A portrait of Jesus of Nazareth by Suzanns Art. More recent artist's renditions have depicted Jesus with a swarthy complexion.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (ANS) — A controversial opinion piece published last week in the New York Times (NYT) has been corrected in an apparent change of heart by the newspaper’s editors.
Eric V. Copage made the claim that Jesus was “most likely a Palestinian man” in his piece, “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes,” that was published in the newspaper on Good Friday.
The article discusses how “a white Jesus is still deeply embedded in the Western story of Christianity,” despite him having lived in the Middle Eastern region.
Shown here is a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth by Suzanns Art. More recent artist’s renditions have depicted Jesus with a swarthy complexion, though we may never know quite what Jesus actually looked like.
“As I grew older, I learned that the fair-skinned, blue-eyed depiction of Jesus has for centuries adorned stained glass windows and altars in churches throughout the United States and Europe,” the story originally read, according to a screen grab from Way Back Machine. “But Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.”
The Opinion Piece was changed a week later, and it no longer has any mention of Palestine.
“As I grew older, I learned that the fair-skinned, blue-eyed depiction of Jesus has for centuries adorned stained glass windows and altars in churches throughout the United States and Europe,” it now says. “But Jesus, a Jew born in Bethlehem, presumably had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man.”
At the bottom of the article the NYT correction reads: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Jesus’s background. While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem.”
