Question presented to me by my son

[teddyruxpin]

What would be the default skin color (created condition)?

Chartreuse.

Just kidding.

Seriously though, it’s like asking if they had bellybuttons, neither provable or important

I would guess that it wasn’t terribly dark, because by Noah’s time, his son Ham(m) was cursed with dark skin. I’d imagine if they were already dark that wouldn’t be a very noticeable curse. It’d be like cursing me to being short or left-handed, y’know?

That’s inference though, since a lot could have happened in the 8 generations between Adam and Noah (Adam->Seth->Enos->Cainan->Mehalaleel->Jared->Enoch->Methuselah->Lamech->Noah). Those were of Adam’s line, but there’s a wife in each generation, and who knows what she was. The Book of Jubilees gives wives for the Sethite line to Noah, but that’s not canonical, so take that for what it’s worth. For what it’s worth though, the names of those wives all seem to be Hebrew in origin (e.g. Mualaleth “God glorified” or Baraka was the daughter of Râsûjâl so that’s Hebrew). I think it’s safe to say they weren’t so dark as to make a curse of dark skin unnoticeable, but I doubt they were lily white either

That help?

 

[DebChris]

God makes people in all different colors. Maybe the reason the color of different races is never mentioned is because it simply is not important.

 

[Allen537]

I think that it’s important to remember that when we look at relgious art, we are looking at an important biblical or historical event through the interpretation of the artist. For example, when we look at a picture of the Blessed Virgin here in the United States, she typically looks like another American woman. The same is true if you go to Latin America, Africa, or Asia. As I think we all know,the Blessed Virgin, if she were to have an accurate painting done of her, she would look like a Jewish girl, not like an Irish/English/German woman. Not that these variations in painting the Blessed Mother are bad, they just show a certain cultural influence of the artist. The same is also true when we look at pictures of Adam and Eve in the garden. We always see Eve with an apple in her hand. When we see this we know two things: The Scriptures do not specify what the fruit from the tree was; and we aslo know that apples are not native to the middle east. So here we see another artist showing his/her european influence in the painting by placing an apple in her hand.

Not to say that these things are bad, but it’s important to remember that when we see a painting, it isn’t exactly a photo from that time period

 

[mlchance]

I think Adam was likely black, since the oldest known human remains is lucy in africa. White skin is simply the absecence of mellon which could be simply an adaptation to meet evniroment.

You could be right about Adam’s skin color, but:

1. Lucy is not the remains of a human. She was a hominid of the species Australopithecus afarensis.
2. She is not the oldest known hominid any more.
3. There is no known direct link between Lucy’s branch of the hominid tree and modern Homo sapiens.

– Mark L. Chance.

 

[cpayne]

Well they had to be white. Every picture I"ve seen of them shows they were white.

Come to think of it, they seemed to be of Western European descent… hmmmmmmmm…

After all, Moses looked like Charlton Heston.

 

[Evan]

Skin color was so unimportant that in the list of popes we don’t know which ones were black, semitic, or white. But it’s fairly certain that there were popes with these characteristics. (EG Peter was semitic, Benedict XVI is white).

Only today do we care because we have a background of mistreating people based on color. So color became important.

If we mistreated people based on height, we would be asking how tall were Adam and Eve, why are there no popes that were under 5’ tall?

 

[DebChris]

Skin color was so unimportant that in the list of popes we don’t know which ones were black, semitic, or white. But it’s fairly certain that there were popes with these characteristics. (EG Peter was semitic, Benedict XVI is white).

Only today do we care because we have a background of mistreating people based on color. So color became important.

If we mistreated people based on height, we would be asking how tall were Adam and Eve, why are there no popes that were under 5’ tall?

I don’t remember the names of the popes. I used to pick up books about the saints that were in the vestibule of the military chapel. I remember reading one about 4 different Black popes.
Color is irrelevant. Character is what matters.