The New York Times issued a correction on Friday to a opinion piece that labeled Jesus “most likely a Palestinian man.”
Eric V. Copage made the claim in his piece, “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes,” that was published last week on Good Friday.
The article discusses how “a white Jesus is still deeply embedded in the Western story of Christianity,” despite him having lived in the Middle Eastern region.
“As I grew older, I learned that the fair-skinned, blue-eyed depiction of Jesus has for centuries adorned stained glass windows and altars in churches throughout the United States and Europe,” the story originally read, according to a screen grab from Way Back Machine. “But Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.”
It was changed a week later and it no longer has any mention of Palestine.
A statue of Jesus Christ on the cross is pictured during a mass for the celebration of the Last Supper at the Sacre-Coeur Basilica of Montmartre, days after a massive fire devastated large parts of the structure of the gothic Notre-Dame Cathedral, in Paris, France, April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier – RC11D9763B90
“As I grew older, I learned that the fair-skinned, blue-eyed depiction of Jesus has for centuries adorned stained glass windows and altars in churches throughout the United States and Europe,” it now says. “But Jesus, a Jew born in Bethlehem, presumably had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man.”
At the bottom of the article the correction reads: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Jesus’s background. While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem.”