim to be half German and have no cultural inheritance from Germany beyond some genes that may or may not be typical of the place, and that does not make him dumb, he is just talking like a normal person not using your secret code words.
Chatting with you and ClubS I’m beginning to think half of the appeal of atheism is getting the feeling you are smarter than other people without having to put in much thought.
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Oh great, so now you’re going to pretend you were talking about culture the entire time? Why were you talking about blonde hair and blue eyes in your original comment? That’s right, because you were talking about Jesus’s racial characteristics instead of what culture he identified with.
Unless you’re trying to argue that the culture someone identifies with makes their hair darker or eyes a particular color, of course. In that case, there’s no help for you at all.
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So you are arguing that Jesus looked like a Viking? This is moronic. Go with Viking Jesus have a nice time with that.
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I suppose asking you to understand what you read is a bit much for you. It must physically hurt for you to form a coherent thought, doesn’t it?
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Got an interesting discussion that I’m interested in getting other perspectives on – https://bloggingtheology.net/2016/09/24/liberal-tolerance/#comments
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Oh my… had a look at it. I think they’re too far gone for reason to work. They don’t seem to even have a grasp of the difference between positive and negative or passive vs. active rights. If that’s not there, you’ll have a very hard time explaining anything more to them.
Perhaps a way to introduce the notion would be to ask them if they know why the (oft touted) founding fathers decided to go with the notion of freedom of religion rather than naming all the religions that were permitted? 😉
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