Jesus was a Palestinian?

My thoughts on the superimposing of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto the biblical story, the prioritizing of narrative over truth and the dangers of rewriting history.

Did you know that if Mary and Joseph were alive today, that they would need to pass through seven Israeli checkpoints in order to arrive from Nazareth to Bethlehem?

Did you know that Mary was in fact named Maryam and was a poor, young, no doubt terrified Palestinian girl?

Did you know that Jesus was born a refugee in Palestine?

Did you know that Jesus was Palestinian?

As a student of history and of the Christian bible, I must profess that I did not know any of this.

I am a little embarrassed, however, I am prepared to admit that for all these years I have been living in ignorance.

Let me explain:

I understood that Jesus was born around 6BCE. This is partly based on the accepted date of King Herod the Great’s death, 4BCE. The bible relates that Herod sought to kill the newborn child7, therefore establishing Jesus’ birth prior to Herod’s death.

At this time, the land and its people were under occupation. The occupying power was the Roman Empire, which had conquered the land, known by its inhabitants as Judea, in 63BCE.

Though the first recorded use of the term Palestine was by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th Century BCE, a reference to the Philistines, a long-since extinct people who had previously inhabited parts of the coastal plain, the vast majority of sources both before and after Herodotus’ writings, referred to the region as Judea. Pertinently, these sources include those written by the local resident population.

At the time of Jesus’ birth, the land, known by the Romans as ‘the Province of Judea’, was a semi-autonomous vassalage of Rome; in fact, King Herod the Great, whilst holding Roman citizenship was actually of Judean and Nabatean heritage. Rome would extend its control to a system of full occupation following the end of Herod’s son Herod Archelaus’s rule as Tetrarch in 6CE.

Following the Bar Kochba rebellion of the Jews against the Romans, launched in 132CE and put down in 135 or early 136CE. The Romans renamed the province, replacing Judea with the name Syria-Palaestina. One of the first documented uses of the descriptive term ‘Palestinian’ referring to a resident of Palestine, was in the 10th century CE. The first documented use of the term being specifically applied to the Arabs of Palestine was in the late 19th Century.

I am not prepared to accept the falsification of history and denial of basic facts in order to promote one narrative and besmirch another, regardless of who is doing it.

I have no patience for those who hijack Jesus’ identity in order to delegitimize Israel or attack Jews, and likewise, I refuse to fall into line with those who misrepresent reality or deny basic facts whilst purporting to stand up for Israel.

And let me make it very clear, none of this has anything to do with seeking to censure legitimate criticism of Israel. In fact, precisely the opposite is true.

Regarding Israel, like anywhere else, there is much to criticize. Yet when much of this critique involves the mental gymnastics of redefining established terms and concepts, misrepresenting facts and rewriting history, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the line between legitimate and illegitimate criticism, between well-intended critique, and criticism infused with nefarious antisemitic undertones.

All of this ensures that, sadly, legitimate criticism of Israel is often not addressed.

The same is true regarding legitimate critique of the Palestinians, which is often dismissed as Zionist propaganda (normally by people who are unable to explain what Zionism actually is).

The claim that ‘Jesus was a Palestinian born in Palestine’ denies the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. It provides the basis for legitimizing the castigation of Jews as foreign invaders and Israel as a colonialist implant in the Middle East.

Interestingly, many of those rebranding the indigenous Jewish population of 1st century Judea as Palestinian are nonetheless quite happy to place the responsibility for Jesus’ death upon the Jews (who apparently weren’t there).

And it is not only Jews and Israelis who should be concerned. For Christians, Jesus’ divinity is predicated on his Jewish lineage and Jewish prophecy.

The rebranding of Jesus and erasure of his Jewish identity serves to undermine claims to his divinity, a serious ideological affront to Christian theological doctrine. That it is increasingly being promoted by senior members of the church, should be of great concern to anyone who cares about the future of the faith.

Seventy-five years ago, Christians made up over 85% of the population of Bethlehem. Today that number is under 12% and falling.

This is the case across Gaza and the West Bank. There are those who assert that it is Israeli policy that is responsible for this decline. In truth, there are multiple factors, with Israeli policy certainly a factor, and Islamic intolerance and Palestinian illiberalism significant determinants.

The decline in the Palestinian Christian population in these areas began with these territories under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, prior to the Israeli conquest of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, though this decline has accelerated following the establishment of Palestinian Authority control in the territories in the early 1990s. A zoom-out to the wider Middle East shows Christian population decline in the majority of Arab states, with Israel, despite its faults, a notable exception.

When political ideology and narrative are valued more than truth and contextual understanding, Jewish Miriam and Yosef can easily become Palestinians Maryam and Yusuf at an Israeli checkpoint, prevented by Israel from reaching a city that is today, dangerous for Jews to enter and increasingly intolerable for its dwindling Christian minority to live in.

When one of my daughters told me about a bully at her school who belittled another student using words or terms that erased their identity, worth or value, my response was that often, someone who puts another person down does so because deep inside, it is they, themselves, who are questioning their own identity, worth or value.

Many today find themselves in a crisis of identity, providing a fertile environment for bad ideas to flourish.

Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, signifies for many a message of hope and redemption. Hanukkah, commemorating the victory of the Jews over their Seleucid-Greek occupiers in 2nd century BCE Judea is a celebration of light, and of triumph over adversity.

At a time when increasingly, facts are relevant only when convenient and when truth is of secondary importance, the onus is on all of us, on all sides, to choose truth over narrative and demand the same standards of others.

I’d love to hear what you think.