On the eve of the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birthday, the Associated Press has published a story via ABC News on the race of the son of Christ. Was he black, white—or even human? It’s tough to say, but the piece aims to cut through a broad and rather dubious debate that has been going on for decades but was recently pushed back into the spotlight.
Earlier this month, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly ignited the flames over what Jesus Christ would fill out on the census form when she declared on-air that Jesus was a white man. Edward Blum, the co-author of "The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America" takes a politically correct approach by saying Jesus referred to himself as light. "How do you racially categorize that," Blum says.
In addition to trying to answer the question about what Jesus is (spoiler alert: the piece doesn’t), there is also history shared as to how the mainstream image of Jesus in America came to be. Blum says the first pictures of Jesus surfaced several hundred years after his death, and some of them even depicted him in animal form as a lion or lamb.
But as Blum points out, the preoccupation of what race Jesus was seems to be a modern-day, more secular concept than a spiritual one. "That says a lot about us, about Americans today," he said.
Read more at ABC News.