The great scholar Albert Schweitzer once quipped that when surveying the life of Jesus, “we look down the well of history and see our own faces reflected.” In the Western world, everyone wants Jesus to be on their team.
Consider the words of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in the context of the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
“Where was Jesus born?… In Bethlehem, Palestine… Jesus Christ was the first anti-imperialist… So, Jesus was a Palestinian boy… He died as a Palestinian man.”
Maduro is not the first political leader to make that claim. In 2019, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour tweeted: “Jesus was Palestinian of Nazareth and is described in the Quran as being brown copper skinned with wooly hair”, again in the context of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities.
This requires some historical clarification. The word ‘Palestine’ is a derivative of ‘Philistia.’ This was how ancient Greek writers designated the lands of the Philistines. By the time of Jesus, the word was no longer in use. Jesus was born in the kingdom of Judea, ruled by Herod the Great. After Herod’s death, the area where Jesus lived was called Galilee, under the rule of Herod Antipas. He died in Jerusalem, which at the time was the Roman province of Judea. After two bloody upheavals, the Romans renamed that province in the Second Century CE ‘Syria Palestina’, partly to spite the Jews, so as to use the name of one of historical enemies of the Israelites, the Philistines.
To claim that Jesus was a Palestinian is disingenuous. Yes, the town of Bethlehem is located in the current Palestinian territories. But that is irrelevant. A historical figure’s ethnic identity is not defined by the ethnic group that today inhabits the place where that figure was born and lived. If we followed that criterion, we would claim that Saint Paul was Turkish because Tarsus is in present-day Turkey. That is absurd. Saint Paul was a Hellenistic Jew from the 1st Century CE, and he had no cultural affiliation whatsoever with the Turks, who conquered Tarsus in 1359 CE.
Likewise, Jesus was a Jew. It is risky to argue that Jesus was of the same ethnicity and religion as today’s Jews because all populations have undergone many transformations in the past two thousand years. But it can be safely assumed that in terms of ethnicity and religion, Jesus was closer to Israeli Jews than to Palestinian Arabs. His language was Aramaic, somewhat closer to modern Hebrew than to Arabic. His Judaism was not the same type of religion as practiced today by Jews, but it was certainly closer to it than to Islam or for that matter, Christianity.
Yet, it would be unfair to pick on Maduro or Sarsour’s disingenuousness. In fact, there is a long history of attempts to make Jesus a non-Jew. Prior to the diaspora into higher latitudes and intermixing with local European populations, Jews physically resembled their Middle Eastern neighbors. So, it is likely that Jesus had somewhat dark skin, with wooly hair. Yet, most Western artistic depictions of Jesus present him as a white, blue-eyed man, sometimes even blond.
This is somewhat understandable, as artists are given license to portray figures of the past adjusted to artists’ own cultural settings. Apart from representing Jesus as fair-skinned, Medieval painters depicted Jerusalem full of Gothic-like temples. It is very unlikely that those artists really believed that there were Gothic cathedrals in 1st Century Judea; they were simply making artistic statements by incorporating their own cultural experiences into the scenes they were depicting.
Pseudo-historians have had more perverse intentions when trying to make Jesus a non-Jew. For example, Nazis created the “Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” and this institute was adamant on presenting Jesus as an Aryan. As per their narrative, Galilee was populated by Assyrians and Persians, and they were forced to convert to Judaism; Jesus was a secret Aryan, and he was killed by Jews because of his ethnicity.
It is easy to be outraged by Nazis’ distortion of history. But Christians must come to terms with the fact that the “dejudification” of Jesus began in the New Testament itself. In all likelihood, Jesus was a Jewish nationalist who expected an apocalyptic event in which God would overthrow the Romans. Paul also had apocalyptic expectations, but he began to tone down Jesus’ nationalism. In this endeavor, he was at odds with James— Jesus’ own brother— who was as nationalistic as Jesus. Ultimately, Paul prevailed, and gentiles were increasingly incorporated into the Jesus movement.
The Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE and Jews were thoroughly defeated after a bloody rebellion. Christians thus understood that the survival of their movement hinged on dissociating themselves from Jews and seeking Roman favor. This had an effect on the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus—all of which were composed after the destruction of the Temple—, to the point that in John —the latest of the four—, Jesus is constantly at odds with “the Jews,” almost as if he were not one of them.
In any case, for historical accuracy, it matters to know whether or not Jesus was a Jew. But for political purposes, how is Jesus’ identity relevant? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complex one, but surely, the ethnicity or religion of a 1st Century failed apocalyptic prophet can have no bearing on it. In the West, everybody wants Jesus to be on their team because ultimately, he is approached as a divine figure. But that is not what we ought to do. We must approach Jesus as any other mortal historical figure, much as we would do with Julius Caesar, Napoleon or Nelson Mandela.
Jesus was a man of virtues and defects. He had a high sense of justice, but he was also a man of his times, waiting for an apocalypse that never came. Let’s admire and criticise him for what he did, but let’s put him aside when discussing complex 21st Century topics. Jesus was not a Palestinian, but that says absolutely nothing about the right of Palestinians (or Jews) to a homeland.
