May Christ be with us

I recently visited a church with a painting of John the Baptist and Jesus and, well...
- Holy shit that's amazing.
  "What colour was John the Baptist?"
  Well, most people there are brown, so brown!
  "Uhh, then what colour is Jesus?"
  The fuck you mean by that? He's Jesus!
  
  I mean there are white arabs/people in that area, but yeah very selective in their portrayal of christ
  
  He knows. Doesn't want to admit it, but he knows.
  
  Jesus is the son of God, not of Joseph. Of course he is white.
- You mean Juan the Baptist?
  
  Juanito the Baptisto

I had someone on reddit argue that the icons show "white" people on their gravestones, so he was probably white. I think he really believed it and it was pretty hilarious to see them do brain exercises to get Jesus to be white. Never mind that the coloring was probably adjusted on the screen, the pigment was falling off and they were 2000 years old. Also, it's encaustic, which is painting with wax and has a sheen.
This is the one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encaustic_painting#/media/File:EncausticPortraitWoman.jpg
- I love this, the picture looks very not-western-european (caucasian), and everything "not allochtoon".
  
  Looks like Stallone.
- Who looks at that painting and thinks that woman is white?

Should've used Rice Christies.

Wdym? Of course everyone named jesus here is white, blond and blue-eyed. Don't you know how the middle east works?
- Don't you know how the middle east works?
  Violently?

The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it's totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.
Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews.
Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.

So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.
- So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian
  Who were, incidentally, also not white untill very recently. Even a hundred years ago, a lot of people didn't consider Italians to be white people.
- Except that theory is flawed if you consider the ramifications of the Islamic conquest followed by European crusades, and then you have the Ottoman, French, British, and most recently, Israeli occupation. A lot of rape/interbreeding happened throughout.
  I live in Egypt and whole providences here are full of green/blue eyes and blonde/ginger hair as a consequence.
  Edit: also forgot the Mongolian hordes. It’s the Middle East, a lot of shit went down tbh
  
  Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it's important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of "white genes" to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don't think it's a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That's not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.
- So they are basically Palestinian?
  
  A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn't call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don't speak Arabic.

Just to be annoying, first you could argue that Jews were a separate ethnic group with distinct characteristics, or that modern people in the Middle East are descendants of Turkic tribes that came to occupy Anatolia after the fall of the eastern Roman empire
- You're right, that is annoying!
- So, you're saying the people in the middle east were a lot more brown in the year 0 right?
  
  I’m saying I have no idea what the Romans found when they conquered that part of the world. Wonder if there are any historical Roman records
  
  There's no year 0. There's year 1 BC, followed by year 1 AD.
- Frankly, way less annoying than Americans trying to apply a concept of "whiteness" to first century social dynamics.