Of all the sloppy attempts at trying to be Woke Enough at the Washington Post, #NeverTrumper Michael Gerson’s drive-by smear of Christians of pallor is appallingly pathetic. Or pathetically appalling.

Gerson seems to have worked his thong into a knot when stumbling across this tweet …

Jesus was white. Did he have "white privilege" even though he was entirely without sin? Is the United Methodist Church covering that? I think it could be important. https://t.co/lNv67Z7g5l

— Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) July 27, 2020

Gerson actually wants to interpret Metaxas’ tweet as serious when any rational person can easily spot Eric’s tongue firmly implanted in his cheek. Metaxas is the author of this and this and has also testified before Congress in 2013 about the rising anti-Semitism.

Now, does that sound like someone who actually believes that Jesus was something other than an Abrahamic Jew?

What Metaxas is doing is tweaking the nose of the United Methodists for embracing DiAngelo and her anti-Judeo-Christian, Kafkatrapping scam. Gerson merely doubles down in a deliberate attempt to not just smear Evangelicals …

“And a nonwhite Jesus would render impossible the intimate relationalism necessary for the evangelical paradigm to function: no proper white Christian would let a brown man come into their hearts or submit themselves to be a disciple of a swarthy Semite.”

… but to do what so many people do when talking to, or about, observant, religious Christians and Jews – try to explain what the Bible or Jesus is really saying.

The embrace of a Scandinavian Jesus is not just foolish but part of a broader historical amnesia. Jesus not only looked like a Middle Eastern Jew; this identity also made him part of an oppressed, dispossessed group. A sense of Jewish powerlessness was the social context for his ministry, and his teaching reflected it.

Jesus offered little advice to the privileged, except to humble themselves and give their wealth away. He had much to say about the inherent value of the poor, the meek and the mourning. This message was one reason he suffered a brutal, unjust, suffocating death at the hands of public authorities. And many of his followers eventually died for resisting the edicts of emperors.

… and then this bit of blatant, racist bigotry:

The Christian message has always been more easily and fully understood by those who lack social privilege — by those who see the face of a nonwhite Jesus.

Really? So not only are – per DiAnglo – “white” people irredeemably racist and the font of all evil in the world, they can’t be Christians either.

Let’s get something else clear, too, since Gerson decided to drop in the strawman argument of “Scandinavian Jesus”. There is close to two thousand years of artwork dealing with Jesus and (go ahead, do an image search on Jesus in art) you will not find the blond-haired God of the fjords Gerson asserts. You will find all range of features and shades of melanin but almost without exception, brown hair. There’s the Jesus of sub-Saharan African, Chinese Jesus, Jesus as an American Indian.

Yet every year, especially around Christmas, we have to hear from the usual Christians-are-icky group that Jesus was from a family too poor to afford a room at the inn who grew up to be a socialist.

And, of course, he was a SWARTHY JEW!!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find the glee that usually accompanies that statement is less about trying to “own” a Christian than bordering on anti-Semitism. Gerson’s attempt to delegitimize “white” Christians skirts close to delegitimizing “white” (Ashkenazi) Jews – something that continually pops up among Jewhaters via the Khazar Myth.

Inevitable in these drive-by attempts, too, is this waving about of this image, breathlessly touted as the REAL face of Jesus.

Not only is this not the FACE OF JESUS! Suck on it, Christians of Pallor!!! RHEEE! but, like all artistic renditions even forensic recreations, the artist can create an impression in the audience to draw other conclusions rather than just facial recognition. Looking at the face above, on the left, the artist has slightly crossed the eyes and furrowed the brow on a jutting face to engender in the audience the idea they are looking at a confused moron. The ¾ view to the right isn’t quite as strikingly moronic, but look at what some very small tweaks to the original image produces.

Also, the idea that this is really the “average” look of Jesus’ contemporaries ignores history and reality. Just as the “average” height of American men in, say, 1776 was 5’8” we had John Adams at 5’7” to George Washington 6’2”. Take a look at these 1st century funerary portraits, the Fayoum Portraits, from Hellenistic Egypt. Quite a variety of faces, amirite?

Gerson would also have you believe that two thousand years of artwork is all representative rather than symbolic, even as a casual observer knows that in a world of little actual literacy, artwork was the language to help preserve oral traditions. Here’s a fresco from the Duro-Europos synagogue, 2nd century.

Besides showing melanin-enriched, swarthy Jews with short hair, mostly clean shaven, who believes that in this “Samuel anoints David” depiction that the prophet Samuel was really head-and-shoulders taller than the rest of the group? Or is that just a symbol to the gathered that when they glance at the image they can immediately identify Samuel and who he is singling out?

Real stretch there, eh?

No observant Christian believes Jesus, the man, was anything more than a Jew of the House of David, whose earthly father, Joseph, was a skilled craftsman. By the standards of the day, Jesus wasn’t raised in poverty and had enough education to converse on an intelligent level with the teachers inside the Temple in Jerusalem (Luke 2:43-47).

Jesus didn’t come to be a politician so He certainly wasn’t there to preach socialism. He also wasn’t there to overturn Jewish law. Jesus was all about individual responsibility – to oneself, one’s family and one’s community.

You know, those White Supremacist Principles that DiAngelo and other Wokeistanians want destroyed.

It’s not like Gerson has done much more than beat the NeverTrumper drum in an attempt to hang on any kind of relevancy, but this verbal anti-Christian Molotov-cocktail in a time of rising violence against churches is beyond the pale.

And I’m not talking about Gerson’s pallor.

featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock, standard license.