We have no record of Jesus ever interacting with someone who looks like me. He and all those around him were people of color.
But I come from Northern European heritage. By racial identification, I am classified as white/Caucasian. In those early days with Jesus, folks with my skin tone, hair and eye color were classified clearly: Barbarians.
The term came from Greek and Roman interactions with Germanic tribes whose various languages sounded to the sophisticated Greco-Romans as though they were babbling “bar-bar-bar-bar … .” In other words, this label was not a compliment. And the identification included not only linguistic prejudice but also cultural condemnations.
David Jordan
The social structure of these Germanic tribes seemed to the civilized world of imperial Rome as a chaotic, disorganized mess. These lands that later would be classified as Northern Europe and the British Isles were understood to be filled with warriors of decent training and frightening strength; but they were also considered incapable of rational thought or ordered social structure.
Even the Pentecost experience of Acts 2 includes a verbal map of only areas in and around the Middle East. Maybe there were a few blond-haired, blued-eyed folk on Crete or somewhere in Pontus, Pamphylia or Cappadocia. But nowhere with Jesus or in Acts do we hear about my genetic predecessors in Northern Europe being included in the fellowship.
My ancestral people were still barbarians and were likely unaware of how culturally obtuse they were considered.
And the first Gentile convert? Not my people. He was, like Jesus, a person of color. He was a Black man from an African country called Ethiopia, a land rich with tradition and in the opposite direction of white folks.
So this first non-Jewish or Samaritan convert in Acts 8 is a man of dark skin, a eunuch who goes on his way rejoicing following his baptism in the Mediterranean Sea.
Gladly for folks like me, God inspires Paul the Apostle. And he follows the early trajectory set by Jesus. In Colossians 3:11, he beautifully expands the circle: “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.”
“Biblically, we are latecomers to the kingdom. Humility should be in order.”
Finally, my barbarian ancestors get called into fellowship with the other believers. For this, I and those with my skin tone, eye color and ethnic background can and should be thankful. The last thing we need to be is arrogant and exclusive. Biblically, we are latecomers to the kingdom. Humility should be in order.
This is where the strange paradox of a white supremacy oozes out of the odd confluence of unexpected social factors. Roughly 14 centuries after people of color gathered with Jesus, the myth followed some pretty hard years for white people. Plagues, lots of mud, horrible sanitation, flimsy construction and increasingly meager crops due to poor farming methods are just a few of the miserable conditions my forebears wallowed in for centuries.
But all that begins to change in the late 1400s. Detailed in Jerrod Diamond’s Germs, Guns and Steel, Spanish conquistadors, Portuguese sailors and later English, Dutch, French and German colonial soldiers stumbled upon the fortunate discovery of new land, new germs (for native people unaccustomed to unsanitary European living conditions), new gun and weapon technology, and new metal (steel).
Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, further illustrates the paradox: New forms of finance evolved in Amsterdam offering new supplies of monetary power for expanded armies and weaponry. Each developed not out of cognitive brilliance or cultural superiority, but rather from the rapacious, tormenting need to pay for and fight endless wars in Europe.
In other words, superior weapons, better metal, more potent germs and sophisticated monetary policy resulted from cultural dysfunction and the need to pound others into submission or be overrun. The tribal anguish and far-reaching warrior culture that ravaged Europe for centuries only abated temporarily as these largely white folks of the north found other outlets for their savagery.
So white supremacy, this odd, sad myth so vigorously reasserting itself through various channels, exists in a make-believe world uncomfortably wedged into our social history as some conjured past. Let’s simply remember Colossians 3, Acts 2 and Acts 8. They remind us of the fascinating journey of a multi-ethnic faith. Some ancestors got there sooner than others. But they were to see themselves and the gene pool that would be white people on equal footing for the long run.
Thank goodness for biblical diversity, equity and inclusion.
David Jordan serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga.