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99.99% of the population of the Mediterranean basin at the time Jesus lived were white, almost certainly more given that the trans-Saharan slave trade was a creature of the camel and post dated the Arab conquest of North Africa.

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“White” didn’t exist at that time and the people of the Mediterranean certainly didn’t think of themselves as one homogeneous group. The various peoples had prejudices about each other which only consolidated into a hierarchy when the trans-Atlantic slave trade needed to legally define who couldn’t be property. Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.

> Prejudices by, for example, the English or American against Greeks or Italians lasted into the 20th century.

Which is a bit funny, considering how they asdmired the ancient Greeks and Romans. Why did they consider their culture and statecraft as so ideal, if they considered the people that originated them as so inferior?

From what I’ve read, there was a lot of thought about them having fallen from their ancestors. Some of the eugenics types wrote about this as a cautionary tale about mixing with other races or letting them share power. The reasoning only makes sense if you start with the conclusion and work backwards trying to make it fit.

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