One of these statements is true. The other three are dubious or meaningless. I will discuss each one of these assertions in turn, and then discuss whether the idea behind the idea holds any weight at all. But first I will talk about the factual case for each of these four statements.
To truly settle any of these questions, of course, would take a degree of expertise in archeology, history, and several different ancient Languages. Lacking these skills, I can point out some of the more obvious holes using only a slight bit of common knowledge.
So, in order:
- Black. Was Jesus Black? If you see the world in terms of black and white, and in the late 20th century world view that history is the progression of the conquering white hordes against the helpless darker hued people of the world, you could say that Jesus was black. Jesus was not a European. But Jesus was not a sub-saharan African. While the Jewish people were not the same culturally or racially as the Roman or Greek peoples (and, of course, were sometimes extremely antagonistic to them), they were integrated into the Mediteranean world much closer than they were into the African world. So to say Jesus is black may be a dubious statement, or it may be a meaningless statement. "Black", as a racial and cultural identity, was created in the last few hundred years, as a result of the slave trade in North and South America. Jesus' possible darker skin tone does not mean he would share cultural features relating to events that happened thousands of years later.
- Gay. Possibly the most baseless assertion, and quite possibly the one that depends the most on modern people projecting our modern concerns and attitudes into the past. While we have much writing on the views of the Roman, Greek and Jewish people's views on sex, there was not always a consistent attitude; and we can't always tell what the common people's attitude towards sex was. I think that most people would agree on this: that the Romans and Greeks had different attitudes towards homosexuality than we did, and in general were fairly permissive towards homosexuality. Jewish society was in general, especially in the prophetic tradition very much less inclined to sensuality. However, Jewish society, to this day, does not look upon celibacy as a positive thing. The questions about Jesus' sexuality, then, if they were to take a more scholarly tone, would be as to why and where Jesus, his followers, and later Christianity split from the Jewish tradition on this matter. However, just as there was no "black" people in the ancient world, there was no "gay" people. Homosexuality wouldn't be invented for another 1800 years, or so. So I think taking dubious evidence to assert something meaningless means this second item is doubly struck down.
- Hippie . This is, by far, the most meaningless assertion. What, exactly, constitutes a hippie? I know many people who in some way or another share traits that might be attributed to hippies, although few would describe themselves as such. Some people may look at to the hippie movement as exemplars of simple, upright living, concerned more with spiritual matters than the rules of society. Others may see hippies as a bunch of self-indulgent, self-righteous losers passed out on a pile of beanbags with their hands in a bag of Doritoes. The truth may lie somewhere in between, but I can say that what may have been called a hippie in London in 1967, in San Francisco in 1968, and in New York City in 1969 would have been three very different people. To project this amorphous subcultural label, only valid for the past thirty or forty years in parts of the Western World, two thousand years into the past, is meaningless. For the sake of argument, Jesus believed in a communal society that set itself against the dominant society. Does that make Jesus a hippie? Maybe, but if we say Jesus is a hippy for those reasons, maybe Jesus was a Juggalo.
- Jew Jesus was most definitely a Jew. No argument there.
So, having shown that most of these statements as unsupported, or more importantly, as meaningless, I will state the statement that was trying to made in the original: Jesus was not a member of the dominant culture of the time, and would probably not fit in in the dominant culture of the present day. This radical idea has already occurred to others. The problem that Euopean culture has been trying to wrestle with, with not a terribly good rate of success, for about 1500 years now, is the fact that they are trying to base a solar culture on a lunar culture. Roman society, and the European culture that followed them, used a solar calendar. Jewish society followed a lunar calendar. This is more telling then it might seem: in the natural world, the moon reflects the sun, but in the world of culture, it often goes the other way. The bright, outgoing world of European culture, whether in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, or in the form of modern day secular humanism, knows that its promise of supremacy relies on what is hidden. As the Solar reflects the Lunar, Being reflects Non-Being. To say that Jesus was a modern category of outsider may be inaccurate, but to say that the fact that European society has based itself on a man who is not a European, and that that same society cruelly murdered, is all too true. This is something that is again and again impossible to integrate.