A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn’t call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don’t speak Arabic.

Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it’s important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of “white genes” to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don’t think it’s a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That’s not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.

The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it’s totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.

Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews.

Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.

So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.

Well what is a mental illness? Historically you had an illness if something caused you to not function properly at the things society expected you to function in. You can’t remember things clearly anymore and it affects your career or social life? You now are considered to have the mental illness of dementia. Are you just slightly forgetful but can still function fine? You are not ill, instead that forgetfulness is just a character trait of yours. And it goes on like this. Back in the day the expectations to marry the opposite sex and have children was huge so being gay was considered a mental illness. Today it’s more accepted and being gay is just part of who you are (in some places at least). And it goes on like this.

I think not much has changed in this regard. If a certain mental affliction doesn’t affect your social or work life in a meaningful way it’s not really considered an illness. So if you take this as a definition of being mentally healthy there are certainly lots of people out there who have no affliction which seriously hurt their current social or work life. However this of course doesn’t mean that these people are completely free from any mental affliction, it just means these mental afflictions are not considered serious in today’s society.

And these things change all the time as society’s expectations change. Back in the day when only a small minority could read and write there was not a diagnosis for dyslexia. Now that reading ability is expected of everyone in today’s society we have defined dyslexia. As new societal expectations come and go the list of diagnosable illnesses will certainly have things getting removed and added. Let’s say theoretically some people can’t handle zero gravity, today this is not relevant for the vast majority of people so there is not any diagnosis for such an illness. But if more and more people are expected to live in zero G then such a diagnosis would be sure to be defined if such an affliction exists.

Is this definition reasonable? Well that’s a completely different question. But as I see it this is how it is generally defined right now.