Yeah, I said it. I’m sorry y’all but I’ve been holding my peace on this subject for years and I can’t hold it much longer. The truth must be told. The opposite has been said for so many years that people take it for granted. I understand how somebody can come up with this conclusion. If you have a very narrow or shallow view of history then seeing Christianity as the white man’s religion and Jesus as the white man’s god makes sense. The formula usually goes like this:
1. White Jesus died for all the poor black, brown, and yellow people
2. He gave all the other white people the job of spreading the news that he died and now they can go to heaven when they die where they will grow wings and play harps
3. To do their job right White Jesus allowed them to use guns and slavery to force the black, brown, and yellow people to believe it (they are mostly too dumb to just believe it on their own)
4. White people got a free pass from white Jesus to own slaves, claim other people’s land for their own, and pretty much be racist greedy warmongers
5. Non-white people who believe this today are delusional, uneducated, and led to be passive and wait for their pie in the sky
This is the general myth that many believe today and it is spreading and gaining ground with a lot of black folk nowadays and it’s time for us to officially kill this lie. Let’s put it to bed before it further twists people up.
Let’s start by blowing that first assumption out of the water: There is no such thing as White Jesus!
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. He lived at least a dozen centuries before the invention of whiteness. Yes! I know you thought that this whole racial thing has been going on since the beginning of time but newsflash: racism was invented during the Renaissance around the time of Columbus discovering of America. It became a pretext to steal people’s land and unite European nations to conquer the world. Before this people were divided more by language and culture. Racial categories as we know them did not exist before this time. So let’s just say it together: Racism is a modern invention. Racism is a modern invention. Racism is a modern invention.
So that picture of White Jesus is not Jesus. Some say it’s a picture of Michelangelo’s cousin or the Pope’s cousin or something like that. But let’s get it straight nobody knows where that image came from. Newsflash: There were no cameras in first-century Palestine. So we don’t know exactly how he looked (Please do not use Revelation 1 to explain to me how Jesus looked. If you do you not know about how to read the genre Revelation was written in).
Jesus was a first-century Palestinian Jew. Have you taken a look at a map to see where Palestine is located? It’s right above Egypt. It is the center of 3 continents (if you count Europe). He came from a people who spent 400 years in Egypt and mingled with a dark-skinned race, and then he spent his early years in Egypt to hide from King Herod. You can’t be white and hide in the Middle East. Newsflash: Blond hair and blue eyes stand out.
So let’s get it straight. Christianity is not the White Man’s Religion. We do not worship a white god because Jesus wasn’t white. Why is this important? Because people make Christianity out to be some kind of conspiracy theory. They try to make it like a group of white men in a secret room invented this to dominate the world. It’s hogwash.
It’s clear when you look at the spread of the gospel and the movement of the early church. Was this a white movement? Was it begun and established in Europe? Did it thrive in Caucasian soil? I think not.
In Acts 1:8 Jesus tells the apostles that they will be empowered by the Holy Spirit to be witnesses in Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.
The early church was super diverse. When you talk of the early church you can’t even talk about it as Christianity. It was more like “christianities” shaped by the different cultures the gospel found itself in. During the first three centuries of the church Christianity could be found in places like Persia (modern-day Iran) and Numidia (modern-day Tunisia and Algeria).
Some of the greatest theologians and pastors hailed from Africa: Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, Origen, and Moses of Ethiopia. Some of the greatest martyrs gave their lives in devotion to Christ and they did this on African soil! They didn’t do this to support some lie about White Jesus because for them Jesus wasn’t white and they had no concept of race as we now understand it.
The Hebrews thought of the world as composed of two types of people or races: Jews and Gentiles. These two groups were separated by a distinct culture and heritage. They fought over a claim to land that is still today the most hotly contested piece of property in the whole world. Then come the Christians. In Antioch one of the most diverse cities in the 1st century Roman empire the people were divided according to ethnicity and culture. Then came the followers of Jesus who consisted of people from different cultures and tribes and it baffles those on the outside. They don’t know whether to call them Jews, Syrians, Libyans, or Ethiopians. They just knew that these different people came together to worship Christ and decided they should be called Christians. Christians came to be known as a third race.
Here’s what the Epistle to Diognetus says about these people called Christians:
“For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity…But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according the lot of each of them has determined and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners…Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.”
Christianity is the white man’s religion? That’s not what the Bible or history tells us. Jesus is for everybody!