In 2012, a team of archeologists headed by Marcelo Castro of the Forum MMX excavation project unearthed a 4th century glass plate in southern Spain which depicts Jesus Christ and his disciples atypically as beardless with closely cropped heads:
One of the world’s earliest representations of Christ has been unearthed in southern Spain by a team of archaeologists, a glass plate which shines new light on the arrival of Christianity in Spain.
The green glass paten, the plate which holds the Holy Eucharist in churches, is the earliest depiction of Jesus found in Spain and is in excellent condition compared to similar pieces discovered around Europe.
“We know it dates back to the 4th century, in part because popes in the following centuries ordered all patens to be made out of silver,” Marcelo Castro, head of the Forum MMX excavation project, told The Local.
The team of archaeologists have so far managed to find 81 percent of the paten at the site of a religious building in Cástulo, an ancient Iberian town in the province of Jaén, Andalusia.
Measuring 22 centimetres in diameter, it shows three beardless men with short hair and halos over their heads.
According to Castro, the figures are Jesus and the apostles Paul and Peter as depicted in Christ in Majesty, an early Christian art form which copied Roman and Byzantine styles.
The Forum MMX team have been able to establish the paten was made in the 300s thanks to coins and ceramic objects found at the same site.
“We were wary about presenting the paten as a 4th century piece in case it clashed with previous studies into the chronology of Christianity in Spain,” Castro explained.
But their estimates coincide with the rule of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to claim conversion to Christianity, who also ensured the religion’s clandestine followers were no longer persecuted.
The paten was put on display on Wedneday at the Archaeological Museum of Linares (Jaén), alongside other ancient pieces such as a mosaic of Cupid (Mosaico de los Amores), unearthed in 2012 and named as one of the discoveries of the year by National Geographic.
It is remarkable that none of these so-called experts draw the most obvious conclusion from this early depiction of Christ and his followers — that whoever created this glass plate did not believe that Christ was a Jew. Had they truly believed that Christ were a Jew, He would have been depicted with a beard and long, unshorn hair, as all later depictions of him attest. The fact that he is beardless is not insignificant — the artisan who carved this glass icon depicted Jesus this way to make a religious statement about how early Spaniards saw Him.
Jews, and especially rabbis, did not shave their beards or cut their hair short — in their vain attempt to follow the rituals of The Law laid out in Leviticus. Had these early Spaniards believed that Christ was a jewish rabbi, as many of today’s misled Christians still believe, they would have most certainly depicted him with a beard.
And it’s highly doubtful that they would have depicted Christ without a beard simply because beards were not “fashionable” in 4th century Spain. To depict Christ without a beard would have been disrespectful and even blasphemous if these early Christians truly believed He was a Jew. Rather what we are seeing here is much more likely how early Christians understood Christ, and even more significantly, how Christ would have seen Himself.
Of course, “jew” is slang for “Judæan”, which isn’t a direct reference to race regardless of its usage by a certain group. Those using that term requiring an assumption of race are actually Canaanites, not Israelites. Israelites are from Jacob; “Jews” are from Esau through his four Canaanite wives.
Esau came out of his mother “red” and hairy. He callously sold his birthright for a “mess of red pottage”. Esau’s descendants through those Canaanite wives were, collectively called “Edom”, a Hebrew word meaning “red”. His descendants later demanded that Jesus’ red blood be on them and on their children. In the early 20th century, his descendants described the system of destruction they designed as “Red Communism”, they as “Red Communists” or simply “Reds”.
The “Jews” know they are not Israelites, which is why they have spent so much effort getting the Israelites to kill each other in wars, or to breed themselves out of existence through miscegenation.
The preface of the 1980 “Jewish Almanac” reads, “Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a Jew, and a modern Jew an Israelite”. See? They know, so, to disagree with them risks the accusation of “antisemitism/antisemitic”, a pejorative invented by the “Jew”, Moritz Steinschneider, just like “Nazi” (Konrad Heiden), “racism/racist” (Lev Bronstein/Leon Trotsky), and “homophobia” (George Weinberg). These are tools to stifle discussions on various subjects.
In Roman Palestine , the tribal descendants of the ancient tribes of Judah and Benjamin which remained in the land were in the North – in the Galilee. The House of David was in the Galilee. That is why Joseph had to go to Bethlehem for the Roman census.
The descendants of Judah had been largely driven out of Judah’s tribal land and the capital because of the Idumean population transfer into Judea when King John Hyrcanus conquered Idumea and mandated the conversion of the Edomites at the time of the Maccabean wars. These are the descendants of Esau. The Books of the Maccabees deals with this history exclusively. At the time of Christ, the Edomites out of Idumea had their puppet king on the throne (Herod) and they had infiltrated into the priesthood of the temple. Their Babylonian Pharisaic cult which had the oral Talmud was in control of the synagogues. In Judea , as conversos to the Covenant, they were styling themselves ‘Jews’. These are the ‘men of Judea’ to whom Peter refers in the first address at Pentecost.
Somehow I was raised with the understanding that God/Christ is white. I remember the question of the white ‘perception’ being posed in catlick school religion class. I can only ever remember all the classic artistic representations of God and Christ being that of a white man. I figured, even at a young age, that how could you argue with history?
Because that understanding is correct ; NO ONE in the early church – or, for that matter, the first thousand years or so in the main and even until 200 years or so in America or most of western Europe – held on to the ridiculous notion of Jesus as an antiChrist jew. The reality of the true Israelite identity of our people was common knowledge.
One finds similar examples of such illustrations in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, where Christ, though bearded, is depicted as fair-haired. It seems clear that the Anglo-Saxons worshiped Christ as an Anglo-Saxon God, and they pictured him so.
Early Old English bibles also mentioned Woden and Ing. There are a couple ways of looking at this of course. One is that simply they all believed Christ to be a European like them, or two is a bit more sinister and that this kind of reasoning was used by missionaries to try to secure conversions. Certainly when it comes to Anglo-Saxon era English people this seems to have been the case, with the modified bibles. English people at the time quite literally believed that to be English meant to be descended from Woden, so this was likely a requirement to even get them to listen to any of these priests.