Palestinian Jesus? Please

Before Easter fades too far into the rear-view mirror, I want to note this stunningly ignorant op-ed in the New York Times: “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes.”

The author decries the Western tradition of depicting Jesus as a white man, and adds:

Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.

As the Daily Wire correctly points out, the Palestinians are Arabs, and the first Arabs didn’t arrive in the vicinity of Israel until 700 years after Jesus’s time. Jesus was most certainly not a “Palestinian man with dark skin.”

There is one fact that, bewilderingly, is missing from the op-ed: Jesus was, as all the world knows, a Jew. As such, he was what we now classify as white. But seriously: does the author, who describes himself attending church as a boy and writes as though he is still a Christian (although he doesn’t specifically say that), not know that Jesus was a Jew, and that the Bible is largely the story of God’s relationship with the Jewish people? If not, he should sue his Sunday School teachers for malpractice.

This piece raises once again a question I have asked before: does the New York Times actually employ editors? It is hard to imagine who could have permitted that paper to print an article which, while it seems vaguely well-intentioned, is so grounded in ignorance.

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