The New Testament is remarkably clear about Christ’s heritage. He was Jewish. Nevertheless, Christianity Today, a leftist magazine that is busy reworking Christianity to conform to cultural Marxism, chose Christmas to announce that, rather than being Jewish (which is a bad thing on the left), Christ is “Asian.” There’s nothing wrong with being Asian, of course, but there is something very wrong with lying about the Bible’s clear and religiously relevant history.

According to the Gospels, Jesus descended from the House of David. David, in turn, was the King of Israel around the 10th or 11th centuries B.C. (A reminder, yet again, of the Jews’ non-stop ties to the land of Israel.) This is a purely Jewish lineage.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which was then part of the Roman Empire, the family having been forced to travel there to fulfill Caesar Augustus’s census requirements. The family had come from Nazareth and returned there after Jesus’s birth. Bethlehem is a Hebrew word meaning “House of Bread.” Nazareth is a Hebrew word meaning a “watchtower.” Jesus spent his entire life in Judea. (The Romans didn’t name it “Palestine” until the 2nd century A.D., after crushing the Shimon Bar Kokhba revolt.)

Nothing in Jesus’s life had anything to do with any area other than the land that had been the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Judea, and then, as noted, when Jesus was born, the Roman colony of Judea.

The problem for leftists this year is that they have decided that Israel is a pariah nation and the Jews an evil people. To cope with that, the leftist minds at Christianity Today have decided to rewrite the Bible…just a little bit. According to them, and I quote, “Jesus was born in Asia. He was Asian.”  

Given Jesus’s alleged Asian DNA (which presumably means anything from India to China, Japan, Malaya, Korea, or any other of the Asian subcontinent nations), Victoria Emily Jones, who wrote this misbegotten, ahistorical, not to say blasphemous essay, the failure to understand Jesus’s “Asian” heritage led generations of Europeans to keep painting him as a white guy.

Jones acknowledges that some stodgy people may be caught up in the whole “historicity” shtick, but they should be ignored:

Some may object to depicting Jesus as anything other than a brown male born into a Jewish family in Bethlehem of Judea in the first century, believing that doing so undermines his historicity. But Christian artists who tackle the subject of the Incarnation are often aiming not at historical realism but at theological meaning.

Of course, there is some truth to Jones’s point that artists from different cultures haven’t been too concerned with Jesus’s genetic lineage. Instead, because of Christ’s immanence and divinity, and going back to times when people’s knowledge of the world was very insular, they’ve painted Christ to look just like them. The Europeans created a blue-eyed blonde, Africans drew a black man and, as the essay makes clear, Asian Christians created a man who looked like them.

None of that is wrong.

What is wrong is to change the Bible to suit your political goals, especially because doing so mutates a fundamentally important fact about Jesus’s identity:

Blasphemy.

Jesus is a Jew. It’s necessary for our salvation that he is a son of David, from the tribe of Judah, and born in Bethlehem.

Stop this nonsense.

He isn’t European, Asian, Palestinian or black.

He’s a Jew—the king of the Jews and therefore the saviour of the world.

— Samuel Sey (@SlowToWrite) December 25, 2023

It’s just more evidence, as if one needs it, that for leftists, the real Bible is an amalgam of Karl Marx and all the cultural Marxist ideas generated in the 20th century that are reaching fruition in the 21st. And with those ideas as their actual theology, even the Bible must bend.

Image: Jan van Eyck’s reverential Madonna and Child, in which the Madonna is a wealthy, early-15th-century woman from Bruges, and Jesus is a white-skinned, blonde baby.