Since when did Jesus suddenly become a Palestinian?

I am not a religious man. Indeed, I am probably about as qualified to deliver a sermon as a sheep is to conduct an orchestra. But one doesn’t have to be a theologian to recognise when history is being asked to perform some rather extraordinary contortions. Or to be changed after over 2000 years.

The latest example is the increasingly confident assertion from many that Jesus was Palestinian.

This isn’t just something found on social media. In September, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, recalled telling the late Queen Elizabeth at the Bradford Literature Festival, “Jesus is our gift to you”. He went on to declare that “the Bible is a Palestinian book”, that “we are the original Christians” and, rather more sweepingly, that “all of them are Palestinians”.

Earlier this year, Palestinian Authority television similarly declared, with “full pride”, that “Jesus is Palestinian”. A PA governor subsequently referred to him as “the Palestinian Messiah”.

There may be a valid point of geography buried somewhere within all this. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, now part of the modern-day Palestinian territories. He lived in a part of the world which has subsequently acquired just a geographical name, that is, Palestine. Nobody disputes any of that.

But geography is not nationality.

Jesus lived in the first century, born into Jewish society and therefore a Jew. He lived under Roman rule in Judea and Galilee. There was no such thing as a Palestinian identity back then. And it cannot, nor should it be, suddenly invented as such. That is a case of making up history to fit a relatively modern-day narrative

The Roman name Syria Palaestina dates from after Jesus’s lifetime. To take a geographical name which later became associated with a modern national identity and apply that national identity to a first-century Jewish man is like suddenly deciding that Julius Caesar must have been Italian because Rome is in Italy. It gets still more curious when we move from Jesus to the Bible.

Yes, the Bible’s stories are deeply rooted in the geographical landscape we now call Israel and Palestine. Yes, Christianity has an extraordinarily long history in the region. Yes, Palestinian Christians are heirs to an ancient Christian tradition and have every right to be proud of it.

But the Bible being set in a geographical region does not make the Bible the product of a modern nation which did not yet exist.

The Hebrew Bible is from the religious and literary traditions of ancient Israel and Judah. The New Testament emerged from the world of first-century Judaism and the earliest Christian movement. To call the Bible a “Palestinian book” in the modern national sense is therefore to take geography and turn it into political ownership.

There is another irony here. Christianity itself has spent centuries trying to come to terms with the uncomfortable fact that Jesus was Jewish. His Jewish identity isn’t an inconvenient footnote to Christianity. It is fundamental to understanding the New Testament.

There is nothing wrong with Palestinian Christians seeing something of themselves in Jesus. There is nothing wrong with depicting Jesus alongside Palestinian suffering. There is a perfectly understandable theological argument that a people experiencing dispossession or persecution can identify with a figure who, in Christian belief, also experienced suffering under an occupying power.

But identification is not identity.

And the same distinction is useful when we hear claims surrounding the hijab. Veiling certainly did not originate with Islam, still less with modern Palestinians. Academic research is quite clear that veiling existed for thousands of years before Islam, across societies including ancient Greece, Persia and the wider Middle East, and was subsequently incorporated into Islamic societies.

There is nothing uniquely Palestinian about the practice.

Indeed, the historical development is considerably more interesting than the political slogan. The Qur’anic terminology and later Islamic interpretations concerning women’s covering developed within early Islamic society, while the broader cultural practice of veiling was inherited from traditions which predated Islam. Scholars have documented how interpretations of the relevant Qur’anic passages developed over subsequent centuries.

So perhaps we should stop asking the wrong question. The question isn’t whether Palestinians have a history. Of course they do. It isn’t whether Palestinian Christians have an ancient Christian heritage. They certainly do. And it isn’t whether Palestinians can legitimately regard Jesus as part of the history and cultural landscape of the place they call home. They can.

The question is what happens when “this happened here” gradually becomes “this therefore belongs to us”, and when modern national identities are projected backwards onto people who lived centuries or millennia before those identities existed. History is not there to every modern political movement can choose any historical fact or event that supports its modern-day narrative the best.

The Bible owes its origin to the lands of the ancient Israelites as well as to those of the wider eastern Mediterranean. Veiling predates Islam by centuries, indeed millennia. All of those statements can simultaneously be true.

What is considerably harder to defend is the proposition that a first-century Jewish man was a Palestinian in the modern national sense, that the Bible is therefore a Palestinian book, or that an ancient and widespread practice such as veiling somehow constitutes a specifically Palestinian invention.

And if one wanted to be very pedantic, it should be remembered that Gaza first appears extensively in the Tanakh as one of the five primary cities of the Philistines. It is famously recorded as the site of Samson’s imprisonment and final death. The region was assigned to the Israelite Tribe of Judah under Joshua, although control alternated over the Millennia.

There was a significant Jewish presence in Gaza for over 3,000 years. There was a history of flourishing communities, sudden expulsions by successive global empires, and subsequent population returns. For millennia, Gaza was a major Jewish political, agricultural, and spiritual area in the region.

The last major Jewish presence in Gaza ended prior to modern times. Following Arab riots in 1929 and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jewish residents were forced to leave or were expelled.

So who is in reality occupying where?

Perhaps the most useful lesson is also the simplest:

We should be very careful about allowing today’s politics to become yesterday’s history. Jesus doesn’t need to be made Palestinian to be relevant to Palestinians. Nor does making him Palestinian make him any more relevant to them.