What Ethnicity Was Jesus? (Uncovering His Nationality and Race)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Questions about Jesus’ ethnicity, race, and nationality have intrigued people for centuries. Since the meanings behind these categories have evolved over time, and since Jesus lived in a very different historical and cultural context from our own, the task of defining his identity can be more complicated than it might seem. What nationality was Jesus?

In this article, I'll answer that question while explaining the terms ethnicity, race, and nationality as they relate to Jesus and attempt to clarify the cultural and political aspects of his identity. By examining the historical context of Jesus' life, we can gain a deeper understanding of who he was, both in his time and in our modern imagination.

Definitions: Ethnicity, Race, and Nationality

Let’s first examine three categories often used to classify the identities of human beings. The first of these is ethnicity. The American Psychological Association gives a good definition of this term:

It’s important to note, then, that ethnicity has little to do with physical traits and everything to do with a shared culture and history, according to this definition. When we define Jesus’ ethnicity, we will see that there is plenty of available information on his culture, which makes it easy to define his ethnic identity.

Race is a trickier category, not least because, since its invention in the 16th century, people have often used it to denigrate and mistreat others based on arbitrary judgments of perceived physical characteristics (i.e., racism). The definition from the American Psychological Association is, again, helpful:

Note that this definition includes the way modern humans have often used the notion of race as a justification for denying power or rights to various groups of people they deemed inferior. Today, race is often thought to be an invalid idea since it is based on perceptions of biology which have no basis in science. In fact, in an article entitled “We Should Abandon “Race” as a Biological Category in Biomedical Research,” Wolfgang Umek and Barbara Fischer argue that

Nationality, the last of our three terms, is simply the legal status of being a citizen of a particular nation-state. Nation-states are a modern invention. Many historians point to France after the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century as the first nation-state. Others say it was the English Commonwealth, established in 1649, Regardless, it goes without saying that in the 1st-century Mediterranean world Jesus lived in, there were no nation-states, and therefore, no nationalities.

Having defined these categories, we can now look into how they do — or don't— fit Jesus.

What Was Jesus’ Ethnicity?

If ethnicity is a category based primarily on shared culture, we need to examine evidence for Jesus’ cultural identity. Fortunately, the Gospels provide us with plenty of data on this. As the well-known scholar Paula Frederikson says, “What astonishes me when I read the stories about Jesus in the New Testament, is how completely embedded he is in this first-century... Jewish world of religious practice and piety.”

Jesus was from the northern region of Palestine known as Galilee and did most of his preaching there. In “The Archeology of Roman Palestine,” Mark Alan Chancey and Adam Lowry Porter note that archaeological evidence from Galilee in Jesus’ time shows a predominantly Jewish population. This evidence includes many ritual baths or mikveh for purity, as well as proof of widespread Jewish burial practices all over the region.

In addition, the New Testament gives us further evidence of Jesus’ Jewish ethnicity. He was circumcised eight days after his birth and then presented in the Temple, according to Luke 2:21-22. Furthermore, in the Gospels, Jesus frequently goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath (Matt 12:9, Mark 1:21, Luke 4:16, John 6:59). His disciples, Galileans like himself, were all Jewish as well, and Jesus spoke Aramaic, the language of most Jews in Palestine. Jesus went to Jerusalem for major festivals such as Passover (Mark 10:32-33, Matt 26:17-18), and while he was there, he and his disciples went into the Temple where they were under the authority of the priests. As Shaye I.D. Cohen says,

What was Jesus’ ethnicity? From the evidence of Jesus’ cultural background and activities, there is zero doubt: Jesus was ethnically Jewish.

What Race Was Jesus?

As I wrote above, race is a suspect category. In fact, I agree with the biologists I quoted above that, given its history and the nefarious uses it has been put to in the modern world, it should probably be retired.

Additionally, since the notion of race is based on judgments of perceived physical characteristics, we are actually at a loss anyway; while people have created visual representations of Jesus for centuries, we actually have no idea what he really looked like. Anyone who has read the Gospels notes that there are no physical descriptions of Jesus.

Historian Joan E. Taylor, using early texts and archeological evidence, has determined that Jesus was likely a fairly short man (by modern standards) with dark skin. Why, then, have depictions of his appearance varied so much, with some modern paintings showing a light-skinned, blond, blue-eyed Jesus, for instance? The answer reinforces the problematic nature of the concept of race.

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In The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000, Colin Kidd writes that in the 19th century, some biblical scholars began to theorize that Jesus was not Jewish. The basis for this judgment was antisemitism: an amazing, wise person such as Jesus could not have belonged to an inferior race such as the Jews.

For example, in her book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Susannah Heschel notes that 19th-century scholar Ernest Renan portrayed Jesus as being transformed from a Jew into an Aryan. Renan said Jesus had been “purified from any Jewish traits.” This idea would unfortunately develop further in Europe and the United States in the years to come.

In acknowledging the troubled past of the concept of race, I don’t think it’s necessary or appropriate to answer the question of Jesus’ race.

What Nationality Was Jesus?

According to our definition above, nationality means legally belonging to a political entity — a nation-state — that was invented sometime between the 17th and 18th centuries. In one sense then, it’s illogical to ask what Jesus’ nationality was. With no nation-states, no one had a nationality.

However, as an ethnic Jew, Jesus did belong to a people. This is signified in the New Testament by the Greek word ethnos, the root of our word “ethnicity.” Sometimes, ethnos in the Bible means “Gentiles,” people who have their own group identities but are not Jewish. An example of this is Matthew 6:32, where Jesus is talking to a Jewish audience about why they shouldn’t worry about what they will eat, drink, or wear. Why? “For it is the Gentiles (ta ethne) who seek all these things.” In this case, an ethnos is simply a people who are not Jews like Jesus and his audience.

Other times, though, the word ethnos is translated into English as “nations.” We see this in Mark 13:10, when Jesus says “And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations (ta ethne).” Don’t be fooled by the translation, though. While the word “nation” is used, it doesn’t mean nation-state.

A synonym for “nation” in this ancient sense could have been as simple as “group” or “tribe.” In terms of identity, though, ancient people also believed that everyone who was a member of a specific ethnos came from a common mythical ancestor or ancestors. Romans, for example, believed they derived from Romulus and Remus, while Jews believed that they came from Abraham.

While Palestine was not a nation-state —  it had no constitution or enforced borders, for example – it was a nation, a people. In Remembering Abraham: Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible, Ronald Hendel clarifies this, writing about “the ways that Israel constructed its cultural identity in relation to its neighbors, and how its cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries were contested and reinterpreted in various biblical texts.” In other words, the nation of Israel was not defined by political borders as our nations are, but by culture, religion, and ethnicity.

By this measure, Jesus, as a member of the Jewish people culturally and religiously, was Jewish. But then another question arises: was Jesus a Hebrew? This question assumes a difference between the words Jewish and Hebrew.

Was Jesus Hebrew?

The word Hebrew comes from the Hebrew word ivri. There is no uniform scholarly consensus on the meaning of this word in its context in the book of Genesis, but Genesis 14:13 calls Abraham “the Hebrew” (Ha’Ivri) meaning “from the other side of the Euphrates River.” Later rabbinic interpretation would take this to mean that Abraham stood apart from his original people, creating a new nation, the Hebrews.

So was Jesus Jewish? Yes. But since he, like his contemporaries, believed he had a common ancestor with other Jews, he could also be called a Hebrew.

Conclusion

The words ethnicity, race, and nationality are often used interchangeably. However, they are not the same. Ethnicity denotes primarily a common culture, which can, of course, include such factors as language, food, and religion, among others. Race is a category invented in the 17th century and categorizes people by perceived physical traits. It has often been used to catalog people deemed inferior and, scientifically, it has little validity. Nationality, on the other hand, simply means citizenship in a nation-state, something that was invented no earlier than the 17th century as well.

For these reasons, the easiest way to define Jesus’ identity is ethnically. What ethnicity was Jesus? He was an ethnic Jew. He was raised in a Jewish part of the world, he spoke Aramaic, the language of most Jews in the 1st century, and participated in the religion and culture of the Jews around him.

Since the notion of race has largely been discredited in the modern world, defining Jesus’ race seems unnecessary or even harmful. While at least one historian has written of what Jesus might have looked like based on his geography and ethnicity, there is no way to know for certain. However, beginning in the 19th century, some scholars asserted improbably that Jesus was somehow not Jewish. This stemmed from antisemitism and an unwillingness to identify such a revered person with a hated racial group.

Nation-states did not exist in Jesus’ time, so, essentially, Jesus did not have a nationality as we define it today. However, he did belong to an ethnos, a “nation” which corresponds in many ways to our modern notion of ethnicity in that it is culturally based. In the ancient world, a nation was a people with a shared culture, religion, and mythical heritage.