Posted on 01/14/2026 10:09:48 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
The incoming Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, recently told The Times, "Jesus was a black man".
Jesus came for everyone, and it’s understandable that different cultures should want to present him in their own image. Here in the UK, for example, Jesus has typically been depicted as a white Westerner. But such unhelpful representations often ignore the fact that Jesus is Jewish. He came “to his own” (John 1:11) as the long-promised Jewish Messiah, and will return to Jerusalem as a Jew, specifically, “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David”. (Revelation 5:5)
As the Brighton-based author and speaker David Hoffbrand puts it in his book The Jewish Jesus, we need to strip away the layers that have increasingly masked Jesus over the centuries so we can see him as he really is.
In one ancient Byzantine church, a fresco depicted Jesus as blond-haired and blue-eyed. Hoffbrand reports how several layers of paintings were found underneath, which dated back to as early as 600 AD. “The interesting thing was,” Hoffbrand writes, the further the archeologists went, "the more like a typical Jewish man Jesus looked [in the painting], with dark brown hair, brown eyes and olive skin.”
Jesus came for both Jews and Gentiles (Luke 2:32). It was his Jewish disciples who brought the light of the gospel to the world at large – all but one of the Bible’s 40 authors were Jewish. Our Lord was steeped in all the ways and customs of the Jews and, apart from a brief exile in Egypt as an infant, never set foot outside Israel. And when, aged 30, he began his ministry as a rabbi, he said he had not come to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfil it (Matthew 5:17)…
(Excerpt) Read more at premierchristianity.com ...
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In our house, and especially for my grandmother, he was a blonde Irishman.
his race isn’t the point.
That’s the problem, people creating God in their own image.
Middleeastern Jews look like caucasians to me.
He is the CREATOR of all things. Nothing made was made without Him.
So it is a stupid mother flipping argument on what skin color He was during His earthly ministry.
It seems to me, the emphasis should be on WHAT HE SAID.
There is a lot of European migration/mixture that impacts makeup of *modern* day Israel. Different from the time of Christ.
The Old Testament has the Israelites white. A documet in the Qumran Caves Scrolls (Dead Sea Scrolls) describes Sarah as being very white.
exactly!!!!! black, white, green with oranges stripes- it doesn’t matter....
Like Robin Williams said,
“When Jesus comes back, he’s not going to look like Ted Nugent, he’s coming back as Charles Bronson, and he’s gonna be ticked off!”
I have no problem believing that Jesus looked more like Yasir Arafat than like any of my Irish ancestors.
The incoming Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, recently told The Times, “Jesus was a black man”. How do you know that for a fact? Some Bible passage?
He probably looked something like Jonathan Roumie or Shahar Isaac or some of the Disciples on The Chosen.
Probably not blonde hair & blue eyes like all the pictures.
I have always considered middle eastern Jews as whites. Am I wrong?
Jesus looks like the early Orthodox icons of Him—NOT the theoretical “Middle Eastern-like” portraits put out by the revisionists!
According to the rest of the world that makes Him what ever the flavor of the day is.
There are a minority of European Jews, along with people closely related to the historic Jewish people, such as Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians, who have lighter hair, eyes, and skin tone. The fact that Scripture gives no physical depiction of Jesus, other than the picture described of an ascended Jesus in Revelation, indicates that the authors of the Gospels did not think it necessary.
So it falls to me sit down and walk them through some clues in the Bible that seem to indicate that the Jews were probably darker than me, but not sure. And the Jews were probably lighter than blacks, but not sure. And that in Acts 2 the speaking in tongues being heard in multiple natural languages may be an indication that the Jews visiting home for Pentecost may have been of mixed races by then (from living in other countries for generations and learning other languages, perhaps with some intermarriage, since the Assyrian empire takeover centuries prior).
But again, we're not sure.
I like the ‘picture’ on the shroud. But I don’t need the shroud to believe.
In one ancient Byzantine church, a fresco depicted Jesus as blond-haired and blue-eyed. Hoffbrand reports how several layers of paintings were found underneath, which dated back to as early as 600 AD. “The interesting thing was,” Hoffbrand writes, the further the archeologists went, "the more like a typical Jewish man Jesus looked [in the painting], with dark brown hair, brown eyes and olive skin.”
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