“(H)e was a man of simple appearance, mature age, black-skinned (melagchrous), three cubits tall, hunchbacked, prognathous (lit. ‘with a long face’ [macroprosopos]), a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose … with curly hair, but having a line in the middle of the head (like) the Nazaraeans, with an undeveloped beard.”

The famous first century writer Josephus (37-100 A.D.) penned the earliest non-biblical testimony of whom we now call Jesus. Josephus was a (black) Jew who lived around the time of the Messiah and he reportedly had access to official Roman records in which he based his information and his work from. In his work, “the human form of Jesus and his wonderful works”, Josephus discussed the true color of the messiah being black. However, his texts were passed through the hands of (white) European christian leaders who altered them to hide the truth about the messiah and who is people were. Fortunately, however, Biblical scholar Robert Eisler in a classic 1931 study of “Josephus’s Testimony” was able to reconstruct the unaltered testimony based on a newly-discovered Old Russian translation that preserved the original Greek text. According to Eisler’s reconstruction, the oldest non-Biblical description of Jesus read as follows:

“At that time also there appeared a certain man of magic power … if it be meet to call him a man, [whose name is Jesus], whom [certain] Greeks call a son of [a] God, but his disciples [call] the true prophet … he was a man of simple appearance, mature age, black-skinned (melagchrous), short growth, three cubits tall, hunchbacked, prognathous (lit. ‘with a long face’ [macroprosopos]), a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose … with scanty [curly] hair, but having a line in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazaraeans, with an undeveloped beard.”

This short, black-skinned, mature, hunchbacked Jesus with a unibrow, short curly hair and undeveloped beard bears no resemblance to the Jesus Christ taken for granted today by most of the Christian world: the tall, long haired, long bearded, white-skinned and blue eyed Son of God. Yet, this earliest textual record matches well the earliest iconographic evidence. The earliest visual depiction of Jesus is a painting that was found in 1921 on a wall of the baptismal chamber of the house-church at Dura Europos, Syria and dated around 235 A.D. This picture of Jesus is called “Healing the Paralytic Man” (Mark 2:1-12) and displays him as being short and dark-skinned with a small curly afro. This description has now been supported by the new science of forensic anthropology. (Source)