Was Jesus a Real Guy?

Okay, if you pay any attention to what I post on social media, you know that I'm not a Christian. Not an atheist either, but that's a discussion for another day. What I want to ramble on about today is the question of whether Jesus really existed. 

First, let's look at whether or not the gospels and epistles can be considered historical documents. A common misconception about historical documents is that "historical" = "true". Many of the sources for our information about historical are considered unreliable. I'm currently listening to series of podcasts on the history of Rome - it's instructive to hear how many sources either contradict themselves or are obviously biased accounts. A significant number of accounts of important periods in Roman history were written a century or more after the events that they describe. Historians compare the different accounts, sifting through them to attempt to ascertain the probable truth amid...everything else. One of the  criticisms of the Bible as a reliable source is that none of the New Testament was written contemporaneously with the events that they describe. But this was not unusual. The historical records are full of information that was compiled after years or decades of word of mouth stories being passed down. 

Another criticism is that the Bible is just one source. Christian dogma asserts that all the various books of the Bible were inspired by God, but from a neutral perspective, they are all separate books, written for different reasons with different points of view. Biblical historians are of the opinion that Mark was written first, with Matthew and Luke, influenced by Mark and a hypothetical source they call "Q", were next, and John last. Thus, for the gospels alone there are five distinct authors, and five distinct sources for any information about an historical Jesus. There are also other documents besides what made it into the Bible, the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha also contain accounts of Jesus' life. Then there's the epistles written by Paul, which predate the earliest gospel by about 20 years. In my opinion, and the opinion of many Biblical historians, Jesus did exist.

Not so fast there! I'm not saying that  the historical Jesus is identical to the Jesus described in the Bible, I'm merely saying that I think it likely that there was someone around 30 C.E. in the Roman province of Judea upon whom the Jesus of the Bible was based. I also think that it's likely that he actually said a lot of what the Bible said he said, at least in broad terms. Do I also think that after his death stories, myths and legends arose regarding his birth, his life and his ministry? I would be astounded, knowing human nature, if this had not happened. How many times have you heard of a politician or other public figure exaggerate the facts of his own life, or the events surrounding the founding of a large company blown up with the bad bits erased? Given that the very first written references to Jesus (Pauline Epistles) had almost 20 years (and a further 20 for the first gospel) of oral history to develop before being committed to pen and paper, it would be surprising if accretions of myth and legend hadn't attached themselves to him. 

Read from the perspective a disbeliever, many parts of the New Testament are clearly written to address and debunk what came to be regarded as heresies. Christianity, unlike just about every other major religion, was very concerned with the minutia of doctrine, with what people believed, rather than what they did. The history of the first few centuries of Christianity, before coalescing into an organized "church" was one after the other of intra-Christian disputes that most people today wouldn't think important, let alone understand. For example, one of the major divisions in the 300's C.E. was called the Arian Controversy. At one time I was taught that Arius believed that Jesus was not, as many believed, God. But the difference between the Arians and the Niceans (adherents to the Nicene Creed) was more subtle than that. Arius and his followers still believed that Jesus was God the Son, part of the Triune God, but that the Son was subordinate to the Father. That's it. There was no practical difference, just this one nitpicky thing. The controversy over whether Jesus' mother's title should be "God-bearer" or "Christ-bearer" was another bare knuckle brawl. And the New Testament is full of references to these intra-Church fights, worded in such a way that you'd hardly know there were serious debates over what made a "real" Christian behind them. So, what's the point of this whole previous paragraph? The very real possibility that not only were the gospel writers putting words in Jesus' mouth to bolster their own opinions, but that later copyists were altering the text for the same reason. If you don't buy into the belief that the Bible is a seamless whole inspired by the Almighty, then it's just people's opinions. As far as that goes, the words of Jesus are just Jesus' opinions. 

In the main, I think Jesus' gospel message as reported in the Bible is probably pretty close to what the person whom the Biblical Jesus is based upon said. There's little things here and there that were probably added in order to advance somebody's doctrinal position, or their opinion of who Jesus was. What's problematic are the supernatural aspects. Everything mundane that's written about an historical Jesus could be 100% true, which does nothing to confirm that the miracles were as well. The big difference is that the words of Jesus, while they can't be verified with complete confidence, are at least plausible - people talk all the time, charismatic preachers gather followers all the time, prominent people have an influence beyond their lifetimes all the time. What doesn't happen all the time is dudes getting up after being dead, raising other people from the dead, miraculous healing, transmutation of matter (e.g. water into wine) or the used-to-be-dead dude levitating through the clouds into what was purportedly Heaven, which can be confirmed isn't anywhere close if it exists at all. If any of that happened, it can't be confirmed, and despite claims from religious leaders (not just Christians) none of it has been replicated under controlled conditions. 

So if you believe Jesus lived, I agree with you. If you follow the broad outlines of what he is recorded to have said, it's not a bad way to live, though I feel no compulsion to do so myself. I also have no problem if you believe the supernatural aspects, just don't talk to me like it's indisputable. 

White Jesus

Do White people really believe that Jesus was White? As a person of European extraction I certainly pictured him as having White European features back when I was a Christian, but I don't think I ever would have made his whiteness a hill that I'd die on. Surely there are people would though. I was also aware that other cultures pictured him in ways that reflected the way they looked. I saw more than one depiction of a Black Jesus. I've seen Asian Jesuses. I think that anyone who gave it any thought would suspect that he resembled the people who inhabit that part of the world, i.e. Arabs, Iranians - dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. 

There is no physical description of Jesus given in the Gospels, which would indicate that his appearance wasn't unusual for his time. There is a description in Revelation of a apocalyptic Jesus that gives him hair white as lamb's wool and feet like brass. I've heard some people say the "wool" describes a Black person's hair, and the brass indicates a dark color. I don't know. Maybe. It's the Book of Revelation; everything's weird in that book. 

A couple of things that come to mind when I hear the two extremes: (1) Jesus was white and (2) There are no white people in the Bible:

One is that the concept of "whiteness" is a fairly recent invention. During the European age of colonization and conquest Europeans used it to distinguish between themselves and the people that they needed to dehumanize in order to subjugate them. While skin color was definitely a factor in the whiteness scheme, it was not the only consideration. For example, the Irish, as far as skin color goes, one of the palest ethnicities around, were for a long time not considered White. In the United States, which had been dominated by Northern European nationalities, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Italians, Greeks, and other Mediterranean people were not considered White. A lawsuit in the early 1900's established that Arabs were White (in order to claim the societal benefits of Whiteness). 

So "Were there White people in the Bible?" is a meaningless question. If one is seriously curious, one might want to know if there were people in the Bible who, based on current understanding of who is considered White, would be considered White if you saw them on a 21st Century street. Again, hard to say. Rome, for example, was not a homogenous empire comprised of one ethnic group. At its greatest extent it included North Africa and the Middle East, surely some of the people identified as Romans in the Bible were what today we would call White, but just as surely there would be some with typical African features, or dark hair and "olive" skin. Without detailed physical descriptions, we just don't know. Recently I've been following a "History of Rome" podcast and have been looking up images of some of the emperors. While some of them appear stereotypically White, one or two look like they could be part African. 

Finally, why do we assume that everyone in the Biblical era looked like people from that region today? And why do we assume that everyone from that region today looks the same? There are indigenous fair skinned, blond, blue-eyed people in that region today, and images from that era are notoriously ambiguous about things like eye, skin, and hair color. (There are also dark haired, dark eyed, swarthy people native to Northern Europe) Modern Jews, who are descended from people in that region, have a wide variety of physical types among them. 

So was Jesus White? No. Maybe. What's White mean? Who cares?