Page 66 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

it referred to a geographical region in a general way, without precise definition. It did not refer to a specific polity or administrative area. Nor did any national or ethno-cultural group claim it as a form of self-identification. Jesus and his kin did not define themselves as ‘Palestinians’. The term is not found in the New Testament, but other names associated with Jewish history—such as ‘Judea’ and ‘the land of Israel’— are. It was only after the bloody, crushing defeat of the Jewish uprising led by Shimon Bar Kokhba, and the mass expulsion of Jews from their homeland in 135 CE, that Judea was renamed Syria-Palestina by the Roman victors.
As obvious as it is that Jesus was a Jew, it needs to be reiterated, because there are forces at work in the world— whether through malice, ignorance or reinterpreted religious symbolism—that airbrush Jesus’ Jewish identity from the pages of history and from the Christian narrative. In social media feeds in the days of the recent Christmas season, posts by certain Islamic preachers claim Jesus to be a Muslim by faith. Elsewhere, social media is awash, in image and song, with Christians drawing every parallel possible with life in Gaza in order to present the nativity story through a Palestinian lens: ‘If Jesus was born today, he would be born under the rubble of Gaza’, states one Christian pastor. Yet the writers of the gospel infancy narratives placed Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem—for good reason. Through the lens of Jewish scripture and tradition, they understood Bethlehem to be the birthplace of Israel’s King David and the place from where a messianic ruler was to come, from the line of David.
While each social media post has to be evaluated individually, as a collective dynamic the obscuring of Jesus’ Jewish ethnicity and cultural-religious context poses a serious problem in societies where religious literacy is waning, and
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