The Jewish Flesh at the Right Hand of God

In the past few years, both Islamist and Western activist groups have said over and over again that Jesus of Nazareth was “Palestinian.” This claim is not based on new historical evidence, but on current political needs. It projects a modern national identity backward onto the first century in order to recruit Jesus into a present-day anti-Israel narrative. The move depends on a series of confusions—between ancient geography and modern nationalism, between theology and activism, and between moral concern and historical truth. Its purpose is not merely rhetorical. It is theological. By recasting Jesus as Palestinian, this discourse functions to detach him from the Jewish people and to weaken the Church’s historic confession of Israel’s enduring significance.

It is necessary to distinguish intention from effect. Some deploy this language deliberately, aware of what it accomplishes. Some people say it again and again without thinking, thinking it’s a safe way to set the record straight or show support. But the effects of theology don’t depend on what you mean to do. The statement, despite its seemingly innocuous reference, surpasses historical context and engages with Christology, implicitly interrogating whether Jesus’ Jewish identity was essential or merely incidental—permanent or transient.

Not only is it wrong to say that Jesus was Palestinian, but it also denies who Jesus Christ is in history, theology, and the sacraments. The argument goes beyond Bethlehem and Golgotha. It moves forward into resurrection and ascension. What is at stake is whether Jesus’ identity remained unchanged after Easter or was subtly modified to fulfill contemporary ideological objectives. The inquiry pertains not solely to the identity of Jesus, but to his enduring essence.

This argument works only if a few theological ideas are quietly added in. It presupposes that bodies are ultimately inconsequential, that resurrection eradicates individuality, and that election serves as a transient mechanism rather than a lasting endowment. It presumes a post-ethnic eschatology in which covenantal identities are liabilities to be shed rather than glories to be transfigured. In effect, it relies on a form of practical docetism: Jesus may have had a body, but that body cannot be allowed to retain a concrete identity once it becomes inconvenient.

Christian orthodoxy rejects these assumptions outright. Jesus Christ is not a symbol, not an idea, not a moral exemplar, and not a political avatar. He is the eternal Son who assumed human nature without remainder. He was incarnate as a Jew, crucified as a Jew, raised as the same Jesus, and ascended without shedding his embodied identity. As the Apostles’ Creed confesses, he “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty”—a confession the Church has consistently understood as referring to the risen Lord in the same body that was born of Mary and glorified, not discarded.

Scripture does not inventory every marker of resurrection identity, but it insists relentlessly on continuity. Jesus, who has risen from the dead, can be seen, can eat, can talk, and can ask Thomas to touch his wounds. Resurrection does not obliterate history; rather, it transforms it. The Jesus who rises is the same Jesus who was circumcised on the eighth day, taught in synagogues, and shaped by Israel’s prayers and Scriptures. The New Testament does not provide justification for regarding his Jewish identity as expendable.

This continuity has unavoidable effects. The body that rules in heaven is not a generic human body that has lost its covenantal meaning in order to be universal. It is the body of Israel’s Messiah, marked by election. The resurrection did not make Jesus less Jewish. By putting Israel’s Messiah on the throne, it made salvation available to everyone. The New Testament makes it clear that the promises to Israel are not canceled by Christ; they are confirmed by him.

Here, clarity is very important. Christian universality does not contend with Jewish particularity; it is contingent upon it. God saves the nations by keeping elections, not by getting rid of them. Israel’s Messiah becomes the Savior of the world by being Israel’s Messiah, not by stopping to be one. Erasure does not bring about redemption; it merely replaces it. The gospel does not recognize salvation apart from covenant.

The alternative logic—that Jewish particularity was a temporary vessel discarded once salvation was achieved—is not Christian theology. It is supersessionism disguised as spiritual maturity. It assumes that Jewishness belongs to the fallen order and must be shed in glory. Scripture refuses this logic. The risen Christ still bears the wounds of crucifixion. His scars are not healed away. If the marks of suffering endure in glory, there is no biblical or theological reason to suppose that covenantal identity evaporates.

This is why the discourse of John 6 is so decisive. Jesus does not invite disciples into a vague spiritual association. He insists on flesh and blood: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Whether read directly as Eucharistic or as the realism of union with Christ enacted in the Eucharist, the passage refuses a purely spiritualized Jesus. The reaction of the disciples confirms the point. Many walk away because the claim is too concrete, too embodied, too demanding.

Paul presses the same claim without mitigation. “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” Participation—koinonia—is the operative word. The Church does not commune with an abstract Logos or a de-ethnicized Christ. It communes with the living Jesus as he is.

Here the scandal becomes unavoidable. The body and blood in which Christians participate are the body and blood of a Jewish man. This is not incidental. It is not symbolic in a detachable sense. It is not theologically negotiable. There is no Christianity that bypasses Israel’s flesh and no sacrament that abstracts Jesus from his people. To receive Christ is to receive him whole.

This remains a hard saying for many Gentiles, as it always has been. The temptation to universalize Jesus by detaching him from Jewish covenant, Jewish history, and Jewish destiny is ancient. Paul talks about this temptation in Romans 11 and makes it clear that he doesn’t like it. The Gentile Church does not supplant Israel; it is integrated into Israel’s olive tree. To brag about the root is to not understand grace or election.

The modern saying “Jesus was Palestinian” is a modern version of this old mistake. To be clear, “Palestine” existed as an ancient geographic term, and Roman authorities later renamed the province Syria Palaestina in the second century. But “Palestinian” as a modern national identity is a much later development. The slogan trades on that anachronism, retrojecting modern politics into the first century in order to produce a Jesus who can be mobilized against the Jewish people rather than confessed as Israel’s Messiah.

A Jewish Jesus is inconvenient. He resists ideological conscription. He binds the Church to Israel in ways that disrupt fashionable moral certainties and activist simplicities. To rename Jesus is therefore to reassign allegiance—to move him from the covenantal economy of Scripture into a modern narrative that cannot tolerate the ongoing election of Israel.

But the risen Christ does not cooperate with this project. He reigns as he rose. He remains who he was. As Gerald McDermott has observed, there is a deeper communion at work here—one in which Israel and the Church are joined, not confused and not collapsed, but inseparably bound in God’s redemptive purpose. The Church does not replace Israel; it lives from Israel’s Messiah.

That Messiah did not stop being Jewish when he went up. The risen body of Israel’s Christ sits on the throne of heaven. The Church’s worship is aimed at a Jewish man. When they take Holy Communion, Christians eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus, the Son of God. This is not a political argument that pretends to be theology. It is theology that won’t give in to political pressure.

To confess Christ truthfully means to say who he is: risen, reigning, embodied, and inextricably linked to Israel. The Christ of the Bible, the creeds, and the altar is not the same as any Christ who has lost that identity. He might be more helpful. He might be easier to deal with. But he is not real.

The real Jesus remains where he has always been: faithful to Israel, faithful to the Father, and present to his Church in the irreducible, eternal particularity of Jewish flesh.