The name figure and her father Joseph are being played by Jewish players, so the approaching biblical film from Netflix, Mary, has received criticism on social media.
The criticisms are based on the argument that Mary and Joseph, and their son Jesus, a Jewish man born in Bethlehem, were, in fact, Palestinian. Some critics of the Netflix casting are concerned that Israeli actors portraying Palestinians as historical figures while Israeli bombs kill contemporary Palestinians.
According to director D J. Caruso, it was important for us to select Israeli actors in order to ensure authenticity while selecting the majority of our main cast members.
So, were Jesus and his parents Palestinian?
Bethlehem is now a city located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Palestinian Territories, about ten kilometers south of Jerusalem. So the short answer is: yes, Jesus was a Palestinian, according to modern geopolitics at least.
One could also argue that he was n’t Jewish and was born in a political vacuum before Palestine.
Paula Fredriksen, a historian of ancient Christianity, made this point in March. She described Jesus ‘ claims as” an act of cultural and political appropriation” in the Washington Post.
A Jewish man from Bethlehem
According to the New Testament, Jesus was born somewhere around 4-6 BCE during the reign of Herod the Great, in Bethlehem. Bethlehem’s location was in an area then known by the Romans as Judea – the land of Judah, then occupied by the Jewish people ( the Judeans ).
The Roman historian Tacitus was the first to mention the existence of Jesus as a Judean, outside of the New Testament, in his Annales ( 115-120 CE).
According to Tacitus, the Christians were to blame for the fire that destroyed Rome in 64 CE, as the Emperor Nero had predicted. They were named, he wrote, after ( Jesus )” Christus”, who was executed by Pontius Pilate when he was governor of” Judea, the first source of the evil”.
According to the Old Testament, the 12 tribes of Israel conquered Canaan ( later to become known as Palestine, then Judea, then Palestine, and then Israel ) around 1200 BCE. In the area south of Jerusalem, the tribe of Judah made its home.
This made Jesus a Judean ( in Hebrew, a Yehudi), from which the English word” Jew” is derived. As a Judean, Jesus was part of the Jewish religious tradition, which was focused on the temple in Jerusalem, known as the second temple.
‘ Palestine’ has a long history
The name” Palestine” for that region also had a long history, though. It first appeared in the writings of Herodotus, a Greek historian, in the fifth century BCE.
He wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê”, between Egypt and Phoenicia, an ancient region that corresponds to modern Lebanon, with adjoining parts of modern Syria and Israel. So, the land ( or part of it ) was called” Palestine” by the Greeks before it was called” Judea” by the Romans.
The Bar Kokhba revolt, which dates from 132-135 CE, was a pivotal period in the creation of Palestine. The Jews were killed, displaced or enslaved. They did n’t start relocating to Palestine until after World War II, when Israel became a Jewish state.
The Emperor Hadrian changed the name of the Roman province from” Judea” to” Palestinian Syria” in c. 138 CE. The region’s Jewish identity was removed by this name change, which implied that it was more Syrian and Greek than Jewish.
We might say that from this moment on, Jesus was a Palestinian.
His religious affiliation to the Jewish religion and his ethnicity both had changed, but his location had also. The Judean had become a Palestinian.
Back then, this mattered little. After all, Palestine was just another name for Judea.
Politicizing” Palestine” and” Israel”
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the boundaries of Palestine were vague and uncertain. ” Palestine” did not refer to any specific political identity, so no precise geographical determination was needed.
The crusaders preferred” the Holy Land”, or” the Kingdom of Jerusalem”. Up until the end of the first world war, Ottoman dominance over the region was overthrown, Palestine’s borders remained ambiguous until it joined the Ottoman Empire in 1516.
British and Allied forces seized Jerusalem in December 1917. The British would continue to rule Palestine until a mandated end date in 1948, and the area was already occupied by them by October 1918. In May 1948, after an estimated 750, 000 people who lived on 77.8 % of the land in then-Palestine were displaced, the modern state of Israel was declared.
Palestine’s historic geography has since come back as crucial. Prior to the establishment of the new state of Israel, Palestine would now be defined as a constrained, determined geographical space.
This new state built upon its original Judean, or Jewish identity. But with its new name, it created a new understanding of itself. A new kind of Jew, an” Israeli”, had arrived in the place formerly known as Judea.
The new Jewish” Israelis” established themselves against the previous inhabitants, the” Palestinians”. According to the Bible, they restricted the Palestinians ‘ access to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which the Israelis still believed to be the Promised Land that God had given them.
The Arabs of Palestine, for their part, began to use the term” Palestinian” to defend the nationalism of the Palestinian people and their right to an independent state.
A common humanity
Jesus could be both a Palestinian and a Judaean when Palestine and Judaea shared essentially the same geographical area. Back then, it did n’t matter.
He can no longer be both in a modern Middle East that is divided along binary lines ( between Jew and Arab, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Muslim or Christian ).
From all of this, Jesus is the only one who knows. However, we should be questioned about the validity and significance of such binary distinctions once we realize that Jesus is both a Jew and a Palestinian.
After all, Jews, Muslims and Christians believe we all come from one original pair of humans: Adam and Eve.
Beyond the arbitrary and impermanent divisions of people and places created by the changes and chances of history, that story leads us to a recognition of common humanity.
Philip C. Almond is emeritus professor in the history of religious thought, The University of Queensland
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