I've seen black Santas, black Barbies and black Jesus'. I was in a black preacher's house the other day and he had a "Last Supper" painting on his wall in which Jesus and all of the apostles were black. None of these things offend me. They only disappoint me for what it says about the human tendency toward bigotry. It does not offend me that Rv. Wright teaches his congregants that Jesus was a black man either. But when I see and hear him do it I pity him and his people for the facts about the black race as it was actually framed in the Bible.

Changing the skin color of toys and icons for the purpose of marketing to blacks has been going on for half a century now. I did not consider it a social issue worthy of note until Farrakhan, Wright and many other religio-racists turned the practice from a marketing ploy to one of race mongering. Where once the issue of Jesus' skin color was only a curiosity men like these have forged it into a wedge between the races. Under these circumstances it is important that we clarify the question of Jesus' skin color and find out what the biblical position on race actually was. Using my training as a critical Bible scholar I believe I can do that.

It would surprise most Christians to learn that when Columbus sailed off to discover the New World in 1492 the Church still had not canonized the New Testament. Individual churches all over Christendom were permitted to teach and preach from whatever gospels they liked. And over the fifteen centuries since Christ's death scores, possibly hundreds, of gospels and other sacred writings had been produced by enthusiastic believers and were being used for instruction from the pulpit. When the Church did finally narrow this body of literature down to the present day N.T. many times more books and documents were excluded than were included. The vast majority of Christians have never seen any of this literature. Some of it is extremely revealing.

I've read as much of this body of literature as I've been able to find; all in all about 35 documents and "gospels". I can understand why the Church excluded most of them. They told stories of Jesus and early Christianity that were so fantastic no one could be expected to believe them - not even people who believed a man could rise from the dead. Perhaps the two most fantastic of these gospels were "I and II Infancy". Whoever wrote them was trying to fill in the missing details of Jesus' childhood. The only thing they had to work with, though, was their own imaginations.

In these two gospels Jesus was portrayed as striking his playmates dead, blinding their parents and creating animals from mud. And those are just a few of the most fantastic examples. Clearly there was nothing behind these tales other than wild imagination and the Church was right to eliminate them. On the other hand, equally important information might also have been tossed out along with those preposterous tales if we had lost these gospels forever.

Fortunately parts, but not all, of the Infancy gospels can still read today (i.e. "The Lost Books Of The Bible And The Forgotten Books Of Eden" Published by Collins). As an addendum to the life of Jesus they are worthless of course. But as insight to the cultural attitudes of the authors and the exuberant nature of Christian authorship and authority in general there is much worth examining. "I Infancy", for example, gives us a shocking clue as to how this early Christian author and his community felt about Blacks and Jews:
I Infancy 16:9 - "...the children of Israel are like Ethiopians among the people..."

Those were words put in Jesus' own mouth!

There is no mistaking the author's meaning in that passage. The term "Ethiopian" was the "N" word of its day. Ethiopians were considered the lowest class of people in the author's culture and Jews were on a par along with them.

There is no way to be certain of when or where this "gospel" was written. It may have been written anytime from 300 AD to 1200 AD and it may have been written practically anywhere in Christendom - but we can be sure of three things:
1. It was not written by either a black man or a Jew
2. If Jesus was a black man the author would not have had him say that Jews were LIKE black men.
3. This author would have fit perfectly into a KKK sheet and hood.

Does bigotry exist? Of course. Did it exist as a fact of life in Christianity practically from day one? Of course. Has the Bible been used to justify racial intollerance? Absolutely. Is bigotry a white thing or a Christian thing? Absolutely not. Bigotry is a human universal. It was not Christians who made "Ethiopian" the "N" word of the Bible. The Jews of the O.T. did that:

Num. 12:1 - Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses regarding the Ethiopian woman he had married, for he had married an Ethiopian...

Jesus was not black and anyone who insists that he was has bought into some race hustler's hate program.