This movie review of “Color of the Cross” in Variety brings up the old debate: was Jesus black?

When I first heard this some seven or eight years ago (in high school), it seemed the ultimate in political correctness. Decades, even centuries, of artistic depiction revealed he was a white man with shoulder-length hair and a beard. After all, I wasn’t nicknamed “Jesus” in high school and college — by completely different groups of people — for nothing.

But there’s actually a lot of evidence that Jesus was dark-skinned. The Bible shows that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, just a short distance from Egypt, to which his family escaped. People from this region are not white. This BBC article quotes Biblical scholars the man was probably somewhat dark-skinned, and even has a picture of what he probably looked like.

That said, the movie apparently depicts Jesus’s life in a rather ridiculous fashion. Mother Mary asks, “Do you think they are doing this because he is black?” Please. As logic (and the BBC article) makes clear, whatever the color of Jesus’s skin, it matched those around him. Mary and Joseph were regular members of their community, at least until Mary got pregnant (by God, the Bible has it) without being married.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.