Aside from agreeing with TC, I shall express my opinion of this thread, the link provided, as well as a few other points of interest not necessarily linked to the initial post.
First, I was not sure, initially, whether to accept either the threads beginning, or the link provided, as being a valid attempt at an honest presentation, or to simply dismiss them as being poor examples of someones' sense of humor(or lack thereof).
Second, (and this goes for every other site, place, etc. that portrays a picture of Jesus), is it simply racial bias, or just plain ignorance, that Jesus is portrayed as a long haired caucasian? Near as I can tell, based upon descriptions of Him in scripture, He would have had a darker complexion and would have sported short curly hair.
That His mother is also portrayed as a fair skinned caucasian should be no surprise, as her portrayal is nothing more than an extension of the pagan goddess Semiramis, who was known by many other names. Some common names applied to the pagan goddess Semiramis included:
Aphrodite, Venus, Artemis, Diana, Athena, Minerva, Demeter, Ceres, Gaea, Terra, Fortuna, Hera, Juno, Hestia, Vesta, Rhea, Ops, and many others, far too numerous to mention here.
The worship of Mary and the god-incarnate Jesus originated with the pagan worship of Semiramis and her god-incarnate son. Numerous Babylonian monuments depict the goddess-mother Semiramis with her son in arms. The image of the mother and child was so firmly entrenched in the pagan mind that when Christianity appeared on the scene these pagan statues and paintings were merely renamed and worshiped as the virgin Mary and her god-incarnate son Jesus.
Worship of mother and child spread from Babylon to the ends of the earth, but were called different names in the languages of the various counties where their worship appeared. The ancient Germans worshipped the virgin Hertha with the child in the arms of his mother. The Scandinavians called her Disa pictured with her child. In Egypt, the mother and her child were worshiped as Isis with the infant Osiris or Horus seated on his mother's lap. In India, the mother and child were called Devaki and Krishna, and also Isi and Iswara as they are worshiped to this day.
In Asia, they were known as Cybele and Deoius; in pagan Rome, as Fortuna and Jupiter-Puer, or the boy Jupiter; in Greece, as Ceres, the great mother with babe at her breast, or as Irene, the goddess of peace, with the boy Plutus in her arms. Even in Tibet, China, and Japan, Jesuit missionaries were astonished to find the Roman counterpart of Madonna and child. Shing Moo, the holy mother in China was portrayed with a child in her arms and a glory around her.
Semiramis was worshiped in Ephesus as the pagan fertility goddess DIANA who represented the generative powers of nature. She was referred to as a fertility goddess because she mothered all the numerous pagan gods representing the god-incarnate Nimrod. Diana was pictured with numerous teats so that she could nurse all the pagan gods, and she wore a tower-shaped crown symbolizing the Babylonian tower of Babel.
Whether the commonly known portrayals of Jesus are rooted in paganism or not is still debated by many. One fact that any reasonable person would find it most difficult to defend against is that "Jesus' appearance was not that of a white guy who would have blended in nicely with the culture in America during the 1960's but would have stood out like an orange in an banana tree in 1st century Jerusalem."
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"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! FEED YOUR BRAIN!".....................Jet
"The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation. This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable.
It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow
™ Version 4.2
