Answering the
 Black Hebrew Israelites 

There is much in the Bible which is friendly and favorable to Ethiopia, Black Africa as known to the Mediterranean world; for example, the Queen of Sheba, according to Josephus, who visited Solomon and marvelled at his wisdom, was the Queen of Ethiopia. In the nineteenth century there developed a tendency, that still exists today and in fact seems to be on the upswing, to portray America's African-American population as the true Israel. Nor are they just claiming to be the ten lost tribes, as so many have done; the British Israelitism which was promoted by the Armstrongs' Worldwide Church of God was the claim that the British were the ten lost tribes, specifically excluding Judah. This reflects the historical fact that the ten northern tribes, making up the northern kingdom after the split, went into exile and never staged any formal return, as did the Jews from their Babylonian captivity.

No, the Black Hebrew Israelites are claiming the whole shebang; they are historic Israel, and the people with the synagogues and kosher markets are imposters. As football player DeShean Jackson explains, quoting, supposedly, Hitler, "'Hitler said, 'Because the white Jews knows [sic] that the Negroes are the real Children of Israel and to keep Americas [sic] secret the Jews will blackmail America. . .The white citizens of America will be terrified to know that all this time they've been mistreating and discriminating and lynching the Children of Israel.'" (unidentified book, highlighted in 'DeSean Jackson is STILL on the Eagles,' by Alex Raskin, July 7, 2020, Daily Mail online). African-Americans (and some Hispanics some of the time) are the real Israel, the others are not legitimate.

The Black Hebrew Israelites do not believe in 'replacement theology,' but rather that a mistake has been made in the history books. These believers take the view that Jesus and His apostles were black, as were the other Israelites of their day. Is this plausible? Was such a state of things ever mentioned by the voluble and prolific authors of the day? Does the artwork which survives from antiquity support this view?:

Petronius

This theory came to my attention when Jemar Tisby showcased on his podcast a spoken word artist from Nigeria who hazarded the conjecture that Jesus looked like him. He had heard arguments from the Black Hebrew Israelites that he found unanswerable. Is this likely? What did Jesus look like? Do we know? No contemporary sketches survive. What was the complexion of Jews in the first century? Petronius, a first century Roman comedic author, indirectly suggests an answer:

Petronius is writing in a broadly brushed, burlesque, comedic style. These hare-brained schemes are not meant to be taken as serious plans to escape detection; the reader laughs at them, as he is intended to do. Giton, in piling on various attributes, white on top of black, is not perfecting the scheme, but rather deriding it. But notice, please, the assumption that an inhabitant of the Roman empire could make himself look like an Ethiopian by wearing black-face, or like a Gaul by whitening the skin. These people are in the middle.

Circumcision is the suggested way to make oneself pass for Jewish. In a world where public bathing was the norm, this was not a private act. Why not adjusting skin color? As a proselytizing religion, Judaism admitted converts of all skin colors; yet if one differing from the Mediterranean norm had predominated, perhaps it would have been mentioned. From this passage, it seems as though a non-standard skin color does not strongly mark off the Jews, as it might if they had looked like Nigerians. Confronted with the claim that the historic Jesus looked like a Nigerian, many answer with another question, 'What difference does it make?' The question here asked is not, what difference does it make, but 'Is it so?' Petronius' evidence suggests the answer is 'No.'

During the late twentieth century, a certain "proletarian intellectual" named Theodore W. Allen made of communism something timeless and universal. This might surprise some readers, who may recall that Marxism is not supposed to be timeless. It is said that ". . .white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy." (Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, Chapter 12, p. 43 of 61). Is this likely to be true? Did racism create us? Should white people repent of the wickedness of whiteness? Or will they join me in resolving to repent of whiteness, only after the polar bears lead the way?:

Martin Luther King found black supremacy deplorable: "We know that a doctrine of black supremacy is as evil as a doctrine of white supremacy." (Martin Luther King, Jr., 1966 Ware Lecture: Don't Sleep through the Revolution, May 18, 1966). On its face it seems to be the same offense, basically, nor is the set of offenders on either side an empty one. Therefore you would expect to see even-handed criticism of both deflections from the ideal of racial equality. You would be disappointed. I can tell you, if you protest against even a gross injustice perpetrated against a Black victim, like say, 'I don't think they should have murdered Fred Hampton,' the white supremacists will tell you you're woke. Contrariwise, if you offer even measured criticism of a race-hater like Malcolm X, you've touched the third rail of American political discourse, and you are a white bigot. Personally I try to be even-handed.

Ezra

The members of the Jewish synagogue at Dura-Europus were evidently 'liberals' on the question of the interpretation of the second commandment. Some people have thought that this commandment forbids any image-making at all, others only that it forbids two things in combination, namely image-making and worship. The synagogue was richly decorated with paintings depicting great events of Jewish history. The artist cannot have known what these illustrious figures of by-gone times had looked like, but he knew what his clients looked like. Syria and Israel are today separate, if adjacent, countries, but at times under the Roman imperial system, Palestine was a part of the Syrian administrative district, the larger whole. Philo Judaeus explains that, under Caligula, king Herod Agrippa was transiting through Egypt on his way to his own realm, which was a part of Syria: ". . .for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign. . ." (Philo Judaeus, Against Flaccus, Chapter VI, Section 39).  We don't think of Galilee or Judaea as being a district of Syria, but it anachronistic to insist these are entirely different countries; they weren't, not under that administrative system. Pliny the encyclopedist incorporates Judaea as a part of a larger whole, Syria: "Next to these countries Syria occupies the coast, once the greatest of lands, and distinguished by many names; for the part which joints up to Arabia was formerly called Palaestina, Judaea, Coele, and Phoenice." (Pliny, Natural History, Book V, Chapter 13 (12)). Neither was even the Gentile population of this area wholly unrelated to the people of Israel, "And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian ready to perish was my father. . ." (Deuteronomy 26:5). So while this locale is far away from our target zone, the information remains relevant.

The provincial artist cannot achieve the naturalism which characterizes the best Roman art of the period, but he is good enough to get his point across, and that's all we need. Dura-Europos was an outpost of the Roman empire which fell to the Persians in 256 A.D., which provides the terminus ad quem for the synagogue's construction, so these images were made approximately two centuries after the crucifixion.

This figure, identified as Ezra reading the scroll or sometimes as Jeremiah, is as white as the paper of the scroll he is reading. Those portrayed are famous ancestral Jews, and many of the figures portrayed are, unsurprisingly, of a Mediterranean, mid-Eastern-looking character. Some are brick red, possibly the artist's way of communicating the hardships of the desert trek under the blazing sun recounted in Exodus. Desert ascetics are given this coloration also. It should be noted that none but white people are prone to turn red upon length exposure to the pitiless sun. None resembles a black African, which is the claim being made. The artist's figures range from pale white to more reddish in hue, never approaching black. This seems to be the norm for this artist: Jews ought to look mid-Eastern, not African.

If his Syrian Jewish clientele had thought this an error, they could have corrected him (or them) before he (or they) went too far with it. Apparently they did not. Whether the artist was Jewish cannot be known, but the people who hired him were, beyond controversy, Middle Eastern Jews. Did they not step out from behind the curtain when they handed him the envelope with the coins in it? Years ago I read in the paper about a career criminal persuaded to plead guilty to the big heist. Naturally enough, they asked him to identify his confederate. Who was it? Shorty? Lefty? Some other member of the old gang? 'I don't know,' he said; 'it was dark and I didn't get a good look at him.' A likely story. The artist knew what the people who hired him looked like, and they were not black or brown:

The database of ancient synagogue art is not large, but fortunately it has more than one entry. Some people, of course, think this category ought to be a null set, or at least contain no living creatures depicted; but, for whatever reason, some people were 'liberals' on this point. In his diatribe against the disgraced Egyptian governor Flaccus, Philo describes it as an innovation to erect images in the synagogues: ". . .all cried out, as if at a signal given, to erect images in the synagogues, proposing a most novel and unprecedented violation of the law." (Philo Judaeus, Against Flaccus, Chapter VI., Section 41-42). The proposed statues of Caligula, a Roman emperor who claimed to be a god, would have been idolatrous beyond question, but where exactly would the men of that time and place have drawn the line? Were floor mosaics in or out? For these later Galileans, they were in. This mosaic from a synagogue in Huqoq, Galilee, dating from the fifth century, intends to depict the spies sent out during Israel's wilderness trek, retrieving a cluster of grapes. If the artist intended to depict a Nigerian person, he failed utterly ('Stunning Mosaics Uncovered in Israel Reveal New Clues on the 'Rich Visual Culture' that flourished in Ancient Jewish Village,' Cheyenne Macdonald July 10, 2018, Daily Mail, UK). Admittedly this example is distant in time from our focus; but how could such a massive population replacement take place, from Nigerian to white-bread, over a span of several centuries, without anybody noticing? The Black Hebrew Israelites generally explain the current white complexion of contemporary Jews as the result of intermarriage with the indigenous population of Europe in the diaspora. But the people who commissioned these synagogue decorations had gone nowhere:

The National Geographic published a beautiful mosaic from Huqoq, which they identified as the Jewish High Priest meeting Alexander the Great. However the High Priest did not wear a simple white vestment, though on that occasion, if historical, the crowd did; he wore a polychrome creation in which some commentators see a vestige of the four classical elements, earth, air, water and fire:

"And when the Phoenicians and the Chaldeans that followed him thought they should have liberty to plunder the city, and torment the high priest to death, which the king’s displeasure fairly promised them, the very reverse of it happened; for Alexander, when he saw the multitude at a distance, in white garments, while the priests stood clothed with fine linen, and the high priest in purple and scarlet clothing, with his mitre on his head, having the golden plate whereon the name of God was engraved, he approached by himself, and adored that name, and first saluted the high priest. The Jews also did all together, with one voice, salute Alexander, and encompass him about;. . ." (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XI, Chapter 8, Section 5, p. 725).

The war elephants might be suggestive of Alexander, but also of his successors. At first I counted five little ones and deduced this was Mattathias of Modin, who had five sons. That would fit perfectly. The bullock, if such it is, is not a war animal, but an animal subject to sacrifice, making this scene look like one of those mandatory but unlawful compulsory sacrifice scenarios which touched off civil war in the intertestamental period. If the cloven-hoofed critter is a pig, admittedly poorly rendered, the situation is self-explanatory. But closer inspection reveals, not five sons, but a gap in the fresco plaster; a foot peeks out from upper left, part of a head to the right of the crack. If these children are the same group depicted below, there are eight sons, not five. So who they are is a mystery. Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, as were his successors, so his 'whiteness' comes as no surprise. But it is generally conceded the white-haired, white-robed figure, whoever he is, is a Jew. Not Nigerian.

U.S. Census

Today's anti-racists are insistent that race is a social construct: "To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth. . ." (White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, Foreword by Michael Eric Dyson, p. 3 of 13). But they are equally insistent that nobody constructs it right except for them. What does the U.S. Census understand a white person to be?:

"White - a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe,  the  Middle East, or North Africa." (About Race, U.S. Census web-site, Topics.)

Under that definition, a middle eastern Jew is, by definition, white. That's always been the way it is, as race has been socially constructed, in the U.S.A. Why do so many people today insist that Jesus, a middle Eastern Jew, is non-white? Did the bureaucrats who conduct the Census hold a vote among American Jews to discover their preference? That is what they forgot to do when they moved Hispanic people from the 'white' column to the 'other' column, and it's a fatal mistake.

An old church friend, when we used to drive past a graveyard, would query, "How many dead people in there?" I'd reply, "I really don't know." To which he would shout, triumphantly, "All of 'em!" Can't argue with that. Jesus is white, as are all from the Middle East, according to the Census Bureau. Perhaps they feel constrained to comply with legal precedent, such as Dow vs. United States, which held that a Syrian Arab is white. In any case, Middle Eastern Jews are white, by definition. Wittgenstein said, there are no private languages; but then he never encountered the anti-racists.

It is claimed that 'white people' began their career as Anglo-Saxon only, then amalgamated various groups to themselves, ultimately drawing in even Jews: "Initially the property of only Anglo-Saxons, whiteness was denied to the first Irish immigrants and then granted in the nineteenth century. Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants went through a similar transformation. . .In time, as whiteness was transformed yet again, Jews too became white, even as their non-Christian status continued to set them apart in the larger American society." (Blood Politics, Leonard Zeskind, p. 374). This is pure fantasy.

From the time when 'Caucasians' were invented, they tended to pull North Africans and the like into their sphere of gravitational attraction: "Caucasian variety. Color white, cheeks rosy. . .To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, pp. 229, 264-265, quoted p. 1337, Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People). If race is a social construct, there you have it; it's an artifact of the cultural history of mankind. If, however, race is a natural category, then Blumenbach might be wrong. You cannot have it both ways. If race is a social construct, then racial essentialism cannot be correct. Refusing to have it both ways is a simple and economical way of putting 'white studies' out of business. North Africans are legitimately intermediate between Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans; what is their 'proper' classification?

Modern academia advances the notion that 'white' is a growing category; they say the Irish, Italians, and Poles were not originally classed as 'white,' but only become so later: "Race is  a social construction, and thus who is included in the category of white changes over time. As the Italian American man from my workshop noted, European ethnic groups such as the Irish, Italian, and Polish were excluded in the past." (White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, Chapter 2, Page 13 of 98). In fact it is a shrinking category. The 'white' category was as compendious as it would ever be, at the dawn of the republic, based on what were believed to be the findings of anthropology and ethnography. Did Blumenbach's category 'Caucasian' really exclude Italians, Irish and Poles? Of course not; it included not only all Europeans, but also Middle Eastern Arabs and Jews, as well as North Africans. The class was larger than any modern notion of a 'white race,' not smaller, though it lingers still in the the U.S. Census' inherited categories. The claim that American immigrants are nouveau-white folks arose as an artful dodge, an improvisation to explain where was their 'white privilege' when those groups needed it, when they started out on the very bottom rung of the U.S. economic ladder. They were not really even competing with African-Americans for these jobs, because prior to 1910, over 90% of the African-American population lived in the South. The people who came here as immigrants were not privileged in the slightest; they tell the story of an Italian immigrant, who came to American, believing that the streets were paved with gold. When he got here, he realized that, not only were the streets not paved with gold, they weren't paved at all! And not only were the streets not paved, he was expected to pave them! But what has that got to do with being 'white'? You would think, wouldn't you, that, the claim being made that white people are privileged, this claim could be disproved by pointing to the existence of many white people who are dirt poor, then as now. You don't get it, do you? They are not white: ". . .poor and working-class people were not always perceived as fully white." (White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, Chapter 2, p. 17 of 98). How do we know they are not white? Because they are poor! We argue in a tight little circle around here.

If the government allots privileges, such as the right to become a naturalized citizen, which they never should have done, on the basis of race, then what policy could be more enlightened than to draw the boundaries of the privileged group as broadly as possible, as did Blumenbach? The founding myth of the racial grievance industry is that, "Race science was driven by these social and economic interests. . ." (Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, Chapter 2, p. 6 of 98), as if the German Blumenbach, who was personally opposed to slavery, knew or cared about the interests of colonial American planters! Germany had no New World colonies. Like the man said, "Of the Negro in particular. . 'God's image he too,' as Fuller says, 'although made out of ebony.'"  (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Contributions to Natural History, Part the First, Chapter XIII, p. 305, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter). Life is more complex than they imagine, and anyone who wants to understand history should stay away from this dumpster fire of an academic discipline, 'white studies.' Looking within their own hearts, they discern no springs of action other than malice and envy, and so evaluate others by to their own measure. Using Blumenbach's categories, we are not excluding Poles, Italians or Irish; we are including all of Europe plus everybody this side of the Ganges. Slight difference.

"Caucasian variety. . .To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Third Edition, Section IV, Chapter 82, p. 265, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter).

"The Caucasian race. The Europeans, with the exception of the Lapps, and the rest of the true Finns, and the western Asiatics this side the Obi, the Caspian Sea, and the Ganges along with the people of North Africa. . .They are more or less white in color, with red cheeks. . ." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Contributions to Natural History, p. 303, Part the First, Chapter XII, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter).

We exclude the Lapps. Got that? Not the Irish. Not the Italians. These falsifiers cannot even admit what the category was, back when people thought it mattered if they were Caucasian. People then were socialized into believing that they belonged to one of these categories, which were thus constructed, but not in a way which 'works' for the anti-racists. What is remarkable about the racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the way it proliferated from top to bottom; the scientific anthropologists ensconced in the universities were looking at the "races of man" much the same way as the groups which recruited from the bottom, like the Ku Klux Klan. But who was the scientific anthropologist who counted the Irish as non-white? There was no such person. This is a requirement of their own nutty system; if the Irish, upon first coming to this country in flight from the potato famine, were not privileged, and Lord knows they were not, then they cannot have been white. To conclude otherwise disconfirms the notion of 'white privilege.' So be it.

Incidentally, this seminal thinker, Blumenbach, was committed to monogenesis, the notion that all humanity are of one lineage, not of multiple origin: "For although there seems to be so great a difference between widely separate nations, that you might easily take the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, the Greenlanders, and the Circassians for so many different species of man, yet when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do so run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Ed. 1775, pp. 98-99, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter). The enlightenment thinker Voltaire had posited multiple species of mankind, with independent origins. Though there were many scientific racists in that day, and especially following Darwin, this man is far from the worst of them. He runs through the standard recitation of accomplished blacks: "The negro Freidig was well known in Vienna as a masterly concertist on the viol and the violin, and also as a capital daughtsman, who had educated himself at the academy there under Schmutzer. As examples of the capacity of the negro for mathematical and physical sciences, I need only mention the Russian colonel of artillery, Hannibal. . ." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Contributions to Natural History, p. 309, Part the First, Chapter XIII, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter). True, he finds the inhabitants of the Caucasus comely. Have the anti-racists made their case that he is no more than a tool of the Virginia slave-owners? His classificatory enterprise has been given up, for humans though not for our animal friends. Hmmm. Blumenbach laid out five main categories, but two are subsidiary, three primary, and these three primary racial classifications are familiar from U.S. law. To Marxists, it is a given,— it is their starting point not their ending point,— that economic conditions are the independent variable of human history; culture, and the ideologies it generates, depend upon the means of production. Therefore slavery comes first, in the causal chain, racial discrimination next, then race science brings up to the rear, called into being by the first and second. But Blumenbach owed nothing to the colonial slave-owners and did not come up with the conclusion they would have liked, that blacks are inferior to whites. Do not expect the Marxists, observing this incongruity, to discard their ideological armature; no historical fact will ever make them do that, rather they will squeeze the facts until they scream, to try and make them fit.

Black and white never should have been categories in U.S. law; the law ought to have been color-blind from the start, and ought to recover that desirable condition as soon as practicable. But they were, and they were not defined subjectively, by matching color swatches. How would such a system have worked, if members of the same family had differing albedos? Rather these categories were defined by where your ancestors resided before they came to the United States. That's what it means to ask, to what race does someone belong. Some object: "Much of Christian history is painted white. It is almost the norm for Turkish, Mediterranean, African, and biblical characters to be assumed to be white. . .My cry here isn't for diversity, but honest portrayals of history." (Woke Church, Eric Mason, p. 103). It is, not almost, but generally the norm for persons of Turkish and Mediterranean origin to be assumed to be white under U.S. law, because so they were defined. At some point, we are told, it was discovered that this system of classification is wrong. Who discovered this, and how did he prove it was wrong, when the entire category system is a social construct? Back when 'scientific racism' was a thing, the category 'white' was far more compendious than people realize. Not to suggest we revive that defunct and discredited enterprise, but where is there progress in announcing it has been discovered that the 'white' category is actually tiny, consisting of no more than Anglo-Saxons and Icelanders? Who discovered this and how was the discovery verified? If it was the Ku Klux Klan, why is their authority held higher than the courts of appeal?

The project of classifying human beings, or any other living thing, is rendered difficult by the insensible transition from one type to the next and lack of clear dividing lines. At the extremes, the varying human types look strikingly different; the Eskimo does not look like the Mandingo who does not look like the Han Chinese; but the interstices between these isolated islands, the extremes of the human condition, are filled in with boiling seas of intermediate types, presenting the ethnographer with no natural lines of division. As the observant Blumenbach puts it, "In the first place, then, there is an almost insensible and indefinable transition from the pure white skin of the German lady through the yellow, the red, and the dark nations, to the Ethiopian of the very deepest black, and we may observe this, as we said just now in the case of stature, in the space of a few degrees of latitude." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Ed. 1775, p. 107, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter). Back when the anthropologists sought to rise to the challenge of classifying the varieties of mankind, they understood this was the crux of the problem. We see clearly enough that there are human types which differ one from another; but we find no gulf, no 'no-man's-land,' between them; rather, they blur into one another:

"Neither must we take merely one pair of the races of man which stand strikingly in opposition to each other, and put these one against the other, omitting all the intermediate races, which make up the connection between them. We must never forget that there is not a single one of the bodily differences in any one variety of man, which does not run into some of the others by such endless shades of all sorts, that the naturalist or physiologist has yet to be born, who can with any grounds of certainty attempt to lay down any fixed bounds between these shades, and consequently between their two extremes." (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Contributions to Natural History, Part the First, Chapter X, Section II, pp. 297-298, The Anthropological Treatise of Blumenbach and Hunter).

The ancient Egyptians and North Africans are, in point of fact, intermediate between the blacks of sub-Saharan Africa and Europeans. If nineteenth century Americans drew the lines differently from how today's 'anti-racists' want them drawn, on what possible basis can they be corrected, in their free social construction? Accusations are heard from the anti-racists, whose main line of business is accusation, that this assignment of North Africa to the 'white' column was premised on racism: the classifiers wanted to take credit for the great achievements of Egyptian civilization. Aren't these people obviously black? Are they, really? If the naturalists classify people as white, they are racist; if they classify people as black, they are racist. Back when being white conferred advantages, 'white' was the popular category; now that affirmative action goes to 'people of color,' why that's the ticket. But please do not accuse people who constructed a very wide 'white' category, of racism; that is a meaningless accusation.

Complicating matters, the ultimate criterion for who is, and is not, a member of the congregation of God is faith, not race:

The Herodians

There is a wealth of information about what some people in the ancient world looked like. For example, the funerary portraits from Fayum, Egypt, tell us what the inhabitants of that place, of mixed Greek and Egyptian descent, looked like. There is not a similar wealth of imagery available for Israel. The perceived prohibition against imagery is one strike, difference in funerary customs another, the devastating wars is another strike against us, and the dissimilarity of the climate from arid Egypt is one more. But perhaps the ruling family can help us. It was the custom in the Roman world for rulers to make images of themselves, scattering around their realm busts, statues, portraits on coins, to excite the wonderment and admiration of those governed. There survives a little bit of that from Palestine, but unfortunately not as much as could be hoped. Herod the Great was an Idumaean who ruled the Jews; some of his family members, of partial Jewish descent, have left their portraits behind, like the infamous Berenice, Titus' girlfriend whom he ditched just prior to becoming Emperor:

Unfortunately you can't tell skin color from a bust, but her features do not call to mind some of the ethnicities people nowadays claim as similar. Thus it is whenever we see depictions of Jews in ancient art, for example, the Jewish captives on the Arch of Titus at Rome. The captives' long hair flows about their shoulders in a way which does not call the Nigerians to mind. While on the one hand these people do not look like Icelanders, nor like Eskimo, nor like the Chinese, neither do they look very much like sub-Saharan Africans. They are more Mediterranean. One might conclude Jesus likely did not look Nigerian. Neither did He look Swedish, Mongolian, nor Cherokee. These latter groups seem content enough with the situation; at least they do not perform rap music asserting otherwise. He is the Savior for all, not just for those whose complexion resembles His.

When artists set out to depict the Lord, if they believe this is lawful, they can reflect that God became man, and draw Him as a man: which means in most cases looking like the man up the street, i.e., a member of their own people-group. For some reason this is thought commendable, but only when the artist is not European; in any case it is very common. Or they can reflect that He was born of the seed of David: ". . .Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh. . ." (Romans 1:3). In this case the artist might, as did Rembrandt van Rijn, embark upon a course of study, searching in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam to see what Jesus might have looked like. Both approaches are legitimate; they both communicate scriptural truths, though slightly different ones. What is rather more off the wall is to depict Jesus in a way no contemporary artist ever depicted a Jewish subject, while insisting that He really must have looked just like that.

Which brings us to the great, magisterial, Byzantine portraits of Christ. When Constantine came to power, the church no longer needed to endure persecution, and ornately decorated churches were put up, incorporating portraits of the Lord. This was done over objections, and later the Iconoclasts would condemn the entire enterprise. The Byzantine artists, working centuries later, did not know what Jesus, as an individual, looked like; not even an authentic verbal description survives. (The Letter of Publius Lentulus first turns up in the fifteenth century!) But the artists of the day cannot have been unaware of what Palestinian Jews looked like, in general, in their world. Was this a case where they made their 'Jesus' look like themselves, as people often do, or were they trying, like Rembrandt, to make Him look like He might actually have looked? There is now no way of knowing, but the idea that they were trying to cover up the scandal of a Nigerian Savior seems far-fetched. What is the motivation for such a large-scale fraud? White racism? But weren't these same people just telling us that white racism was not invented until seventeenth-century Virginia?

Some people see racism in this Byzantine Christ and his modern cousins:

"Protestant organization started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus — a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people." (Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, Chapter 12, Page 40-41 of 58).

But whose racism? Were the Byzantines white racists? The Black Hebrew Israelites sometimes identify modern Jews as "fake Jews." Or they sometimes offer a milder, less incendiary explanation for why modern Jews do not fit their paradigm, namely that the Jews of the European diaspora intermarried with European stock. The Byzantine artists knew what Jews who had not intermarried with Europeans looked like. Why did they falsify the evidence? Some explanation for this massive conspiracy theory is required, beyond just 'white folks are evil.' What were the motivations of the conspirators? Cui bono, who benefits, as the conspiracy theorists whisper?

Paul the Egyptian

Some people say that Paul was non-white, because he was mistaken for an Egyptian:

"Paul was mistaken for an Egyptian, so he clearly was not white (Acts 21:38)." (Eric Mason, Woke Church, p. 60).

The Roman authors will sometimes mention a 'swarthy Egyptian,' indicating that they perceived at least some of the Egyptian people as less 'white' than themselves. Herodotus surmises that the Colchians, the inhabitants of Soviet Georgia, were related to the Egyptians, because both groups are "dark-skinned:" "For the people of Colchis are evidently Egyptian, and this I perceived for myself before I heard it from others. . . .That this was so I conjectured myself not only because they are dark-skinned and have curly hair (this of itself amounts to nothing, for there are other races which are so). . ." (Herodotus, Histories, Book II, Chapter 104).

The reference in Acts seems likely to be to a member of Egypt's Jewish minority engaging in Zealotry or false Messianic agitation, rather than to a Gentile Coptic-speaking Egyptian. Did the Jews of Egypt, numbering one million according to Philo, look like the Coptic indigenous population, or were they recognizably distinct? There is evidence for both. In describing the antisemitic riots which broke out in Egypt upon Tiberius Caesar's death and Caligula's accession to the throne, Philo gives a chilling narration of how Jewish shoppers were plucked out of the market-place and then brutally done to death by the howling mob. So, whether they were keying off wardrobe and ornament, or facial features and cranial anatomy distinctive to the Copts as opposed to Semites, the mob seems to have thought they could tell. They were often wrong, however:

"The truth is, as I have said already, the whole business was a deliberate contrivance designed by the cruelty of Flaccus and of the multitude, in which even women were included; for they were dragged away as captives, not only in the market-place, but even in the middle of the theatre, and dragged upon the stage on any false accusation that might be brought against them with the most painful and intolerable insults; and then, when it was found that they were of another race, they were dismissed; for they apprehended many women as Jewesses who were not so, from want of making any careful or accurate investigation." (Philo Judaeus, Against Flaccus, Chapter XI., 95-96).

In the end, how can you finally tell who is Jewish and who is not? Try to get them to eat swine's flesh:

"And if they appeared to belong to our nation, then those who, instead of spectators, became tyrants and masters, laid cruel commands on them, bringing them swine's flesh, and enjoining them to eat it. Accordingly, all who were wrought on by fear of punishment to eat it were released without suffering any ill treatment; but those who were more obstinate were given up to the tormentors to suffer intolerable tortures, which is the clearest of all possible proofs that they had committed no offence whatever beyond what I have mentioned." (Philo Judaeus, Against Flaccus, Chapter XI., 96).

When the Rwandan genocide was in the news, at first it was reported that Tutsi and Hutu looked different,— one was long and stringy, the other squat and compact,— but then it turned out that, absent the entry on their identification documents, no one really could have been sure to what group any given individual belonged. Evidently it was like that with Philo's native Egyptians and their Jewish neighbors. This hanging thread can be observed in many of these situations; pulling on it, things begin to unravel. Nazi antisemitic propaganda movies made much of how exotic Jews looked compared with Europeans; but in practice, it was found necessary for the Nazis to put yellow stars of David on the Jews to mark them for persecution, because how otherwise would anyone have known they were Jewish? There is so much individual variation within all human populations, that perhaps commonalities should be stated as tendencies rather than unbreakable rules. As will be seen, there was a range of hues to be encountered on the Egyptian street, from Macedonian peaches-and-cream to African; perhaps if the Gentile population had been monochrome, the Jews might have stood out. It also is true though, to this day, that the Copts look distinctly like themselves and no one else. These were the natives, furious to see themselves shouldered aside by Macedonians and Jews, newcomers to the country. Then came the Arabs.

What was the complexion of contemporary Egyptians, not yet overrun by the Arabs, themselves also a white race if you take it from the U.S. Census? They were part of the African continent yet a nearby country to Israel, so it would be interesting to know. Was it very similar to the Nigerians of today? Fortunately a database exists, of the Fayyum funerary portraits, preserved by Egypt's arid climate. These living, breathing portraits are so life-like that you expect the sitters to get up and walk out onto the street when their sitting is complete, although in reality, they mouldered into dust millennia ago:

Mediterranean, or Nigerian? Certainly not Swedish. Golly. . .Mexican, maybe? Darker hued than Vikings, yet neither do they look like today's sub-Saharan Africans. But neither did those residents look then as they do now, the Bantu-speakers not yet having completed their southward migration. The people who waved from shore as the daring Carthaginian mariners completed their transit around the Cape were not so dark-skinned as those who would later displace them. Are the people depicted in the ancient Egyptian funerary portraits white or black? They present a continuum of skin tones, picking up from where sub-Saharan Africa leaves off to people who look like Greeks or Italians. Someone committed to the concept that race is a social construct would have to say, that depends on how you define it. Fewer people really are committed to that idea than seem to be.

If some tendency is noticeable for the women to look lighter-skinned than the men, some of this difference might be attributable to indoor occupations, but all-in-all more to art than to nature. Women in the ancient world used white lead as a cosmetic, even Jerome's sensible colleague Paula, in her earlier years: ". . .but she only said: ‘I must disfigure that face which contrary to God’s commandment I have painted with rouge, white lead, and antimony.’" (Jerome, Letter 108, Section 15). This is distressing when you realize that lead is a powerful central nervous system toxin. These people are intermediate in hue between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans; looking at them, one can understand both sides of the equation; a Greek like Herodotus might perceive them as "dark-skinned," relatively speaking, while someone with a darker benchmark might see them as white. They look no more Nigerian than they do Icelandic. The Hebrew Israelite idea that the default color for humanity is black is as bankrupt as any other form of racism.

White and Ruddy

The only indication found in the Bible concerning coloration of members of the House of David is 'white' and 'ruddy:'

"And he sent, and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the LORD said, Arise, anoint him: for this is he." (1 Samuel 16:12).

"And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him: for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance." (1 Samuel 17:42).

"My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand." (Song of Songs 5:10).

John Gill explicates Song of Solomon 5:10 thus, ". . .the description of him in general is, that he is 'white and ruddy;' having the whiteness of the lily, and the redness of the rose; which make a perfect beauty." (John Gill, Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, Song of Solomon 5:10). This exposition is as literal as literal can be. Whether Jesus of Nazareth resembled His illustrious ancestors cannot be known, but it's not unheard of for people to resemble their ancestors. David and Solomon are not only predecessors, but types, of the illustrious greater David to come.

Reportedly, other Semitic languages use 'red' as a way of referring to white-skinned peoples: "'Red (al-hamra') refers to non-Arabs due to their fair complexion which predominates among them. And the Arabs used to say about the non-Arabs with whom white skin was characteristic, such as the Romans, Persians, and their neighbors: 'They are red-skinned (al-hamra'). . ." (Ibn Manzur, Lisan al-arab, IV:209, 210). When the Spanish Catholics had recaptured most of Spain from the Moorish invaders, Granada held out as a Muslim stronghold, under the leadership of a man called 'Red,' not because he had red hair, but because his ruddy (white) complexion distinguished him from his Moorish soldiery: "Fifty thousand Moors are recorded to have fled to his protection from Valencia, and three hundred thousand from Seville, Xeres, and Cadiz. . .The founder of the dynasty of the Beny-Nasr, an Arab named Ibn-el-Ahmar, or the 'Red man,' because of his fair skin and hair, was a vigorous sovereign, but he could not withstand the power of the Christians, who now held nearly the whole of Spain." (The Moors in Spain, Stanley Lane-Poole, Kindle location 2037).

Black supremacists are not alone in troubling the world; there are white supremacists, too:

Proof-Texts

What are the proof-texts used by the Black Hebrew Israelites to substantiate their position? Texts like Lamentations 4:8,

"Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick." (Lamentations 4:8)

See? They're black. This would be a more convincing proof-text if it weren't immediately preceded by,

"Her Nazarites were purer than snow, they were whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was of sapphire:. . ." (Lamentations 4:7).

Precisely because there is an obvious contrast set up by the author, between their prior white and ruddy appearance and their current blackened state, the reader cannot resort to widening out the range of meanings of 'black.' For these people, health and normalcy means a white and ruddy complexion, black indicates pathology. But how? When the Allies liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the skeletal survivors had not turned black. Unlike, say, frost-bite, there is no inherent necrotizing tendency in starvation. Nevertheless it is possible for deficiency diseases like scurvy to produce dark blotches on the skin. Perhaps there was an environmental factor for these people, camped out amidst the ruins of a devastated city. Opportunistic skin infections, bacterial or fungal, may have piggy-backed onto their malnourished condition.

In times of famine, people resort to unfamiliar or uncommon food sources, and consume food that has suffered spoilage in storage, which would otherwise be discarded. Ergot, a fungal contaminant of rye, can cause people's extremities to turn black: "Rye was a weed grain and occurred wherever wheat was cultivated. Often it became the dominant plant when wheat fields were abandoned. . .However, it was not cultivated for food until some time in the early Middle Ages. . .It was in the Rhine Valley, in 857 A.D., that the first major outbreak of gangrenous ergotism was documented.. .The victims' toes, fingers, arms and legs often became blackened as a result of gangrene, and would eventually die from the infections in these extremities." (Ergot of Rye: Introduction and History, Department of Botany, University of Hawaii website). These starving people would not have sown rye as a cereal crop, but if they found it growing as a weed might have counted it a bonanza. But the ergot which contaminates it causes a variety of alarming symptoms, including discoloration of the skin resulting from vasoconstriction.

Disease is the faithful if mournful companion of famine, and disease can impact complexion. The Spanish flu of 1918, by depriving its sufferers of oxygen, turned their skin hue to a scary mottled brown and purple: "'Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheek bones and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from the ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored man from the white.'" (witness testimony, quoted in Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, p. 13). Mix mahogany with blue and what do you get? The color of slate: "Bodies the color of slate were 'stacked like cordwood' or lying about the morgue floor in confusion, and the eminent physicians had to step around and over them to get to the autopsy room." (America's Forgotten Pandemic, Alfred W. Crosby, Kindle location 258). The author elsewhere describes it as the color of wet ashes: ". . .the virus of 1918 produced a disease that turned people the color of wet ashes and drowned them in the fluids of their own bodies and inspired names like the 'purple death.'" (America's Forgotten Pandemic, Alfred W. Crosby, Kindle location 5475). This isn't 'black' exactly, but then neither is the complexion of African-Americans! While this particular twentieth century illness cannot be the culprit,— the Hebrews did not keep swine, and so cannot have suffered from swine flu, even if any such affliction had existed then,— illness resulting from famine might well have changed their appearance. Perhaps self-disfigurement from rolling on the ash heap, as a mourning ritual, played a role. In any case, black is not normal, not for them; it is a pathological consequence of famine: "Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine." (Lamentations 5:10).

So much for speculation, by a lay-person, on why famine might result in a darkened countenance. Why this happens is open to question, but that it happens, under conditions found in the Near East, is stated by various authors, including Maimonides and the Rabbis, as summarized by John Gill, in speaking of John 11:44:

"And his face was bound about with a napkin; the use of which was not only to tie up the chin and jaws, but to hide the grim and ghastly looks of a dead corpse; and one of the same price and value was used by rich and poor: for it is said [Maimon. Hilchot Ebel, c. 4. sect. 1.],

'the wise men introduced a custom of using. . .'a napkin,' . . .of the same value, not exceeding a penny, that he might not be ashamed who had not one so good as another; and they cover the faces of the dead, that they might not shame the poor, whose faces were black with famine.'

"For it seems [T. Bab. Moed Katon, fol. 27. 1.],

'formerly they used to uncover the faces of the rich, and cover the faces of the poor, because their faces were black through want, and the poor were ashamed; wherefore they ordered, that they should cover the faces of all, for the honor of the poor.'" (John Gill, Exposition of the Bible, John 11:44).

So whatever the reason, under middle Eastern conditions, famine was understood to blacken the countenances of those who suffered and died from that cause, thus explaining the references in Lamentations.

Other texts important to the Black Hebrew Israelites, a tendency which dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, are the curses denounced against ancient Israel found in Deuteronomy 28, in the event they disobeyed the law; for instance, "And the LORD shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you." (Deuteronomy 28:68). But they are making a fundamental logical error; the Lord did not says these curses are unheard-of things which the nations know nothing about, misfortunes which will strike only Israel, so that one could reason from a nation's observed affliction to their identity as the true Israel. For instance, God warns Israel He will strike them with a pestilence if they disobey: "The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it." (Deuteronomy 28:21). What greater pestilence was there in recorded history than the Black Death, which swept away one third to one half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century? But we do not therefore conclude the Europeans are the true Israelites! Famine, plague, and military defeat happen all the time to the Gentile nations; it's a rough world. Woe to those Israelites who violate their solemn covenant with God; but it's not like those outside the covenant are immune to catastrophe and misfortune. Besides, the black Africans sold into the American slave market never passed through Egyptian ports; they were taken rather from Africa's western Atlantic coast.

The curse of bondage and captivity did fall on Israel, on the Northern Kingdom by way of the Assyrians, on the Southern Kingdom by way of the Babylonians, far more heavily than it ever fell on West Africa, because no West African nation was ever subjugated and depopulated by the slave traders. These nations were not invaded by foreign armies and forcibly removed; they were visited by the occasional cluster of trading ships or even single ships. These nations continued on, prospering even, all the while selling individuals they had captured into slavery and allowing them to be transported to the New World. Other nations have also faced the mournful fate of watching their children sold into slavery; the English word 'slave,' comes from 'Slav.' The great majority of Africans were never taken from their homes and subjected to the horrors of the Middle Passage. Entire regions of the continent were exempt, such as Africa's east coast. Are these people Hebrews? They have no such recollection of themselves; they do not observe the Torah. Some of the Black Hebrew Israelite websites want to say the Africans are not Hebrews. . .and African-Americans are not African! If Africans in general are not Hebrews, if the countries along Africa's West Atlantic coast are not Hebrew, then what reason is there to think that individuals taken at random from those places are Hebrews? Some wish to say that a few specific tribes are of this heritage, but then how would they know the African-American, to whom they are speaking on the street, is descended from one of these tribes rather than from the much larger African Gentile population?

The origin of the various people groups of the world does not go unexplained in the Bible. The earth's population went through a bottle-neck in Noah's flood, which exterminated all but eight people. The existing peoples and tribes of the world are descended from Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, as explained in Genesis Chapter 10. Humanity radiated out from its new starting point, where the ark rested on Mount Ararat. The Hebrews are the descendants of Eber, great-grandson of Shem. The black Africans are the children of Cush, Ham's son; this is no mystery, their designation in the Bible could be more literally transliterated as 'Cushites,' this is the word the King James Version translates as 'Ethiopians.' Javan, of Japheth's lineage, is the progenitor of the Greeks. So we already know where the Greeks, white folks, and African blacks come from: Javan and Cush, respectively. Enter the Black Hebrew Israelites, and confusion begins to reign. By their reckoning, African-Americans are the offspring of the Hebrew Jacob. Whites come from Edom, Jacob's brother. Who saw that coming: white Americans are Semites, and children of Abraham by race! Once the white supremacists find this out, will they omit it from their manifestos? But they aren't really, though if they placed their trust in Christ, they would become Abraham's spiritual heirs: "And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise." (Galatians 3:29). Have they never heard Deuteronomy 23:7?: "You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother." Their anti-Edomic rhetoric is not very brotherly. Not like it's addressed to them.

So who are the multitudinous inhabitants of Africa: descendants of Ham, as the Bible teaches, or descendants of Shem, as this new cult teaches? Or are these two entirely separate, though nearly indistinguishable, groups of people? If they are from completely different lineages, why are they nearly indistinguishable? Other than from their admixture of European DNA, one could not tell African-Americans from Africans. Isn't it odd that such a very large population grouping arose so late, from such small beginnings, when they were already there anyway? Abraham went down to Ham's place, Egypt, and found it already full of people! It is a little like proclaiming the Chinese, in their billions, the descendants of Grace Kelly. Why are there so many of them, and why were they already there long before Grace Kelly came along?

Strangely enough, some of the modern-day Black Hebrew Israelites include Latinos in their roll call of Black Hebrews. This confuses their story even further, because Latinos are descended in part from people who came from Spain and were never enslaved. Most have a European genetic heritage to a degree, some exclusively. They own, not only their own land, but entire countries, south of the border. The Black Hebrew Israelites enlist also native Americans, who were not slaves either. Evidently they don't consider their own proof-texts important, because you do not have to belong to a group which was once enslaved to be a 'Black Hebrew.' But if this proof-text goes out the window, then there is no reason at all to count African-Americans as Hebrews.

Wild misidentification of the Biblical tribes is not in itself original to these new groups. It is the bread and butter of racism. Other population groups have noticed, down through the years, that the Bible makes little mention of them, if any. The Anglo-Saxons noticed this. To rectify this glaring omission, they 'corrected' the Bible record by identifying their own group, which they were convinced is the central pivot point of human history, with some tribe or lineage which is mentioned. Thus England and America became Ephraim and Manessah. There is no cultural, historical or linguistic reason to make this identification, any more than there is for the novel theories of the Black Hebrew Israelites. But to find racism in the Bible, you must insert it with a shoe-horn, and so they did, and still do to this day: "For so-called Christian Identity adherents, Germans were regarded as descendants of the biblical tribe of Judah, and Germany by right was the Lion of Europe." (Blood Politics, Leonard Zeskind, p. 228). Germans make as much sense as Dominicans, who loom large in some New York City neighborhoods, or anyone else. These whimsical identifications can be made by anyone at all with equal merit or lack thereof.

Another verse used, oddly enough, by the Black Hebrew Israelites is Amos 9:7: "Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD." This verse involves a comparison between two terms: one thing is "as" another,— thus it does not identify the two terms. The Lord is warning the congregation not to presume too much on His everlasting love for them; as John the Baptist warned, He could raise up a people from the very stones of the earth. Or He could have chosen the Ethiopians, or any other nation on the earth, for His bride. Ultimately, in the Messianic age, the Gentiles will be called and those believing incorporated into His kingdom. If I say, this man is like Liberace in his sartorial sense:

. . .then what am I saying? That he is Liberace? That, because Liberace was Polish, he must be Polish as well? That he can be distinguished in no possible respect from Liberace? No, I am saying he is like Liberace in one particular feature, namely his fashion sense. To Liberace, that would have been an outfit to die for. It dazzles the eye of the beholder. This man, Tazadaqyah, shares a certain taste in common; or maybe he would fit in well as a designer here at Thriceholy. It is a simile. It does not imply complete identification of the two terms brought into relation. In fact a thing cannot be compared to itself; we do not say that Tazadaqyah is like Tazadaqyah, but that Tazadaqyah is like Liberace.

If Amos 9:7 itself is not felt to be clear in distinguishing the Ethiopians from the children of Israel, how many other verses make it clear the two people groups cannot be identified with one another?: "And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman." (Numbers 12:1). Why would anyone object to Moses marrying a member of their own group? They objected to him marrying outside the covenant people. Or 2 Chronicles 14:12, "So the LORD smote the Ethiopians before Asa, and before Judah; and the Ethiopians fled." Is it not apparent this verse does not work if we identify the Ethiopians as Jews? How could the Ethiopians be "overthrown," if the victorious Jews are also Ethiopians? Judah and the Ethiopians are understood to be two different people groups, their armies facing one another across the battlefield.

Aside from this encounter with an imperialist, expansionist Ethiopia on the battlefield, the Ethiopians are mentioned in prophecy, as people who are not now believers in the Lord, but who will come to be:

"Thus saith the LORD, The labour of Egypt, and merchandise of Ethiopia and of the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto thee, and they shall be thine: they shall come after thee; in chains they shall come over, and they shall fall down unto thee, they shall make supplication unto thee, saying, Surely God is in thee; and there is none else, there is no God." (Isaiah 45:14).

These prophecies do not necessarily await fulfillment at the Second Coming; upon the First Advent of Christ, Egypt and Ethiopia were converted and became majority Christian countries. They followed the Messiah. Unfortunately Islam happened after that, though both the Ethiopian church and the Egyptian Coptic church survive to this day.

The Queen of Sheba, who visited Solomon, was mentioned above. Extra-biblical sources, like Josephus, identify her as the Queen of Ethiopia. What seems at first glance to be a rival identification, that she was queen of southern Arabia, is not necessarily divergent, inasmuch as the two locales have at various times been under one political combine, such that the queen of one was queen of the other. Ethiopians later produced an apocryphal body of literature claiming that she and Solomon had a love child; the Rastafarians promote these views. She is mentioned in the New Testament as the Queen of the South, a seeker who sought the Lord so earnestly as to condemn the present generation. All of these positive references to Ethiopia should be stressed; the references identifying Ethiopia as Israel are absent.

Realizing that when the earliest icons of Christ start turning up, centuries later, they cannot represent any living tradition of what He, as an individual, looked like, there is no reason to doubt they were ethnographically plausible, in the eyes of the artists who produced them. There is no valid historical reason to mistrust this tradition:

There is no reason to question the actual evidence, yet the political idolatry of these people knows no bounds. They reserve the right to change Jesus from what He is to what is more to their liking, as indicated in a recent tweet from Beth Moore: "But you can't have white Jesus. Nope. Sorry. Can't." Where does that level of arrogance come from?

Mistaken Identity

Leaving the safe harbor of scripture and sailing off into the uncharted seas of the apocrypha, we find many cases of mistaken identity, a favored topic of pot-boiler literature through the ages. The way the Greeks and Romans looked, and the way the inhabitants of Fayum, Egypt, looked, in antiquity, are known quantities because of the wealth of artwork which survives, even though only a tiny fraction of what was created. Can a Jew from that epoch be mistaken for a Greek or Roman? You betcha. According to the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, Nero Caesar ordered Paul to be seized and executed, with this result:

"And Dioscorus the shipmaster, who brought him to Syracuse, sympathizing with Paul because he had delivered his son from death, having left his own ship in Syracuse, accompanied him to Pontiole.  . .But Dioscorus the shipmaster, being himself also bald, wearing his shipmaster’s dress, and speaking boldly, on the first day went out into the city of Pontiole. Thinking therefore that he was Paul, they seized him, and beheaded him, and sent his head to Caesar." (Acts of Peter and Paul, ECF 8, p. 1002).

This work, and this category of works generally, have zero historical or documentary value concerning the life and times of the apostolic figures who feature prominently in them, who, having lived centuries earlier, were entirely unknown to the authors. But what the author must have known is what, in general, a Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor and a Greek from Sicily would have looked like. He thought one could be mistaken for another. A Nigerian cannot be mistaken for a Greek.

Another apocryphal work, with a different setting:

"And when they heard these words from John, they raised their hands against him, saying: We thought thee to be a fellow-citizen, but now thou hast shown thyself that thou art their companion. Like them, so also thou shalt be put to death. . ." (Acts of Barnabas, p. 1045, ECF 8).

Why did they not realize John was a Hebrew, if Hebrews looked like Nigerians? Or did the inhabitants of Asia Minor also look like Nigerians? Even those who were Gauls, for whom Galatia was named? The one thing you can count on in history is that things change. In ancient times, the people in England were not Anglo-Saxons, the people in Eastern Europe were not Slavs, and North Africa was not Arab. There were no Turks in Asia Minor at that time; the Turks lived in Central Asia. Many of the people who lived along the coast of Asia Minor were of Greek heritage. Various languages were heard throughout Asia Minor and numerous people groups lived there, having little in common other than a universal innocence of Turkish nationalism. Is 'Nigerian' a plausible guess? Who were these particular people, the inhabitants of Hierapolis in Phrygia, who could be mistaken for Jews? Admittedly it's not like any of this happened anyway. Herodotus said the Phrygians were migrants from the Balkans. The Iliad abounds with blond-haired characters, mostly fighting for the Greeks, not for the Trojans; indeed. one of those who fought in Troy's defense was Memnon, the son of the Dawn, an Ethiopian. So were the inhabitants of Asia Minor black? If they were, we could 'save the hypothesis' of Black Jews. Well. . .Andromache, Hector's wife, has white arms: "Andromache of the white arms led the lamentation of the women, and held in her arms the head of manslaughtering Hektor. . ." (Iliad Book 24, 723-723, p.494, Richmond Lattimore translation). Hector himself is likened to a "snowy mountain:" "So he spoke, and went on his way like a snowy mountain, calling aloud, and swept through the Trojans and their companions." (Homer, Iliad, Book 13, 754-755). In what way Hector is like a snowy mountain has caused puzzlement to more than a few commentators, but it does not seem like a natural image for a Black man.

'Bishop' Talbert Swan, relying on the very latest Rastafarian research, claims there were "black Anatolians." But if you believe what you read in classical literature, 'black' is a considerable overstatement, certainly for the inhabitants of Turkey's west coastal region. Virgil's Aeneid is the tale of how Rome was founded by refugees from Troy's downfall. What do we learn in this book about what those folks looked like? Priam's daughter Cassandra, doomed to prophesy truly but to be disbelieved, has white hands: "Here before us came Cassandra, Priam's virgin daughter, dragged by her long hair out of Minerva's shrine, lifting her brilliant eyes in vain to heaven — her eyes alone, as her white hands were bound." (Virgil Aeneid, Book II, p. 47, 533-537). Priam's daughters are likened to "white doves:" "At this altar Hecuba and her daughters, like white doves blown down in a black storm, clung together, enfolding holy images in their arms." (Virgil Aeneid, Book II, p. 51, 669-672). Aeneas himself is described like so: "For she who bore him breathed upon him beauty of hair and bloom of youth and kindled brilliance in his eyes, as an artist's hand gives style to ivory, or sets pure silver, or white stone of Paros, in framing yellow gold." (Virgil Aeneid, Book I, p. 24, 801-806). Ivory? Yellow gold? An odd way to talk about black folk. Just saying."Butes' head being turned, she put her lancehead in the gap between his helm and cuirass, where the neck showed white, above the shield on the left arm." (Virgil, Aeneid, Book XI, 938-941, p. 356). Virgil traces the founder Dardanus, who gave his name to the Dardanelles, to Italy, from which he emigrated, although mythographers more commonly give his place of origin as Arcadia. Virgil was far away in time and place, but he was well-informed, and he did not perceive this population as similar in appearance to the Nigerians, neither in their day nor in his. He does not offer any explanation for how there came to be a complete population shift. Even 'Bishop' Talbert Swan concedes the Romans were white folks. Virgil doesn't explain, 'You're wondering how the Trojans could be our ancestors. The Phrygians then, of course, looked completely different from how they look today.' The simplest, and thus the preferable, explanation for these things, is that they weren't black.

Does any artwork survive from antiquity depicting the heroes of Troy? You bet. Here is the Judgment of Paris as conceived by a mosaic artist in Antioch-on-the-Orontes in the second century A.D. The artist of course never saw Paris, who started all the trouble by running off with Helen, but he knew what people from that part of the world looked like. The seated figure, second from left, is Paris. Looks like a white guy to me:

What population groups in the ancient world are we expected to believe were black? The Greeks and Romans, even amidst the ruin of their civilizations, left behind so much statuary and imagery that many people will recall a childhood trip to the museum to look at it. So you can't make that fly. Nevertheless, some of the Black Hebrew Israelites do make the claim that basically everybody in the ancient world was black. Not Menelaus, though. When he was grazed by an arrow, onlookers saw what looked like ivory stained with purple:

"As when some Maionian woman or Karian with purple colors ivory, to make it a cheek piece for horses; it lies away in an inner room, and many a rider longs to have it, but it is laid up to be a king's treasure, two things, to be the beauty of the horse, the pride of the horseman: so, Menelaos, your shapely thighs were stained with the color of blood, and your legs also and the ankles beneath them." (Homer, Iliad, Book IV, lines 141-147).

Why not ebony drifted with rose petals? So the Greeks at least are exempt. Both they, and the Romans, even called themselves 'white.' So why not make a virtue of necessity? According to 'Bishop' Talbert Swan, Jesus was a "Black messiah" who resisted "white European colonizers," presumably the Romans:

"The irony of the Bible is that a book written by Black and brown people about the struggles of Black and brown people and their Black messiah resisting the oppression  of white European colonizers was used by white European colonizers to justify oppressing Black and brown people." ('Bishop' Talbert Swan, tweet, 11/27/19).

If the one group, Jews, and the other group, Romans, actually fall into two opposite racial camps, then it is perplexing how one could be mistaken for the other. But we learn in the first story that a Sicilian can be mistaken for a Jew. We learn in the second that a Jew might be indistinguishable from a Phrygian. Perhaps we can compromise and say they are 'olive-skinned.' Some of the poets talk about a 'honey-colored' skin. What is clear is that Jesus cannot have looked all that different from His country-men; Judas arranges a sign for His arrest, "Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast." (Matthew 26:48). They did not want to arrest the wrong man; they needed to know which one was Jesus. If Jesus had a unique personal appearance, let's say if He was black in the midst of a white nation, then what is the need for a sign? Just say, 'You can tell him a mile off, he's the black guy.' So the 'Black Jesus' rises or falls with Black Israel. But Black Israel is a myth. In real life, Jews could be mistaken for Sicilians or Phrygians. They were not black.

Justin Martyr says, in his Dialogue with Trypho, that circumcision was the only distinguishing mark of Jews, which allowed the victorious Romans to exclude them from Jerusalem:

"For the circumcision according to the flesh, which is from Abraham, was given for a sign; that you may be separated from other nations, and from us; and that you alone may suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that your land may be desolate, and your cities burned with fire; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem. For you are not recognized among the rest of men by any other mark than your fleshly circumcision." (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 16).

But if the Jews were black, unlike neighboring people, then there would have been no need for the conquering Romans to use this sign to exclude them from their capital city. At this, with a wave of their magic wand, the Afrocentrists will make basically everybody that lived back then to be black, failing to realize the extreme difficulty of so doing, given the respectable pile of artwork that survives from that period. Floor mosaics are revealed periodically, the dust and debris of centuries being swept away. The people depicted therein are not black in the main, except a few scattered sojourners. If everybody was black back then, why are the people in the pictures not black?

On this question of the complexion of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as noted, 'Bishop' Talbert Swan concedes the inevitable conclusion of those who take the trouble to inspect their artwork, that they were white. Not all concede this point. Some of the Afrocentric websites go off into orbit at this juncture:

"How did the Hebrews turn White? Of course they didn't really; except in the imaginations, and then the lying histories of Albino people. Who for probably practical reasons, decided that Hebrews, and the Blacks who originally lived in and ruled over, the Country's [sic] they took over as a result of the 'Thirty Years War' on the continent and the British 'Civil Wars' of the 1600s. These were of course actually 'Race Wars' with religion as the focal point. These wars pitted Europe's ancient Black and Catholic Rulers against the rebellious Albinos who had 'In-mass' been chased out of their Homelands in Asia by the Mongols and into the Black lands of Europe." (Article, 'How did Jesus and the Hebrews become WHITE?' Real History website, retrieved 12/18/19).

If all people were black, prior to the Thirty Years War, then evidence is beside the point. This is a conspiracy theory of a magnitude to eclipse all theories about faked moon landings and the like. There is no evidence, because they destroyed the evidence.

When was this next picture done? Not in antiquity, that's for sure. For some odd reason, you do not see pictures like this cropping up until the modern era. Its premise, as I hope is evident from what has gone before, is not overly credible. Some people admire their own group so much they just cannot make themselves believe He did not belong to it. They quail at the contradiction of first teaching their children to hate white people, and then showing them a picture of a white Jesus. It is a contradiction, and its resolution is to stop teaching their children to hate white people. It's not true that we don't know what those people looked like. We do know, and they did not look like this:

The problem, to which this image is the proferred solution, is this: "Brothers and sisters, the white man has brainwashed us black people to fasten our gaze upon a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus! We're worshipping a Jesus that doesn't even look like us! Oh, yes!" (Malcolm X, Harlem 1954, quoted p. 151, James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America). Now, is this a problem? If it is, are we entitled to solve it? If men make their gods, then why not?: "That was why he said that we black people  'should not worship a man who doesn't look like us, act like us, walk like us or even smell like us.' According to Malcolm, 'every nationality of people serve their own god. Chinese have Chinese gods, Japanese have Japanese gods, the whites have a white god but the Negroes have only a white god.'" (James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, A Dream or a Nightmare, p. 171). Do like the pagans do; why not? The nations have their gods, are we any different? Yes, supposed to be: "For all people walk each in the name of his god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever." (Micah 4:5). The gods people make, are not really gods at all: "Will a man make gods for himself, which are not gods?" (Jeremiah 16:20). Malcolm told the people to make their own gods, and they did. Malcolm neglected to tell them what happens, in the long run, to people who make their own gods.

The above actual picture of Jesus comes from 'Bishop' Talbert Swan. As seen in his tweets below, retrieved on February 18, 2020 from 'Bishop' Swan's website, he seems to expect Jesus not only to be black, but to be a black supremacist who delights in casting white believers who mistakenly stray toward Heaven's Gates down to Hell.

'Bishop' Talbert Swan is not a black Hebrew Israelite, but a pastor of the Church of God in Christ holiness/Pentecostal denomination. They used to be a fairly orthodox Christian church. I do not know what happened, that 'Bishop' Talbert Swan suddenly began to seem plausible to them. What percentage of black Christians in the U.S. today actually think this is a plausible portrait of Jesus? As best I can determine, nearly one third! "Nearly one in three black Americans favor removing 'white Jesus' from churches. . . .That's according to a recent Rasmussen Reports survey taken after Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King called for bringing down any and all statues that depict Jesus as a 'white European.'" (Rasmussen: Nearly one in three blacks favor removing 'white Jesus' from churches, June 28, 2020, Tom Trillion, BPR). Mr. King claims the conventional depiction of Jesus is a "gross form" of "white supremacy," created as a tool of oppression. Consequently, statues of Jesus need to come down, smashed on the pavement alongside Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. This means that a contemporary artist who looks at the ancient Israelite mosaics and wall paintings to get a sense of what Jesus looks like, is promoting white supremacy! If you portray Jesus as looking the way He probably does look, down He goes, because they want something different. While, as noted, it is natural for artists to portray Jesus as looking like a member of their own group, and this is how we get the Korean Jesus, the African Jesus, and the Scandinavian Jesus,— this is arguably legitimate artistic license,— for practitioners of one of these tendencies to announce they intend to tear down the others, is nothing other than racism, especially if the one they are tearing down is closest to historical fact.

It is remarkable how fast bad information can travel in this information age. The concept of the black Jesus or brown-skinned Jesus is promoted by all kinds if people, including J.D. Greer, leader of the gargantuan Southern Baptist Convention, who, according to the Washington Post, delivered himself of this harumph: "Our Lord Jesus was not a White Southerner but a brown-skinned Middle Eastern refugee." If so, He looked quite unlike the people surrounding Him. The large size of this denomination will likely prove self-correcting in the end, because what usually happens to main-line churches who take a sharp left turn is an avalanche of membership loss.

On the point of Jesus' racial affiliation, 'Bishop' Swan agrees with the black Hebrew Israelite view discussed on this page. But then, so do many other black pastors nowadays. I fervently hope they do not also labor so assiduously to spread race hatred as he does. What is his story?:

Maybe 'Bishop' Swan can help us answer the question, 'Does it matter?' In Jesus, God became man, and it is natural for people around the world to hear 'man' and think of the people next door, not people far away. Certainly Jesus had to be a Jew; He is the King of the Jews. But artists who aren't quite clear on what Jews look like, there being none in the neighborhood, will be prone to making Him look Korean, or Chinese, and there's no harm in that. Or is there? This flattering fiction, that Jesus was a sub-Saharan African, becomes the basis for a resentful conspiracy theory: that "wypipo" invented the 'white Jesus' in the nineteenth century (!) in order to subjugate black folks. This fictional transaction becomes one more grievance for the grievance-peddlars like 'Bishop' Swan to peddle. Depicting Jesus as looking like He probably did look, becomes a racist offense.

Efforts to reassign Jesus to another people group are not always well-intentioned. Ernest Renan would have preferred Jesus as an Aryan, rather than a Semite. Ernest Renan, a nineteenth century French author who was quite influential in 'liberal' Bible studies, was an antisemite who claimed European Jews were Khazars, not authentic Jews. Is this present effort, to make Jesus a sub-Saharan African, well-intentioned or ill-intentioned? If it is based on racial animus against white people, then it is ill-intentioned. The church should wake up and realize there is a problem.

Black Madonnas

The 'Black Madonna' of Europe are presented as affirmative evidence in favor of the 'Black Jesus.' What could account for them? Fables that these images sprang directly from Doctor Luke's paintbrush, or fell from heaven, must be laid aside. They are not particularly early. This carved wooden statue, the Madonna of Montserrat, in Spain, can be dated to the Romanesque period, the late 12th century. What could explain these images?

In evaluating the materials an artist has chosen to use and the style he embraces, for instance, ebony for a portrait bust, or 'black-figure' in Greek pottery, it is important to realize that the skin tone of the subject, real or inferred or imagined, is one, but only one, possible factor which might influence the artist's choice. Recall, it is normal to find Korean artists depicting a Korean Christ, African artists an African Christ, European artists a European Christ, so there is also an observable tendency for an artist to make the subject look like he and his friends look.

In the case of this Spanish black madonna, this latter factor might conceivably be at work. At the time she was made, there was a complement of darker-skinned inhabitants of Spain. The Moors, who invaded in several waves as the Christian residents tried to wrest their country back from their Arab conquerors, often stayed after the emergency was over and established themselves on land expropriated from the indigenous inhabitants, as Imperial conquerors ever do. While it's not to be expected that a Muslim conqueror would pick up a paintbrush and adopt art as a second career, what subsequent generations might choose to do is up for grabs. The complexion of the inhabitants of North Africa, Berbers and their allies, ranged from white to darker shades. We do not think of Spain as a country with a dark-skinned population, but that is only because Ferdinand and Isabella kicked out the Moors once it became militarily possible to do so. Perhaps this artist had relatives who had intermarried with the Moors, or perhaps this was intended as an outreach to that population.

Secondly, the way these images appear is not always the way they appeared when they left the artist's hand. In this case it seems likely we are looking at something very like the original, but with some of the painted black madonnas, that does not look likely. Some of these images have a complex history. Their present appearance may involve chemical decomposition as well as accumulation of soot from candles and other grime. In the case of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, she was destroyed by Hussite iconoclasts and later restored. At this point, you could not drill down to the original paint; the original image is gone. What the Byzantine artist intended is not known.

What is commonly found with icons, and one of the reasons why those Reformers who objected to their use thought this prevalent Catholic practice fell under the condemnation of the second commandment, is that some 'work' better than others. If the only function of these images is to remind the worshipper of the object of worship, the Reformers reasoned, one should 'work' as well as another. Usually the more ancient and mysterious an image, the more powerful it is imagined to be. Evidently Black Madonnas have a lot of ju-ju. Their evidentiary value, respecting the actual appearance of the Virgin Mary, is limited, because the life-spans of the people who made these images did not overlap that of Mary of Nazareth, nor did they live anywhere in the vicinity.

Black Madonnas in Spain might conceivably be related to the flesh tone of local residents, at times in the past, because sometimes if you reach for the crayon labelled 'flesh' color, it might come up black. But that cannot be the case with France or Poland. What could explain the Black Madonna of Saint Gervazy so beloved of Christena Cleveland, who has a Pilgrimage Stop number 8 on her web-site for "Encountering your Home in the Black Madonna of Saint-Gervazy." Why do Black Madonnas turn up in European countries that never had any African immigrant communities living there? Why are they often assumed to be uniquely powerful?

I suspect the answer lies in the way Northern Europe was Christianized. The early church found its converts on the retail level, one by one. But in some cases the tribes of the pagan peoples of the North were baptized en masse, the chieftain of the defeated peoples ordering it to be so. When someone pointed out to the Pope that these people were not Christians, he sagely remarked, 'No, but their children will be." This was to give too much credit to education, which cannot, in fact, make pagans into Christians. What actually happened is that these people limped along, until the Reformation swept the idols away, with one foot in Christianity, one foot in paganism. Just as did the people who invented Santeria in the New World, they 'baptized' the old gods by renaming them as Christian saints.

When we modern people look out the window and see it rain, no one is tempted to pull shut the drapes to give them a little privacy.  We are not aware the transaction we are witnessing is anything other than G-rated. But to the view of pagan peoples, we are witnessing a sexual encounter where the storm god, Baal, Hadad, etc., is impregnating Mother Earth. This involves a somewhat simplified view of human sexuality; it was not until 1827 that Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the mammalian ovum. The storm god is impregnating Mother Earth with his fructifying rain. Like they say, do anything you like, dear, only don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.

Some of these 'Mary' figures, one suspects, are just old-time fertility goddesses wearing their new choir robes. The people worshipping in these places, who had been pagans not long ago, resonated with the old objects of worship; they could see past their new forms. Why she is black in color is because Mother Earth nurtures and sustains us all, and the most fertile soil is black in color. If you start digging in the garden and come up with blonde-colored sand, or worse, fish-belly white clay, you had better go over to the nearest Garden Center and get some amendments for that soil, because it needs more organic matter.

Christena Cleveland, I hear, wants to make the Great Mother trans. How that is going to work out I don't know; who is going to volunteer surrogacy, the moon? If Mother Earth is a goddess, then the sky god has to be male, or else we're all in trouble. Maybe better stock up on canned goods.

To return to the Great Mother of Montserrat, at least she's a round-earther; notice the world ball she intends to give her Son. Realizing that Christena Cleveland used to write for Christianity Today, some people read her latest writings and say she's gone pagan. But whatever it is, paganism it's not, because the pagans realized it takes two to tango. Mother Earth was not a man-hater; she wanted it to rain: “On the Acropolis at Athens there was an image of Earth praying to Zeus for rain. And in time of drought the Athenians themselves prayed, 'Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, on the cornland of the Athenians and on the plains.'” (Sir James Frazer, the Golden Bough, Chapter 15). When the rain god does not visit her, she can take comfort on the side in the embraces of Sol, Helios, Apollo; but when that gets a touch scorching, where to go but to the lover she cannot do without:

“. . .and on the Capitol at Rome the god was worshipped as the deity not merely of the oak, but of the rain and the thunder. Contrasting the piety of the good old times with the scepticism of an age when nobody thought that heaven was heaven, or cared a fig for Jupiter, a Roman writer tells us that in former days noble matrons used to go with bare feet, streaming hair, and pure minds, up the long Capitoline slope, praying to Jupiter for rain. And straightway, he goes on, it rained bucketsful, then or never, and everybody returned dripping like drowned rats. 'But nowadays,' says he, 'we are no longer religious, so the fields lie baking.'” (Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, Chapter 15).

We have so far demythologized nature that we do not look out on a rainy day and say that the sky god is mating with the earth goddess. But neither do they require surgical intervention even to pantomime mating.

The Samaritans

The people known as the Samaritans can serve as a helpful 'control' in judging this question of the appearance of the ancient Israelites. Like the modern Black Hebrew Israelites, they claim to be the Jews! Unlike the Black Hebrew Israelites, their claims are not laughable; at least they've been in the Holy Land for a very long time. They still exist to this day, though not in large numbers. The New Testament, and the Talmud, record a history of mutual hostility and recrimination between the Samaritan religious authorities and the Jewish authorities, concerning for example the proper place of worship. Their history is quite separate from that of the Jews; there was no Samaritan diaspora in Europe.

They share a partial ethnic heritage with the Jews, although mixed with other Near Eastern strains. So how come they're not black?

Overview

'Black Hebrew Israelite' is not the name of a specific denomination but rather a number of loosely affiliated groups interested in the rumored Israelite origin of African-Americans. Some denounce the Jews (the real ones, I mean) as fraudulent imposters, while others take a more moderate stance toward this rival operation of long standing. Some have even accepted tutoring and discipleship from the historic Jews. Some are virulently anti-white, berating white passers-by on street corners, while others are sweetly reasonable. Some anticipate that the black Jesus (Yahawah) will return to earth to slay or enslave all the Edomites, though the date of this proceeding has been pushed back a bit, of necessity, given that it did not happen. They cluster around the concept that African-Americans are the true Israel. Some of these ideas have bled over into orthodox Christian churches, or at least churches that used to be orthodox. 'Bishop' Talbert Swan of the Church of God in Christ, a black supremacist who hates white people, preaches a black Jesus, as do many others. As noted above, it is not at all likely that the historical Jesus was black.

As is common in the world of cults, many Black Hebrew Israelites are anti-trinitarian. The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ denies the trinity, though confessing Jesus as God's Son and Messiah. Not all of those who fall generally under the Hebrew Israelite umbrella confess Jesus as Messiah, but those who do, often deny His deity. Does the Bible confirm, or deny, that God is triune?

The Bible teaches these four great truths: That there is only one God, that the Father is God, that the Son is God, and that the Holy Ghost is God. Reconciling them by denying one of them,— usually they deny that the Son is God,— is not reconciling them at all.

Another idea found amongst Black Hebrew Israelites is, oddly enough, a preference for the King James version of the Bible over modern translations. I concur! Great choice:

Would that all our differences could be resolved so easily! You've got to love the KJV with its forthright "white" and "ruddy," not some politically correct substitute.

The Bible promises salvation to all who believe: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel £of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, 'The just shall live by faith.'” (Romans 1:16-17). But the Black Hebrew Israelites do not believe that salvation is "for everyone who believes." People of many different ethnicities might happen to believe, a Rainbow Coalition, if you will, of the redeemed. But often the Black Hebrew Israelites believe the 'Edomites,' i.e. white people, in their lexicon, are doomed to eternal servitude, regardless of what, or in whom, they may happen to believe. They are 'doomed from the womb;' they are just the wrong blood-line, that's all. This is racism pure and simple. Moreover, it directly contradicts the Bible, which teaches that salvation is for all who believe.

Some but not all Black Hebrew Israelites seek to revive elements of the Mosaic polity, including dietary and ceremonial law. Is this appropriate for new covenant believers?:

Frank S. Cherry, founder of one stream of Black Hebrew Israelitism, purportedly believed in a square earth. Whether this view is common amongst this crowd, I have not been able to determine.

Some Black Hebrew Israelites share the Seventh Day Adventist preference for worship on Saturday. Is there Biblical support for this idea?:

The common feature between all these heterodox believers is that they consider African-Americans to be the true Israel. The Israel of New Testament times had, they believe, a black population, and so therefore Jesus and His apostles were black. This issue has been addressed above. A glance at the artwork surviving from antiquity does not confirm that the Jews at that time were black. Did these ancient artists care to 'get it right'? According to the art critics, their goal was life-likeness: ". . .but in truth the hands of Praxiteles wrought works of art  that were altogether alive." (Descriptions, by Callistratus, 8. On the Statue of Dionysus, pp. 403-405 Loeb edition). Imitation was the goal: "For the stone, while retaining its own nature, yet seemed to depart from the law which governs stone; what one saw was really an image, but art carried imitation over into actual reality." (Descriptions, by Callistratus, 2. On the Statue of a Bacchante, p. 381, Loeb edition). Ideally the critics were looking for a speaking likeness: ". . .and though it was void of living sensation, it inspired the belief that it had sensation dwelling within it. . ." (Descriptions, by Callistratus, 6. On the Statue of a Opportunity, p. 397, Loeb edition). It was considered praiseworthy, by this critic at least, that an Indian portrayed in a marble statue looked like an actual inhabitant of that subcontinent (ancient ethnographers often classed the dark-skinned people of South Asia with the Ethiopians, as if they were the same race separated geographically): "The Indian was of a marble verging on black and shifting of its own accord to the color given by nature to his race; and it had thick, woolly hair, shining with a hue not exactly black, but at the tips vying with the brilliancy of Tyrian shellfish; for the hair, as if it were well cared for and moistened by the neighboring Nymphs, was rather black were it rose from the roots but grew purple near the tips." (Descriptions, by Callistratus, 4. On the Statue of an Indian, p. 389, Loeb edition).

Are there errors in racial identification in ancient art? Is it possible the artists just did not care? There do seem to be occasional errors, like Philostratus' Andromeda, who is white although an Ethiopian: "The maiden is charming in that she is fair of skin though in Ethiopia, and charming is the very beauty of her form; she would surpass a Lydian girl in daintiness, an Attic girl in stateliness, a Spartan in sturdiness." (Philostratus, Imagines, Book I.29, p. 117). In this work, the art critic is describing various works of art. Is it possible he has simply misidentified her? After all it's not like Andromeda was the only maiden chained to a rock as an offering to a sea monster. What of Hesione, daughter of King Laomedon, rescued by Heracles rather than Perseus? But misidentification can't be the problem because the grateful crowd is Ethiopian: "Many cow-herds come offering him milk and wine to drink, charming Ethiopians with their strange coloring and their grim smiles; and they show that they are pleased, and most of them look alike." (Philostratus, Imagines, Book I.29, p. 117). Since the artist was neither incapable of depicting the race of his subjects nor uninterested, there must be some story behind the story explaining who were the royal family and where did they come from. There were alternative traditions placing Andromeda, for instance, in Joppa. The Latin poet Ovid was aware she was supposed to be the daughter of the Ethiopian king, making his Sappho say,

"If I’m not pale, Andromeda pleased Perseus,
dark with the colour of her father Cepheus’s land.
and often white pigeons mate with other hues,
and the dark turtledove’s loved by emerald birds.
(Ovid, Heroides, XV, Sappho to Paon).

It could be that the tendency to portray Andromeda as white reflects the same trend as the 'blonde Jesus,' where, lacking authentic models to sit for him, the artist conforms his subjects' appearance to his own. When it mattered, the artists of antiquity were capable of making a realistic portrayal of a specific ethnic group; for example, the Germans and Gauls of the Roman triumphal friezes look like actual Gauls and Germans, not just like the Romans in the same pieces. Art critics like Philostratus do not seem to be interested, and do not mention, any effort on the part of the artist to differentiate one Mediterranean people group from another, although modern observers would expect there to be significant differences. It could be that the theory of governance which  underlay the project of the vast Roman empire did not wish to stress differences so much as commonalities.

Or possibly they were mindful that the myths speak of how one nation started as a colony from another, and how the founders were interrelated, not strangers to one another. Whether rightly or wrongly, they may have credited the myths that depict the Mediterranean peoples as one big sprawling family, if not a happy one. For some of the artists we've been looking at, the achievement of verisimilitude fell beyond their wildest dreams; this is provincial art, but indicating the color, black or white, of the subject did fall within their competence. The evidence says, white. Anthropology and ethnography are not modern pursuits only; the ancients wrote extensively on these subjects. Scholars like Aristotle and Pliny were not fools, and they were committed to gathering empirical evidence, but given the difficulties of communication in the ancient world, they could be snared and taken in by implausible traveller's tales. While these biologists often mention the Ethiopians as a black race, as well as some of the inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent, Jews are never mentioned in this connection. Why not, if they were black? We see, for instance, that Io can expect to encounter black people when she enters Ethiopia: "You will come also to a remote land near the Ethiops River at the source of the sun's course where dwell a black race of men. Walk beside the banks of this river until you arrive at the cataract, whence the Nile's sacred stream flows form the Bibline Mountains." (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, quoted pp. 84-85, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World, Kennedy, Roy, and Goldman). Granted Io's historicity is less than rock solid,— she was a lady turned into a cow,— this information probably reflected the author's understanding of the geography. If everyone was black, why tell Io she would encounter black people when she got to Ethiopia?

If the information became lost to historical memory that the Ethiopians were black, it could easily be restored from surviving ancient documents, which frequently connect the two, as in, "Aethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair." (Xenophanes, The Eleatic School, p. 8, Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, by Charles M. Bakewell.) Comparable texts connecting 'Jews' with 'black' do not exist. Where is the affirmative evidence in favor of this view, that ought to be there but is not? Why does this author take "dark coloring," among other features, as "proof" his servant is from Africa: "Meanwhile, he calls upon Scybale (she was his only attendant, African by race, her entire body proof of her descent, with her twisted hair, thick lips, dark coloring, broad chest, pendulous breasts, concave stomach, thin legs, and profusely spread soles of feet)." (Anonymous, Moretum, quoted p. 193, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World, Kennedy, Roy, and Goldman). In a world where everyone was black, supposedly, why do such features testify to an African origin, as this author believes?

Jeremiah asks, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23). If the color of the Ethiopian's skin were just the same as everybody else, as these people claim, then why single out the Ethiopian? (In antiquity, the Greek word 'Aethiopian' is not restricted to the boundaries of the present-day country of that name, but is a general reference to Black Africa.) One of Aesop's fables is called 'Washing the Ethiopian White.' It is often left out of modern compilations owing to its offensive character. In the story, a clueless slave-master who has just purchased an Ethiopian slave tries to wash him white, as if that could be done. The name Aesop is sometimes thought to be a corruption of 'Aethiop:' i.e., Aesop was himself a black slave. Who knows whether this very thing happened to him! But why is there a story, offensive or otherwise, about washing an Ethiopian white? If everybody was black, as these people claim, then why single out the Ethiopians? A similar proverb of Lucian is quoted, "You wash the Ethiopian in vain; why not give up the task? You will never manage to turn black night into day." (Lucian 'Against an Ignoramus,' quoted from the internet). Again, why single out the Ethiopians? These are not however the only people in antiquity mentioned as having black skin; some inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent are also described as black in the Greek and Roman sources. There are of course other black-skinned people groups, but it's not like the Greeks and Romans knew anything about the inhabitants of Tasmania. Why are the proverbs and sayings so phrased, if everyone was black? Why not, 'You wash the Jew in vain?' 'You wash the black Anatolian in vain?' There is no such proverb. . .because there ain't no such people. The Ethiopians were singled out because they were singular: other people did not have black skin. Pliny marvelled, "Who, for instance, could ever believe in the existence of the Aethiopians, who had not first seen them?" (Pliny, Natural History, Book VII, Chapter 1.1). Who has ever doubted the existence of people who look just like everybody else?

This is Venus, from Sepphoris, Galilee. Given that she is a pagan goddess, it might seem that ethnicity is beside the point. But, realizing that Venus is not always on hand when you need her, it could be that the artist instead found a local girl to serve as his model:

Xenophanes pointed out that the pagans tended to make their gods in their own image:

"If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own." (Xenophanes).

Some pagans break the mold; the Egyptians, though themselves human in form, worshipped bird-headed and jackal-headed deities, outlandish composites of the human with lower creatures. But the Greeks gravitated towards gods resembling men, and they did use human models to achieve their goal. The interesting thing about 'Venus' is, not what the pagans imagined about the goddess, not at hand, but who this woman was. Was she a Greek, or a Jew? Would she have stood out walking down the street?

I don't know what seizes people to make them suddenly say, 'You know what we need? We need a fancy mosaic floor in here. Let's spend a ton of money installing one that will take thousands of man-hours to complete!' Even less can I fathom why black folks would insist the characters depicted must be white. Why would they do that? Self-loathing, perhaps?

Though the belief that the Jews were black has no objective evidence in its favor and a considerable weight of literary and archaeological evidence against it, it seems to be gaining ground amongst the general public, with 'woke' evangelical worthies routinely describing Jesus of Nazareth as "brown-skinned." This is a bit of a 'cheat,' though, because they do not mean by it that Jesus looked like a sub-Saharan African, which is what Jemar Tisby and 'Bishop' Talbert Swan mean by it. They mean rather than everybody who is not visibly of Icelandic heritage should be described as "brown-skinned." If we do re-classify humanity according to this novel racial scheme, such that 98.5% of all people will be classed as "brown-skinned," what have we accomplished by this innovation? The ability to defame people who have never heard of our new system of racial classification as 'racist'? Their category 'white' retains no resemblance whatever to Blumenbach's category 'Caucasian.' Certainly that eighteenth century worthy can be left behind without regret; but when they claim 'race' is a 'social construct,' why are they the only ones allowed to construct it? Why does history count for nothing? If you can compare one system of racial classification with another and conclude, 'this system resembles nature more perfectly than the other,' you are doing empirical science. Is that after all what this is? If so, may I offer a hint on methodology: if you propose to divide humanity roughly into thirds, it would be a good idea not to offer one tiny little third and two great big ones. Just a hint. When they point out that Jesus cannot have been blonde-haired and blue-eyed, as He is sometimes depicted, people nod in agreement, and quite rightly. But to go from there to saying He was a sub-Saharan African is to leap over a chasm.

The Southern Baptist Convention, a huge Protestant denomination, is at the moment riven by a dispute between its partially 'woke' leadership and its mostly slumbering parishioners. Now, if ever there was a church with a bad history on racial issues, it's the Southern Baptists, who started out to provide a safe haven for slave-owning Baptists. But overshooting the mark, the 'woke' corrective is to depart altogether from the individualistic premises of liberal democracy. Because the leaders of the dissenting party adhere to world-view analysis as their preferred mode of resolving disputes, this is parsed as a debate over 'Critical Race Theory.' No one knows what 'Critical Race Theory' is, because no two practitioners of this discipline define it in the same way. Since this is the kind of 'social science' which is not falsifiable,— one cannot propound, even in theory, a practical experiment which would prove that 'Critical Race Theory' is not accurate,— it is really not science at all and should best be disregarded.

As a matter of practical procedure, the popular pursuit of world-view analysis starts at the wrong end and proceeds in the wrong direction. Observing a dispute between two parties, it climbs immediately to the highest possible level of generality and vaults upward from there. Instead, observing a dispute between two parties, those committed to resolving the dispute should immediately set up a perimeter around them with crime-scene tape, and define, as narrowly as possible not as broadly as possible, what is in dispute, and what conditions would need to prevail for each alternative to be true. For example, noticing that one party to the dispute vilifies all white people, crying 'You must repent of the wickedness of whiteness,' it is asked, 'Is this not racism?' The claim is made in response that, because 'whiteness' was invented as a system of social control in seventeenth century Virginia, it is legitimate to vilify 'whiteness.' But history records no such set of circumstances, as reported in my page on anti-racism. So instead of being a world-view divergence as wide as the heavens, stretching as far as the east is from the west, what ensues ought to be a narrowly delimited discussion of what, if anything, happened in colonial Virginia. Believe me, the 'whiteness is wicked' side cannot win this debate! Neither can they win if they are tarred and feathered as Marxists; but they say they are not Marxists. This is another problem with world-view analysis: one side says, 'You are Marxists,' the other side says, 'We are not Marxists. You are liars.' The discussion does not, and cannot, proceed from that point.

There is presently in this country a debate about reparations. Should the tax-payers to the federal government, including black tax-payers, issue a check for reparations to the descendants of slaves? Listening to the two sides, one immediately catches the echo, on the side of those demanding reparations, of Elijah's Muhammad's old dichotomy, that this is a nation consisting of two parties: the children of slaves, and the children of slave-owners. This is demographically as false as false can be; even in the ante-bellum South, most whites did not own slaves, how much more so in the North where slavery was illegal. Moreover the ancestors of many members of the contemporary white population were not even in the country at the time.  But Elijah Muhammad had blown out his brains on alcohol before encountering Wallace D. Fard, whom he mistook for God, and it seemed to him, and his interpreter Malcolm X, very plausible that the U.S. population should be divided into two classes, the children of slaves and the children of slave-owners. Simply correct this misperception, and point out that the GDP of the United States at its current rate dwarfs the output of the pre-Civil War economy, meaning that, no, we are not living on accumulated capital amassed from slavery, and enthusiasm for reparations wanes.

And why the federal government, which did not exist before the Revolutionary War which gave it birth? It was claimed, by Justice Taney in his Dred Scott decision, that the U.S. Constitution upholds slavery. Does it really? The Northern states had all eliminated slavery prior to the Civil War, with none of them experiencing any constitutional obstacle or bottle-neck. The defenders of slavery and the anti-racists scoff that they had few slaves to liberate, which is true of the New England states, though not of mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The U.S. federal government imposed slavery on nobody, though it expended quite a bit of blood and treasure in eradicating it. And the majority of its tax-payers are not the children of slave-owners. African-Americans are presently 12-13% of the total population; prior to the Civil War, and prior to the great influx of immigration from Central, Southern and Eastern Europe that followed, they may have numbered as much as 18%. This does not provide enough for even one in five whites to own a slave, realizing that some large slave plantations soaked up hundreds of them! Nevertheless it is crucial to the industry of racial grievance to claim that the U.S. economy, as a whole, was based on slavery: "At the same time, the US economy was based on the abduction and enslavement of African people, the displacement and genocide of Indigenous people, and the annexation of Mexican lands." (White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo, Chapter 2, 4/98). This is counter-factual. The Northern economy was still largely agrarian, based on a different system of land tenure from what prevailed in the South: the family farm. If you want productivity, here is where to look.

Slavery became a sectional issue for a variety of reasons, including eighteenth century medicine, a very imperfect project. The environmental theory of disease was first broached in antiquity, but had not lost its popularity by colonial days. And indeed there is some truth to it, though not the entire truth. The American southland was unhealthful for whites, but not only for whites. Diseases like malaria and yellow fever were endemic. The complex etiology of these diseases, including their dependence on insect hosts, was altogether unknown. But because they were evidently related to the hot climate, it was theorized that people naturalized to hot climates, like African blacks, would not die in such large numbers as did white people if they were handed the task of farming the vast tracts of southern land. This did not turn out well, as the experience of the Caribbean and Central America showed. Introducing white farm labor had been a failure: "A very few years ago it was attempted to cultivate Jamaica with European or white laborers, in despite of all previous experience! I need say noting of the result. . .A limit, then, seems set to the aggressions of the fair races." (Robert Knox, M.D. The Races of Men, A Fragment, pp. 193-194). Importing slave labor from Africa was not the answer, though, because mortality was high for both groups. One copy of the trail for sickle cell anemia, found in some West Africans, produces partial immunity to malaria, but as far as I'm aware, there is no difference in death rates for yellow fever. How great a difference mosquito netting would have made, but nobody knew that then. Nevertheless, under the influence of this theory, the deep South was populated in good measure with slaves. It would be long years before effective control measures for the endemic diseases could be discovered. The founding fathers hoped that slavery would die a natural death, owing to popular revulsion, after the Revolution; and so it did, in the North. Public attitudes were different in the South. At the time of the Civil War, slavery was a sectional issue, having been resolved peaceably and justly elsewhere in the U.S. Reparations, if fair, ought to be sectional not national. But they are not likely to be, because paradoxically, if slavery is indeed the fount of all wealth, the South is a poor section of the country. And even more paradoxically, Africa, the mother of American slaves, is a poor continent. Perhaps they should rethink where this nation's wealth actually comes from. When the South and the North were separated, as by an iron curtain, during the Civil War, which section experienced hardship and decline?

In any case, micro-economic analysis of reparation demands is the right path, not world-view analysis. Proponents of world-view analysis might retort, 'How would you know how to resolve disputes, you were kicked off Twitter for hateful conduct.' In fact the 'Woke' crew will not hear dissent, which they take for hate speech, from any quarter; but still I think the narrow way is best. Moreover, there is a fatal ambiguity at the heart of this movement against Critical Race Theory. Some of these people understand that slavery is unjust, some do not. Who does not? Douglas Wilson, taken for a sage by many in this crowd, for one. For another, the operator of the web-site Reformation Charlotte, who says, "To declare that slavery, in and of itself, is ipso facto always sinful is to  add to the Scriptures. This simply is not a concept that is derived from Scripture. . .It simply cannot be found in the text." (Article 'New Video Surfaces Showing that Al Mohler Fully Subscribes to Critical Race Theory,' Jeff Maples, December 3, 2019). The abolitionists found it in the text. Believe me, it's in there. Nevertheless this view has supporters: "So here's the Christian response to that. The Old Covenant teaches that the institution of slavery is not immoral. The New Covenant teaches that the institution of slavery is not immoral. That's the response. . .Modern American pagan values assert that the institution of slavery was inhumane and immoral. . .Christian belief affirms slavery was moral." (Ed Dingess podcast, 51:04-52:25, Reformed Rant, posted at ReformationCharlotte website, retrieved 1/3/2020). Really, it is pagan to think there is anything wrong with slavery? If this is what the anti-social justice party believes, they should be loud and proud, and state it unambiguously, so it can be examined against the Bible. Is it not apparent that first we need to establish that slavery is wrong,— this is not conceded by all,— and only then address means of redress? If slavery was not wrong, nothing need be done to make it right. We are not all on the same page. Exponents of this popular movement need to be more open on this point, it is a critical issue. A little bit of honesty would go a long way.

World-view analysis, upon encountering disagreement, immediately changes the subject, so that instead of talking about race relations in contemporary America, we begin to talk about Marxism of the Frankfurt School; when it turns out that no disputant wishes to defend or uphold the Frankfurt School, and for that matter most people don't even know what it is, they proclaim victory. In real life, the problem isn't the Frankfurt School, it's Malcolm X. And neither he nor Elijah Muhammad knew the Frankfurt School from a frankfurter. To an academic like Jordan Peterson, it might seem axiomatic that all noteworthy intellectual innovations arise from the academy. After all, why else is he there? If that's not where it's at, why bother with it? But maybe some things start elsewhere: