Why There are No White People in the Bible
Why There are No White People in the Bible
Dan Bouchelle
Did you know there are no white people in the Bible? Does that surprise you? It’s true, I assure you. Not Adam, Abraham, Moses, Deborah, David, Elijah, Jezebel, Daniel, Jesus, Peter, Paul, or even Lydia or the church in Rome were white. Most of the people in the Bible were Jews of middle eastern origin. The few people in the Bible from the region we now call Europe may have had light-colored skin and would be considered white today, but they were not white in their day.
How can I say this? Because the concept of whiteness didn’t exist yet. Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have always thought in terms of tribes or nations (as in the Cherokee nation or Navajo nation, not a modern nation-state), but the idea of race is a fairly new concept. The Greek word for nation is “ethnos” (from which we get the word “ethnic”) and referred to any group of people with a common language, culture, story, and territory. Some nations were related to others with common historical roots and cultural overlaps. Some nations were greatly different from each other and far removed in every way.
Nations or tribes were categorized in various ways in the ancient world, as reflected in the Bible, but skin color was not one of them. It’s not that the Bible never notes that some nations had darker skin than others, but that is an exceedingly rare thing for the writers of scripture to mention. It just wasn’t considered a relevant factor for identifying people groups.
Skin color in antiquity was more like hair color is for us today. We see it and occasionally mention it. We can even build a few stereotypes and jokes around it. But no one really considers blonde, red, brown, grey, or black hair to be a marker of value, superiority, personality traits, or humanity. It’s just one of those things that can vary among humans like height, body type, or eye color. Humans come in endless varieties, but we are all humans. As N.T. Wright once quipped on a podcast, “In the Middle Ages, no one in Europe would have called anyone ‘white’ unless they had seen a ghost or were dead.”
However, starting in the 15th century, for the first time in human history, skin color began to take on a new significance. Europeans began placing people of different nations on a continuum of skin color, with baseless generalizations being made about people on either end. This way of thinking grew in prominence until the formulation of legal justifications for race-based chattel slavery in the 17th century.
Creating the language of “black” or “white” people was driven by economics and empire. It was an effort to justify the enslavement of people from Africa or the Americas by Europeans as they expanded their global empires and needed cheap labor. What developed was a diabolical but baseless theory of race that classified all nations on some color scale of “red, yellow, black, and white,” which was combined with a developmental scale that put white people at the top, black people at the bottom, and red and yellow people somewhere in between.
All this was just a form of tribalism or nationalism on steroids. All these ways of thinking are mere extensions of self-interest in communal forms that are profoundly anti-gospel. The gospel tells us that all people are children of God equally loved and valued by their creator, who will unite us all in Christ to form one people who demonstrate the diverse beauty of God’s creativity (see Rev. 21:22-22:5).
While slavery had been around from the beginning of recorded time, it was not previously based on skin color. Slaves were people conquered in war or people who had fallen on hard economic times. Slavery was typically not a lifelong or hereditary status. It was an ugly reality, but not as evil as it became when it got tied to the myth of race. The idea that people of certain skin colors were superior or could legitimately own and control people of other colors was unknown in the days of the Bible.
All this means that “whiteness” is artificial—a false story humans have created. It is important to know there is no genetic or biological reality that supports the idea that people with certain skin tones constitute a distinct group with common characteristics. People of all races are 99% genetically identical. Exactly who has been considered white has changed over time. Early in U.S. history, neither Jewish, Irish, nor Italian people were considered to be white, but now they typically are. There was a time when the KKK opposed viewing Christopher Columbus as a hero because he was Italian, they did not consider Italians to be white, and they wanted to keep them out of the USA. Who gets counted as white has been amazingly arbitrary.
Now, in saying that whiteness is not a biological reality, I am not seeking to diminish the impact race has on our world. Race is a powerful myth that has impacted billions of lives for half a millennium. Most of us with light-colored skin and European ancestry have been deeply indoctrinated in the mythology of whiteness (often under other names), and we carry unconscious convictions of white primacy, which we are skilled at hiding from ourselves. We may not tie it to skin color or genetics, but we typically assume that “white culture” (which we can’t define) is better, more evolved, or more refined. We assume that other cultures can be improved by being more like “white” culture, regardless of skin color. We believe this because we have been taught it directly or indirectly. You don’t have to be part of some fringe “White Supremacy” group to be infected with white superiority assumptions.
Why does this matter?
Because the amount of evil done in the name of race is staggering and beyond calculation. It must end.
Because there is a false idea, still prominent in many parts of the world, that Christianity is a white or western religion.This makes it difficult for many people to embrace Christ because they have been hurt by “white” people who claim to follow Christ.
Too often, Christians from the western world have bought into false racial ideas that have directly or indirectly supported white primacy. This undercuts the faithfulness, justice, credibility, and impact of the gospel. Lurking behind the struggle American missionaries sometimes have with trusting national leaders in other countries is the unspoken and unrecognized factor of race.
The implications of the myth of race are massive and complex, and the challenges of undoing the injustices in our world fostered by these arbitrary categories are immense. Yet, the one thing we should be able to agree about as followers of Jesus is that skin color is no basis upon which to judge or rank people. Jesus wasn’t white. Seventy percent of Christians globally are not white. And all people matter equally to our creator.
While we should not try to be color blind, which doesn’t acknowledge the realities of people whose life experience is different than ours, we should reject color bias. We should be relentlessly committed to the equality of all people. The cross should be the end of all claims to the superiority of any people groups.
Our hope is not in any race, culture, nation, or other human source. Our hope is in the God who made us all from the same original couple and who is drawing all people from all tribes and nations, regardless of color or culture, toward the same home in the New Jerusalem.