page_title: Race and appearance of Jesus
section_title: Emergence of racial theories
hierarchical_section_title: Race and appearance of Jesus / Emergence of racial theories
context_page_description: The race and appearance of Jesus has been a topic of discussion since the days of early Christianity. Various theories about the race of Jesus have been proposed and debated. By the Middle Ages, a number of documents, generally of unknown or questionable origin, had been composed and were circulating with details of the appearance of Jesus. Now these documents are mostly considered forgeries.
  A wide range of depictions have appeared over the two millennia since Jesus's death, often influenced by cultural settings, political circumstances and theological contexts. The depiction of Jesus in art of the first Christian centuries gradually standardized his appearance with a short beard. These images are often based on second- or third-hand interpretations of spurious sources, and are generally historically inaccurate.
  By the 19th century, theories that Jesus was non-Semitic were being developed, with writers suggesting he was variously white, black, Indian, or some other race.
context_section_description: According to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was a descendant of King David. One argument against this is the contradiction in Jesus's genealogies: Matthew says he is descended from Solomon, and Luke says he is descended from Nathan, Solomon and Nathan being brothers. John of Damascus taught that there is no contradiction, for Nathan wed Solomon's wife after Solomon died in accordance with yibbum (the mitzvah that a man must marry his brother's childless widow).
  Colin Kidd, in his book The Forging of Races, argues that the assignment of race to biblical individuals has been a mostly subjective practice based on cultural stereotypes and societal trends rather than on scientific methods. Kidd reviews a number of theories about the race of Jesus, including a white Aryan Jesus and a black African Jesus.
  In his book Racializing Jesus, Shawn Kelley states that the assignment of a specific race to Jesus has been a cultural phenomenon emanating from the higher levels of intellectual circles within societies, and he draws parallels between the different approaches within different settings. Cain Hope Felder has argued that New Testament passages such as Galatians 3:28 express a universalism that goes beyond race, ethnicity or even religion.
  By the 19th century, theories that Jesus was of the Aryan race, and in particular of Nordic appearance, were developed and later appealed to advocates of the new racial antisemitism, who wanted nothing Jewish about Jesus. Houston Stewart Chamberlain posited Jesus was of Amorite-Germanic extraction. The Amorites were actually a Semitic people. Madison Grant claimed Jesus for the Nordic race. This found its most extreme form in the Nazi theology of Positive Christianity. Scholars supporting the radical Aryan view also argued that being a Jew by religion was distinguishable from being a Jew by race or ethnicity. These theories usually also include the reasoning that Jesus was Aryan because Galilee was supposedly a non-Jewish region speaking an unknown Indo-European language, but this has not gained scholarly acceptance - Galilee had a significant non-Jewish minority, but these spoke various local Semitic languages.
  Godfrey Higgins suggested in his book Anacalypsis (1836) that Jesus was a dark, brown-skinned Indo-Aryan from North India. In 1906, a German writer named Theodor Plange wrote a book titled Christ-an Indian? in which he argued that Jesus was an Indian and that the Christian gospel had originated in India.
  By the 20th century, theories had also been proposed that Jesus was black, but not necessarily a descendant of any specific African ethnicity, based on the argument that the ancient Israelites, as a group, were in whole or part originally a black people. Martin Luther King was a proponent of the "Black Christ" movement and identified the struggle of Jesus against the authorities of the time with the struggle of African Americans in the southern parts of the United States, as he questioned why the white church leaders did not voice concern for racial equality. For some, this blackness was due to Jesus's identification with black people, not the color of his skin, while others such as Albert Cleage argued that Jesus was ethnically black.
  A study on the 2001 BBC series Son of God attempted to determine what Jesus's race and appearance may have been. Assuming Jesus to be a Galilean Semite, the study concluded in conjunction with Mark Goodacre that his skin would have been "olive-coloured" and "swarthy"—these results were criticised by some media outlets for being "dismissive" and "dumbed down".
  In academic studies, beyond generally agreeing that "Jesus was Jewish", there are no contemporary depictions of Jesus that can be used to determine his appearance.
caption: Jesus with Nicodemus, by Tanner, 1899
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