The Real War Over Christmas
Let's play Highlights Magazine! How many errors can you spot in this picture? Have you made your list? Good, because here I go: 1. Mary is blonde! 2. Mary, Joseph, Jesus, the shepherds, and two of the wise men are white! 3. The other wise man appears to be of African descent! 4. Jesus is getting a Faberge egg for his birthday! 5. The wise men and the shepherds are there at the same time! I'm cutting it off right there, because the last is what this post is really about. But before I tackle it, I will quickly take on the first three errors, all of which are grounded in the anti-Semitic movement of the nineteenth century, which sought to bleach Jesus' complexion to make him more acceptable to the world-dominating Europeans who also used the Bible to justify slavery, colonization, and social Darwinism. Caucasians ruled the world because we were destined by both God and nature to do so; which meant the foundational stories of the Bible had to be retrofitted w...