It’s the Christmas season, that joyous time of year when malcontents are guaranteed to ooze out of the woodwork to make life miserable for everyone who wants to enjoy the holiday.

This year is no different.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has been slapped with a lawsuit over the display of four paintings depicting Jesus as blond and — gasp! — white.

Justin Renel Joseph — who reminds us that he is a veteran, which he must think gives him some special standing — filed the lawsuit on November 30, stating that “the Racist Artworks depict the historical and public figure of Hebrew descent, Jesus Christ, as a blonde haired, fair-skinned, Aryan adult male, despite that an adult male native to the Middle-Eastern region of Hebrew descent who existed from approximately 1 B.C.E. to approximately 33 A.D. would not be genetically disposed to possess such features (i.e., blonde hair, fair-skin and other such Aryan features) and despite that historical accounts of Jesus Christ describe him with hair like wool and skin of bronze color.”

Here is one of the works of art which he finds “racist:”

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Museum, Elyse Topalian, stated what should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge: European painters of the time produced art which coincided with the cultural identity of that time and place. “When they were painted, it was typical for artists to depict subjects with the same identity as the local audience. This phenomenon occurs in many other cultures, as well,” she said.

Case in point: the phenomena of the “Black Madonnas,” which are depictions of the Virgin Mary with darkened skin. Most of them are medieval in origin and are found displayed in Catholic-majority nations. They had been studied in the first half of the twentieth century, and while some were found to be the result of changes in the pigmentation of the paint, many were found to be painted according to the dark-skinned population of the indigenous culture.

History doesn’t matter to Joseph, however, He responded to Topalian by saying, “They’re basically saying these artists painted everyone to look like them, which is not true. Obviously when black people have a lesser role, it’s acceptable to not have them in paintings.”

A pox on the historicity of art. Because. . . racism!

Here’s Joseph explaining himself in a video.

We don’t know what Jesus looked like when he walked the earth. Historically and scientifically we’ve come a long way from what Renaissance painters conceptualized Jesus’s image to be. For example, Popular Mechanics used forensic science to create this image of what Jesus may have looked like:

In the 21st century we know that Jesus most likely had a complexion closer to that of Justin Joseph than to those of us who are of Northern European extraction. Art, like culture, evolves with the availability of new knowledge. While Joseph complains that little black children are being shown pictures of an incorrect Jesus, wouldn’t it be a travesty if those same little black children would be denied the rich history of art simply because aspects of it didn’t fit into a malcontent’s ideology?