Jesus was not caucasian white as most of America likes to present him as

This is a sensitive topic, obviously. I wouldn't want to sound as though I'm defending a racist and wrongheaded school of thought. But allow me to reframe this with historical perspective. Let us first consider our terms. Principally, we must turn to the figure of "Jesus." This question rests on the presupposition that the biblical Jesus is a particular historical figure, which is an argument that I believe fails under close scrutiny. Next, I take issue with your conflation and definitions of "White" and "Caucasian." The theory that white people are actually a singular race, coming out of the Caucasus mountain region, has been proven to be a particularly sticky remnant of an outdated type of historical thought. Indeed, if you've ever met any people from the Caucasus, they are noticeably different than those that are native English. There is no such race as "white." Now, if there is no such thing as a singular whiteness, then what does whiteness entail: 1) an actual physical description of skin color and certain other features. But, obviously, there is a decent amount of differentiation in what might be considered "white." So, the only real marker is that one might be "whiter" than others around him to be described as white. & 2) historical privilege. In the Roman times in which Jesus is supposed to have lived, the ruling class of Romans and Greeks in Judaea would have been olive-skinned mostly. So Jesus didn't look like the ruling class. However, Jesus is noted to have spoken in Greek with Pontius Pilate. This portrays him as someone who is knowledgeable enough to know the lingua franca of the trading world, and we can assume that he was fluent in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek (though not necessarily Latin). As someone who was rather educated, in a time and place when relatively few could read and write, much less in three languages, it could be claimed that Jesus did possess a certain amount of privilege for his day. There are very few secular historical records of the life of Jesus. Basically everything we know about him comes from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John in the New Testament. Significant historical research has pointed to the fact that there was a pre-gospel, known as the "Q Source," which served as the source material for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John was written separately later, in poetic Greek for an audience of converts. That leaves us with essentially two sources for the existence of Christ, along with a footnote by Josephus of Alexandria (which is more likely to have referred to Barabbas actually.) Was there someone named Jesus alive in first-century Judaea? Most certainly! It would be like asking if there was someone alive today named Josh. In fact, the New Testament itself gives us the name of another "rabble-rouser," scheduled for sentencing on the very same day in Roman Jerusalem, Jesus Bar-Abbas (Barabbas, coincidentally, means "son of the father.") So, even if there was a certain man named Jesus with a following, it's quite likely there was more than one! Moreover, several previous and contemporary Classical religious myths tell of a Messiah-like figure, son of god, born of a virgin, who dies for his people. Without significant data to bolster the gospels, one could easily say that the gospels are flawed themselves, and thus as a source for the life of Jesus they also must be dismissed as entirely factual. To believe in him, this one Jesus Christ, to believe in his very existence, requires faith, which I will--for the sake of this argument--disregard as being incapable of withstanding rigorous scrutiny. One can take a quick "out" on this question by re-framing it in this light and I would pose my answer as: if Jesus is not, in fact, an historical figure, then Jesus is just as white as you want to imagine him to be, since he's only a myth anyway. And, importantly, he's just as black or asian or whatever else you might want him to be as well. But, let us now examine this question under the assumption that Jesus Bar-Joseph was a real, historical figure, one and the same with the Jesus referenced in the New Testament. Given the nature of this assumption, I must now use those gospels as the sources for my argument, though I maintain that they are, at best, on shaky factual ground. This Jesus was a Jewish man, born in Bethlehem, son of Mary & God, reared by Joseph, and he fled to Egypt with his parents soon after he was born. The gospels also share that he was "of the House of David," which alludes to the fact that he was red-haired and ruddy, as David was. In fact, many artists throughout history have depicted Jesus as red-haired for this very reason. DNA evidence has proven the existence of relatively fair-toned, redheaded Jews living in Judaea at the time. If Jesus was red-haired and lighter-toned, a rare (~1% or less of the population) genetic mutation in the eastern Mediterranean region, a place occupied mostly by people with more typically Mediterranean skin and hair, then he was fairer-skinned and lighter-haired than most, which is the first description of "whiteness" which I gave previously. The biblical Jesus can thus be surmised to have been a redhaired Semite with a ruddy complexion. While it may not square with the exact concept of "whiteness" which mainstream America accepts, it can nonetheless be argued that Jesus Bar-Joseph could have been a "whiter" person than most in his time and place. This is not to say that he resembles a white Anglo-Saxon or similar western European, but that is not essential to the definition of whiteness which I am employing. https://en.wikipedia.org... https://en.wikipedia.org... http://www.salon.com... http://www.judaismandscience.com... http://www.judaismandscience.com... http://www.themythsandhistoryofredhair.co.uk...