Revealed: Jesus Was Black And From Nigeria – BBC (Photo)

A traditional Jesus, left, and the BBC's image of what he
might have looked like

A traditional Jesus, left, and the BBC's image of what he
might have looked like Jesus has been named the top black
icon by the New Nation newspaper. Their assertion that Jesus
was black has raised eyebrows in some quarters – so what
colour was he?

Just as no one will ever produce proof for the existence of
God, the question of Jesus's colour may always be a matter
for personal belief.

Was he white, white-ish, olive-skinned, swarthy, dark-skinned
or black? There are people who believe he was any one of
those shades, but there seem to be only two things about the
debate that can be said with any degree of certainty.

First – if the past 2,000 years of Western art were the judge,
Jesus would be white, handsome, probably with long hair and
an ethereal glow.

Second – it can almost certainly be said that Jesus would not
have been white. His hair was also probably cut short.

I think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus as 'a man of colour'

Yet the notion that Jesus was black – highlighted this week in
a survey of black icons by the New Nation newspaper which
ranked him at number one – is genuinely held by some. One
school of thought has it that Jesus was part of a tribe
which had migrated from Nigeria.
And Jesus probably did have some African links – after all the
conventional theory is that he lived as a child in Egypt where,
presumably, his appearance did not make him stand out.

Blue-eyed and brown-eyed Jesus
The New Nation takes it further: "Ethiopian Christianity,
which pre-dates European Christianity, always depicts Christ
as an African and it generally agreed that people of the region
where Jesus came from looked nothing like Boris Johnson,"
the paper says. As light-hearted evidence that Jesus was
black, it adds that he "called everybody 'brother', liked
Gospel, and couldn't get a fair trial".

But the truth, says New Testament scholar Dr Mark
Goodacre, of the University of Birmingham, is probably
somewhere in between.

"There is absolutely no evidence as to what Jesus looked
like," he says. "The artistic depictions down the ages have
total and complete variation, which indicates that nobody did
a portrait of Jesus or wrote down a description, it's all been
forgotten."

Culled from BBC News Online Magazine