People of Color in the Bible

Galatians 3:28 teaches, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." God has always honored this principle. Man, however, has not.

Portraying Jesus as being one color or another is not a problem in and of itself. No brother or sister in Christ should ever object to visual portrayals of the Lord Jesus as being of any race. The problem is that the early fathers felt the bible was too Hebrew [black] so they devised a psychological operation that has resulted in many in the church to use the European Jesus image to exclude other peoples from identifying with Jesus as being one of them. Thus making the white Jesus a symbol of white supremacy in the role of divinity.

The first people of color in the Bible that we'll share about are the Egyptians. About 1/3 were black-skinned; more importantly, the people who lived in the area known as the Fayoum depression, which laid the foundation for Egyptian civilization in the dynastic ages, were black-skinned Africans.

Ethiopians, a race of black people, are another obvious people of color mentioned in scripture. The African continent was originally called Ethiopia. the Bible term "Ethiopia" refers to several black-skinned peoples who lived in the southern Nile area including modern-day Sudan. Moses had an Ethiopian wife. He married her after his first wife died. God loved her to the degree that He struck Marriam with leprosy for speaking against her. All Cushites descended from Ham, the youngest son of Noah and the ancestral father of Africans (see Gen. 9:19, 10:1-20).

Mark, who wrote the Gospel of Mark, was also a man of Cyrene, a north African Jew like Simon of Cyrene. He is the apostle who made the blessed confession "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). His gospel, the Gospel of Mark, is believed by Bible scholars to have been the first gospel written (it was written about 50 A.D.).

Another group of blacks mentioned in the Bible is the people of Cyrene. The people of Cyrene were African people who lived in what is now Libya. That is the African country where Simon of Cyrene came from, that blessed brother who helped the Lord Jesus bear His cross up to Mount Calvary (Matthew 27:32).

The icing on the cake is the evidence about Jesus. The first-century Jewish writer Josephus (37-100 AD) penned the earliest non-biblical testimony of Jesus. In his work Halosis or the “Capture of Jerusalem),” written around 72 A.D., Josephus discussed “the human form of Jesus and his wonderful works.” Biblical scholar Robert Eisler in a classic 1931 study of Josephus’ Testimony was able to reconstruct the unaltered testimony based on a newly-discovered Old Russian translation that preserved the original Greek text. According to Eisler’s reconstruction, the oldest non-Biblical description of Jesus read as follows:

“At that time also there appeared a certain man of magic power … if it is meet to call him a man, [whose name is Jesus], whom [certain] Greeks call a son of [a] God, but his disciples [call] the true prophet … he was a man of simple appearance, mature age, black-skinned, short growth, three cubits tall, hunchbacked, prognathous (lit. ‘with a long face’ [macroprosopos]), a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose … with scanty [curly] hair, but having a line in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazaraeans, with an undeveloped beard.”

This short, black-skinned, mature, hunchbacked Jesus with a unibrow, short curly hair, and undeveloped beard bear no resemblance to the Jesus Christ taken for granted today by most of the Christian world. In fact according to Ephesians 2:17 this genuine Jesus was near the Jews [blacks] than the Gentiles [Greeks].  Nevertheless there were many people of color that God used in the Bible. There are many people of color that God is using today. This is a very important area where our Bible teachers, our Bible schools, and our Bible seminaries are being imbalanced and therefore not telling the whole truth.