Was Jesus a person of color? An immigrant? A Palestinian?

Recently you may have watched three claims about Jesus worm their way into popular discourse: That Jesus was

A). a person of color,
B). an immigrant, and
C). Palestinian.




Obviously, the increase in these claims coincides with their perceived political value. Last Christmas, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez made these points as an appeal for Christians to advocate for different immigration policies. Just yesterday, the Washington Post ran a (particularly strange) column appealing to evangelicals to stop supporting President Trump—something about his connection to the youth group purity movement of the 1990s —but it closed with the author reminding Christians that Jesus was a “person of color” and “an immigrant.”



As ironic as these statements are coming from people arguing for expanded legalized abortion, they are not confined there. We’ve seen authors, and church leaders repeat those three claims in contexts where politics don’t seem to be the goal. I fear that we are almost at a tipping point where those claims have been repeated so often that they are beginning to be assumed as true.

But these claims are problematic because they represent a subtle attempt to redefine Jesus away from his own Jewish identity.

Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Was Jesus “a person of color?”

First a disclaimer: I don’t really care what color Jesus’ skin was. When people say “by the way, you know Jesus was a POC,” they seem to be implying that this would be offensive to evangelicals. Hardly. If Jesus’ skin was black, brown, yellow or white, I find it entirely insignificant. He is the Lord of the entire human race, so his exact pigmentation and complexion is theologically irrelevant.

Which is probably why most Christians don’t push back on this claim. It simply doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he was Jewish? Mary was Jewish. He was born into a Jewish family. So the better question to ask is, “are Jews persons of color?” And of course, that depends on how you define “person of color.”

POC is an obnoxiously American phrase. It is loaded with division, and in as much as it is true, I suppose it is also obvious. But historically its not a phrase that has been used outside of the US, and I suspect that many who use it today would generally not categorize Jews as “persons of color.”

Because of the diaspora, there are pockets of dark-skinned Jews in parts of the world, and today many have immigrated to Israel. In Israel, it is not uncommon to see Jews from Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, or Djibouti. So there certainly are some dark-skinned Jews.

But was this the case in Jesus’ life? Well, we happen to know Jesus’ family tree—it is light on Ethiopians but does contain the odd Moabite. The bottom line is even anthropologists don’t know what Jewish skin looked like 2,000 years ago because it is just not recorded in secular history. That fact alone has led some to conclude that Jews tended to have olive-colored skin (anything else would have been noteworthy).

Today, this is a big issue in Judaism (each of those words links to a different story on it). Rabbis are aware that there is a stereotype of Jews being white, and yet many Jews are in fact dark-skinned. So they fight against any skin-tone depictions or stereotypes of Jews. They find them unhelpful. On this point, Christians should agree.

Was Jesus an “immigrant?”

When I started seeing this claim, I wondered, do people mean when he fled to Egypt, or when he came back to Galilee? But in chasing down references to this, it seems like most who make this claim mean at his birth. As in, “his family emigrated from Galilee to Judea.”

Jesus’ parents were from Bethlehem, and at some point had moved to Galilee. Then they went back to register for the census, which is why Jesus was born in Judea. Sometime later they fled to Egypt, then returned to Nazareth.

Strictly speaking, none of these were immigration. All three provinces where Jesus lived were controlled by the Roman Empire. When Jesus was born, Herod the Great ruled both Galilee and Judea (Idumea).

So this would not have been considered immigration. When he fled to Egypt, he may have been a refugee, although Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. By the time his family returned to Nazareth, Herod Antipas was ruling Galilee. But even this was not immigration since his family was returning home.

Obviously, there is one sense in which Jesus was an immigrant: Ephesians 4:9. Yet I doubt this is what is normally meant.


Was Jesus “Palestinian?”

The term Palestine is the Roman butchering of the term Philistine. When the Jews revolted against Rome in the second century BC, the Romans renamed the area Palestine for the purpose of offending the Jews. They resurrected the name of their long-ago disappeared enemies as a means to subjugate the Jews, and they did this out of spite. I don’t know of any examples of Jews under Roman rule ever identifying themselves as Palestinians.

Palestine then disappeared from history for 1,900 years, until the British divided up the land they gained from the Ottoman Empire. Today in Israel the term Palestinian is used to contrast those that live in the Palestinian territory from those who live in Israel. In point of fact, there are no Jews that live in the Palestinian territory, at least not legally. When you enter Palestine, you pass a big sign that forbids Jews from being there.

Of the three claims, this is the one that most obviously false. While Jesus may have had olive skin, the term “person of color” is anachronistic, and not really a suitable term. While Jesus did shift and change provinces, he never really was an immigrant (although certainly a refugee in some sense). But he most certainly was not a Palestinian in any normal sense of the word.

Why does any of this matter? After all, I don’t really care about the politics of the thing. But I can’t help but notice that all three of these statements seem to strip the Judaism out of Jesus. By implying he was an immigrant to Israel, a person of color (as opposed to most Jews today), and calling him a Palestinian instead of an Israeli…well taken together it strikes me as an attempt to redefine Jesus way from the genealogy in Luke 3.

Jesus should not be a political pawn whose identity shifts to match whatever the political cause is of the day. It is better for us to orient our lives around him than him around our politics.

But whatever his skin-tone or immigration status, he was and is the King of the Jews.

Author: Cripplegate