THE COLOR OF SCRIPTURE

The issue of race and /or color in the Bible is one that has been over looked and/or disregarded by the church for years. Todays Christians assume the characters of the Bible had European features. Sadly this is what we are taught and we accept it. These assumptions are enhanced by illustrations in Christian education and Sunday School material. In fact any time a film studio even conceder’s allowing a black man to play the role of Jesus, there are vast protest and calls of blasphemy. Most English-language information on Christianity gives the false subliminal impression that Jesus was a dark haired Anglo or Caucasian. Though Christianity is frequently portrayed as “the White Man’s Religion”. The truth is that most of the people in the Bible were people of color: Semitics, black, and Mediterranean. CONCERNING ADAM AND THE ORIGIN OF MANKIND When you conceder the likely location of the Garden of Eden, the climate of the time and the likely diet of the people, the evidence will leave little doubt that those that occupied the garden were people of color. Adam could not have resembled today’s traditional white man, for he, Eve and their offspring lived in a tropical environment unlike any known today, Making it impossible for a man to live life with pale skin. Genesis describes Eden as a tropical paradise. The Bible names the countries Havilah (a Country near Egypt) and Ethiopia, placing the garden in Africa and in the mist of the “lands of Ham and Crush, “the father and grandfather of black nations”(see Gen. Chapt. 2) Furthermore science confirms it is not possible for a Caucasian couple to produce offspring with skin that is dark in color. It is however possible for a black couple to produce offspring with skin dark in color. Based on this Scientific truth alone you must conclude that the original man had to be black. THE ORIGIN OR MANKIND AFTER THE FLOOD. According to genesis 9:19 and the table of Nations in Genesis. 10, all mankind is descended from the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japheth. The descendants of Japheth, the youngest son, settled in Anatolia, modern Turkey, and from there moved to the Caucasus mountains of Western Russia. As a result they settled Europe and Russia becoming he ancestors of the Caucasian Peoples. Their main impact on Israel was though the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Ham’s descendants became the various black peoples who settled the African continent and parts of the Arabian peninsula. His son were Cush, whose descendants settled in Egypt, Put, whose descendants settled in Libya and Canaan, whose descendants settled in Palestine and founded the cities of Sidon, Tyre and Carthage among others, were the ancestors of the Phoenicans. Collectively, in ancient times the decedents of Cush formed a large ethnic group and were the main populace of the Cushite Empire which extended from present day libya to Ethiopia and Nubia, South of Egypt, all of present day Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula into the Mountains of Turkey. They Spoke a variety of Languages and had Skin Pigmention ranging from dark black to medium brown. One of Cush’s sons was Nimrod, founder of Babylon, Akkad, Assyria and Nineveh, several of early mankind’s most powerful nations And cities. There Languages are generally. referred to as belonging to the Western Semitic group, although they are actually Hamitic. Mizraim’s descendants became the Ludim, Anamim, Lehabim, Naphtuhim, Pathusim, and Casluhim (Phillistines). According to the Jewish0Roman Hisorian Flaviua Josephus, Most of these people were destroyed in the Ethiopic Wars. THE MYTHICAL CURSE OF HAM AND THE ACTUAL CURSE OF CANAAN It its often claimed that the black race resulted from a curse that Noah placed on his son Ham because Noah become drunk with wine and Ham “looked upon his fathers nakedness.” Some scholars interpret this as a euphemism and believe that Ham had Homosexual intercourse with his father; others believer the reason for the curse was the disgrace Ham Caused by telling others. The claim is that the curse turned ham black in the spot. The truth is Genesis 9:25-27 records that in fact Noah cursed Ham’s youngest son Canaan, not Ham: [25] he said, “cursed be Canaan!” Canaan’s decendants founded Sidon and among others were the ancestors of the Jebusites, Amorities, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinited, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathithes. There is ample historical evidence that indeed cursed with depravity including temple prostitutes and human sacrifice. One scholar, Lenormeant, said of the Canaanite religion: “no other people ever rivaled them in mixture of bloodshed and debauchery with which they thought to honor the deity.” THE LINEAGE OF JESUS FROM NOAH Jesus descended from the line of shem: his lineage from Noah though Abraham is shown in Genesis 11:10-27 and Luke 3:34-38. Jesus’ Lineage from Abraham though David is shown in Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Jesus as a Person of Colour The oft-asked question “What did Jesus look like?” is sometimes paired with related questions like “Was Jesus black?” or “Was Jesus a man of colour (color)?” Our difficulty is the sheer scarcity of the source materials that would help us to give properly informed answers to these questions. Nevertheless, it seems likely that it is appropriate to describe the historical Jesus as a person of colour, but appreciation of this likelihood has been impeded in much Christian art, culture and scholarship for several reasons: * There exists no early description of Jesus akin to the one we have, for example, of Paul in The Acts of Paul and Thecla. The few short descriptions we do have tend to focus more on his stature than on his appearance (Justin Martyr, Tertullian), and those are most likely derived from inferences based on Isaiah 52:14 and 53:2-3. * The description of the heavenly, apocalyptic Jesus in Revelation may have exercised an undue influence. The Jesus of Revelation 1 has hair “white like wool”, though one might draw attention to the fact that Ethiopians in antiquity were characterized as having “woolly” hair,(1) in which case the mentions of the word “white” (leukos) here should be seen purely as informed by the apocalyptic nature of the passage. But ultimately this passage tells us much more about apocalyptic than it does about first century Galilean peasants like Jesus. * Politics of omission: recent New Testament scholarship has drawn attention to a shameful politics of omission in both Biblical authors (e.g. Luke-Acts) and modern Biblical scholars, the tendency of which is to exaggerate the role of Rome and the Roman orbit and to marginalize darker races outside of that orbit.(2) * Reconstructing Jesus in their own image: the perennial problem of historical Jesus research, highlighted nearly a century ago by Albert Schweitzer yet still prevalent – and historical Jesus scholarship, as a sub-discipline of Biblical Studies, has been carried out primarily by white, male American, German and British scholars working with the modernist historical-critical approach. A quick survey of the depictions of Jesus on the covers of recent books on the Historical Jesus, most of which have portraits in the white, western artistic tradition, confirms how far most of these scholars are from even tacitly acknowledging that Jesus was a man of colour.(3) The New Testament itself tells us nothing directly about Jesus’ appearance. No doubt many of the first tradents, themselves Jews emanating from the same part of the world, would have taken for granted that Jesus, like them, was a person of colour. But for many a contemporary western audience, some rethinking needs to be done, not least given the legacy of Anglo-Saxon Jesuses presented by so many for so long. There is a marked influence, for example, from the Jesus films emanating from America and Europe in the 20th Century, all of which use American or European actors of a particular hue, tending to prefer sandy-haired, blue-eyed Jesuses. When black actors appear in the films, they are placed opposite Jesus and in contrast with him (e.g. Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar (dir. Norman Jewison, 1973). The Miracle Maker (dir. Derek W. Hayes & Stanislav Sokolov, 2000) marks a distinct and welcome departure from this trend in its depiction of a dark, swarthy Jesus who, it might be added, is probably supposed to evoke the notion, in contemporary viewers, that he is Jewish. But what is the evidence that Jesus might be described as a person of colour? * The region in which Jesus lived: the African American Biblical Scholar Cain Hope Felder(4) makes the case that we should see the Middle East of Jesus’ day as a kind of eastern extension of Africa, using archaeological and linguistic evidence to demonstrate the interaction between these peoples in these regions.(5) * Jesus’ General Ancestry: A key element in the narrative of the Hebrew Bible is the Hebrews’ move to, sojourn in and liberation from Egypt. Felder claims that they were a mixed race of Afro-Asiatics. Moses had a Cushite, or Ethiopian wife (Num.12:1); a son of Aaron, the one who begot the priestly line, was Phinehas (Ex.6:25), which in Egyptian means “the Nubian”, referring to the area of Sudan or Ethiopia (Jer.38:7).(6) * Jesus’ Genealogy – four Afroasiatic women are mentioned in the Genealogy that opens Matthew’s Gospel: Rahab. Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba. (Matt. 1.2-17) * Jesus’ Connection with Egypt: in both Christian and non-Christian texts, Jesus is placed in Egypt during his formative years. Celsus, a Jewish critic of Christianity from the second century, reported the tradition that Jesus learnt his magical powers in Egypt (Origen, Contra Celsum, 1.28). And Matthew’s Gospel famously reports the holy family’s flight to Egypt (Matthew 2) and announces the return with the scriptural “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Matt. 2.15). Some Useful Quotations “If the truth be insisted upon, the family stock of Jesus himself was none other than Afroasiatic. His parents probably resembled the typical darker Palestinian, Egyptian or Yemenite of today; many African-Americans would have similar features . . . It may not be going too far to suggest that the “Sweet Lil’ Jesus Boy” of the Negro Spiritual is probably most accurately described as an Afro-Asiatic or “a person of color.” While the Negro spiritual intones: “We didn’t know who you was,” it paradoxically reminds many modern Christians that what Jesus actually looked like may come as a surprise.” (Cain Hope Felder, “Blacks in the Bible and in Bible Lands”, Sphinx (Summer 1999), on-line journal, http://www.apa1906.org/sphinx/sum99/p069.htm) “. . . Jesus and his family spent more than a fleeting moment in Egypt. It is not inconceivable, for example, that Jesus might well have learned to walk and talk right here in Africa. Further, Jesus and his Jewish family, being Afro-Asiatic in colour and culture, would have appeared more chocolate-brown than Caucasian in complexion — more like a typically miscegenated African American, Kenyan Kikuyu or South African ‘coloured’.” (Gosnell L. Yorke, “Biblical hermeneutics: an Afrocentric perspective”, Religion and Theology 2/2 (1995), pp. 145-158; reproduced on-line at http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/press/rt/22/theol2w.html) Select Bibliography Randall C. Bailey & Jaquelyn Grant (eds.), The Recovery of Black Presence: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Essays in Honor of Dr Charles B. Copher (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995) Charles Copher, Black Biblical Studies: Biblical and Theological Issues on the Black Presence in the Bible (Chicago: Black Light Fellowship, 1993) Cain Hope Felder (ed.), The original African heritage study Bible (Nashville: James C. Winston Publishing Company, 1993) Cain Hope Felder (ed.), Stony the road we trod: African American biblical interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991). Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters; Race, Class, and Family, (New York: Orbis Books, 1994) Cain Hope Felder, “Blacks in the Bible and in Bible Lands”, Sphinx (Summer 1999), on-line journal, http://www.apa1906.org/sphinx/sum99/p069.htm Rosemary C. Rodman and Vincent L. Wimbush (eds.), African Americans & the Bible: Sacred Text and Social Texture (New York: Continuum, 2000) Gosnell L. Yorke, “Biblical hermeneutics: an Afrocentric perspective”, Religion and Theology 2/2 (1995), pp. 145-158; reproduced on-line at http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/press/rt/22/theol2w.html Notes 1. Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 23. 2. See, for example, Cain Hope Felder, “Racial Ambiguities in the Biblical Narratives,” in Gregory Baum and John Coleman (eds.), The Church and Racism, (Concilium 151; New York: Seabury, 1982); and Clarice J. Martin, “A Chamberlain’s Journey and the Challenge of Interpretation for Liberation,” Semeia 47 (1989), pp. 105-135. 3. I can think of only one possible exception to this rule, John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Volume 2: Mentor, Message, Miracles (Anchor Bible Reference Library; New York: Doubleday, 1994), which depicts a Jesus with a dark complexion, with long black hair and beard. 4. Felder is professor of New Testament languages and literature at Howard University Divinity School in Washington, D.C., U.S.A. 5. Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters; Race, Class, and Family, (New York: Orbis Books, 1994), pp. 8-14. 6. Ibid

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THE COLOR OF SCRIPTURE

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