I am sure many will object to describing Jesus Christ as a Palestinian, some may argue that it is heresy, but a lot of these people probably object to describing Jesus as a Brown person. The fact of the matter is that Jesus Christ was born in Jewish Palestine, a Jewish Palestinian, a Semite. So like it or not Christ is a Palestinian, a Semite and a Jew, and to Christians our Messiah, our Saviour. Too many Christians believe Christianity has to be pro Israeli because Jesus Christ was born a Jew but that is not what Christ taught and is not supported in the New Testament. Christianity teaches all must be treated equally. not based on religion or ethnicity, or any other personal trait. Those calling for the destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews can not be supported or tolerated. Those calling for the denial of an Arab Palestinian nation and the elimination of the Arab Palestinian population can not be supported or tolerated. Christians must practice the teachings of Christ and condemn and stop supporting Israel's genocide of Arab Palestinians in Gaza, the total physical destruction of Gaza as well as the attacks on Arab Palestinians and the illegal and immoral seizure and / or destruction of their property in the West Bank. Political, economic and religious discrimination of Arab Palestinian Israeli citizens must end. Christians must also condemn and stop supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis / Dash, Houthis, and every other terrorist organization and country whose goals are the elimination of Jews and the destruction of Israel. Whether spoken by Jew or Arab, the call for possession of all of Palestine from the river to the sea is as evil as Hitler's Lebensraum policy and must never be supported by Christianity. These articles from Sojourners and TyndaleHouse......
(NOTE THE DEATH TOLL IN GAZA IS NOW 35500+, MOSTLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN)
Walid Mosarsaa is a Palestinian Quaker in Greensboro, N.C. He serves as the secretary of the board and senior program coordinator for Every Campus A Refuge. In his spare time, Walid enjoys running, CrossFit, traveling, and being with friends.
This is why I wear a shirt emblazoned with “Jesus is Palestinian” at protests I attend across the globe. My reason for wearing this shirt is beyond its provocative statement; it is a deliberate act of claiming Jesus as my ancestor to reclaim his identity as a Jewish subject under Roman occupation in first century Palestine. As a Palestinian in the United States, I know this assertion is a challenge to Christian hegemony, serving as a powerful reminder that Jesus was a disenfranchised imperial subject. For Palestinians like myself, Jesus is not only a historical or religious figure; he is a testament to our enduring heritage — an ancestor symbolizing both our deep roots and our ongoing struggle for justice and liberation.
But some Christians bristle at the assertion that Jesus is Palestinian. Why?
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, Peter Wehner, has criticized this designation, interpreting it to be an attempt to dissociate Jesus from his Jewish background. For Wehner, referring to Jesus as a “Palestinian” is rooted in an anti-Jewish, Palestinian nationalism that seeks to deny Jewish indigeneity to the Holy Land and separate Jesus from his identity.
But this argument presents the history of the Holy Land and Jesus through a myopic point of view that fails to account for the history of Palestine, the social circumstances Jesus faced, and the ways modern Palestinians relate to Jesus’ social circumstances. To say that Jesus is Palestinian is to fight back against revisionist narratives about the history of Palestine and the view that Jesus’ Jewish identity must be pitted against his identity as a Palestinian.
The revisionist history of Palestine
The word “Palestine” significantly predates Roman imperialism, with its earliest recorded usage tracing back to the late Bronze Age. Variations of the term were consistently used by ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Romans, including in The Histories, an influential historical work from circa 425 B.C.E written by Herodotus, often hailed as the “father of History.”
Yet, the history of Palestine, as presented in Western narratives, has frequently been shaped by Orientalist historians and biblical scholars. This approach has aimed to validate various fictional accounts found in the Bible, like the story of the Exodus, which some use to justify Zionism and the current apartheid. Even with the consensus among scholars that the Bible is not a history book, it remains peculiar — especially from my Palestinian perspective — to observe how often Western Christians still refer to the Bible for “historical accounts” of Palestine.
Here, it’s important to note what the late literary scholar and Palestinian Christian Edward Said, so poignantly expressed in Permission to Narrate: “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them.” If facts require context and social purchase to become widely accepted, revisionist history primarily relies on narratives of domination.
One such narrative is that modern Israeli Jews are the unbroken lineage of first century Palestinian Jews, the rightful owners of the land. In this narrative, modern Palestinians are framed as descendants of subsequent Arab “invaders,” and are allotted a conditional claim or no claim at all to the land. And as a Palestinian Christian, I am confronted with a profound sense of erasure within this discourse, a sentiment echoed by numerous members of my community.
This manipulation of the historical narrative serves as a tool to justify systemic violence and perpetuates the occupation under the guise of historical restitution based on an intractable, centuries-old, Muslim-Jewish conflict. This effectively shifts the perspective away from settler-colonialism to an irreconcilable age-old “who came first” dispute. But, even if one were to uncritically endorse the biblical narrative, this would not absolve the modern state of Israel from settler colonialism, nor would it make Jesus’ affiliation with modern Palestinians any less real.
Why Jesus is a Palestinian
As 20th century theologian Howard Thurman poignantly reminds us in his seminal 1949 work, Jesus and the Disinherited, “Jesus was a poor Jew,” and because of this, he was subject to Roman cruelty. Thurman emphasizes that Jesus’ lack of Roman citizenship status meant that “if a Roman soldier pushed Jesus into a ditch, he could not appeal to Caesar.” Jesus was a member of a disenfranchised group amid a larger, dominant group that sought to establish control. Through this lens, we draw parallels between life in Palestine during the times of Jesus and what we currently endure today.
To say Jesus is Palestinian is to articulate a narrative that both honors his Jewish identity and emphasizes his profound role as a liberator within the specific context of Palestine. This dual recognition does not diminish his universal significance as a figure of liberation but enriches it, highlighting the particular resonance of his life and teachings for us. Jesus is not merely a symbol of liberation in the abstract; he is a direct ancestor, a beacon of resistance whose life under occupation mirrors the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people.
This is further amplified by Palestinian liberation theologian Naim Stifan Ateek in A Palestinian Theology of Liberation. Ateek narrates how the essence of Palestinian liberation is intrinsically linked to Christ’s human journey as an oppressed individual who craved justice. For Ateek, Christ’s humanity provides a crucial hermeneutical key for interpreting biblical texts in a manner that resonates with the lived realities and aspirations of Palestinians today: “The most useful hermeneutical key is Jesus Christ himself. With this hermeneutic, it is possible to determine the meaning and relevance of the biblical text of our life today.”
This framework does not merely seek to contextualize scripture but actively engages it as a source of inspiration and guidance in the pursuit of liberation and justice. It reinforces the connection between past and present liberation struggles, reflecting a Palestinian heritage of resilience against oppression. This is not an erasure of history or Jesus’ identity, but a reaffirmation of a narrative that honors the multifaceted identities of Palestine and its people.
Jesus and Palestine today
Ateek shows us how stories from the Bible, like Jesus’ birth, resonate with the lived reality of Palestinians today, particularly amid the unfolding genocide in Gaza and the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
According to Luke, Jesus was born in Bethlehem and not in his native Nazareth, due to the Census of Quirinius, a Roman mandate requiring registration in ancestral towns (Luke 2:2). This event, despite its historical ambiguities, echoes the situation of contemporary Palestinians.
Post-1967, following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a census led to Palestinians being issued three distinct types of identification based on registration: for the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. These IDs dictate movement and profoundly disrupt family life, including my own.
I was born into a family where my mom has a Jerusalem ID and my dad has a West Bank ID. As a result, our family faces significant challenges under the Israeli color-coded ID system. My father, sisters, and I are assigned green West Bank IDs, and we are therefore restricted from freely entering and residing in Jerusalem. On the other hand, my mom, who has a blue Jerusalem ID, has far greater freedom of movement and the ability to live in Jerusalem. But living in Jerusalem as a Palestinian comes with the financial burden of proving that you actively maintain a “center of life” in Jerusalem and not spending much time outside the city. Residency checks are also a regularity where authorities inspect trash and question neighbors. During my childhood, she risked losing her Jerusalem ID to live with us in the West Bank.
Just as Jesus’ early life was marked by displacement and peril, so too are the lives of countless Palestinians who are caught in the throes of an unceasing war. This parallel is set against a backdrop where Palestinians are being dehumanized, described as “human animals” by Israeli officials, and enduring Western media’s coverage which often lacks nuance and empathy. This rhetoric is contributing to the rising death toll in Gaza — which has surpassed 27,000 people — the highest death rate of any other conflict in the 21st century.
Amid these realities, to say that Jesus is a Palestinian affirms a historical truth and resists the narratives that seek to erase our presence and legitimacy in our land. It’s a declaration that the Jesus who preached liberation and justice in the face of imperial tyranny is a direct ancestor of the Palestinian people.
Affirming Jesus’ Palestinian identity is important to me as a Palestinian Christian because our perspective on the history and development of the Christian faith has been marginalized. It’s deeply troubling to witness a religion that emerged under occupation being used to justify the modern occupation that we are currently experiencing.
Was Luke wrong about the census?
Is it possible to reconcile Luke's account of Jesus's birth with other information we have from the same period that seems to contradict it? David Armitage explores how we might approach the widely debated issue.
One of the best-known elements in the Christmas story is the journey of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, despite Mary’s advanced pregnancy, to participate in a census associated with a Roman official named Quirinius. At the centre of every nativity play is the resulting crisis, as Mary and Joseph hurry to Bethlehem but – unable to find accommodation – take up residence with the livestock.
From a historical perspective, though, the census story is widely regarded as highly problematic, because it seems difficult to reconcile with other information about that period, and especially with the account provided by the historian Josephus. Writing towards the end of the first century AD, Josephus describes a census carried out by Quirinius just after Archelaus (a son of Herod the Great) was deposed as ‘ethnarch’ of Judaea by the Romans. The rationale given by Josephus for this census is that at this point (in AD 6) the Romans annexed Judaea, incorporating it into the province of Syria (Antiquities of the Jews 18.1-3). Consequently its status for Roman taxation changed, necessitating registration of property.
The difficulty is that both Matthew and Luke seem to place Jesus’s birth—and hence, for Luke, the census—within the lifetime of Herod the Great, who is most commonly thought to have died around 4 BC. The census of Quirinius, at least as described by Josephus, thus seems to have been about ten years too late.
Was Luke just wrong about the census?
For many people, this apparent contradiction between Josephus and Luke is easily resolved: Josephus was right, and Luke was mistaken. Either Luke got the details of the census incorrect (perhaps naming the wrong official) or—more drastically—he created or reproduced from another source an episode that was essentially a fiction. There are, however, good reasons to be cautious about such negative judgements.
An important point in favour of taking Luke’s account seriously is the distinct likelihood that he had access to testimony from individuals closely connected to those involved in the relevant events. If Luke was (as is widely believed) the associate of Paul who travelled with him in the period described in the later chapters of Acts, this implies direct acquaintance with at least one member of Jesus’s family: his brother James, a notable leader amongst the believers in Jerusalem—see Acts 21:18. This provides a straightforward route by which Luke could have learned about events associated with the birth of Jesus, even if James’s mother Mary was herself no longer alive when Luke visited Jerusalem with Paul.
There is therefore a case—from a historical point of view—for at least reading Luke’s account with an open mind and not concluding too quickly that he must have been uninformed. Whilst it is sometimes claimed that the details of Jesus’s birth would have been lost to the early Christians, this is not very persuasive given the prominent role played by at least one member of his immediate family in the crucial first decades.
A second reason to be wary of playing off Luke against Josephus and declaring Luke to be in the wrong is that the accounts given by Josephus can themselves be problematic historically. For example, as Andrew Steinmann has made clear, the consensus position regarding the chronology of the end of Herod’s reign is far from certain.[1] Of course, questions about the census cannot be resolved by arguing that Josephus just gave the wrong date for it, since the account in Antiquities 18 locates the census in a wider set of events associated with the exile of Archelaus, and not with the last years of Herod the Great. If Josephus was wrong about the timing of census of Quirinius, this would imply confusion of events on a larger scale. This might seem unlikely; Josephus himself was only one generation removed from the events in question. However, as shown by John Rhoads, Josephus’s use of his sources (even for relatively recent events) was on occasion erratic; there are indications that in juxtaposing information from different sources he sometimes misplaced or even duplicated events.[2] Rhoads argues in detail that Josephus conflated events at the end of the reign of Herod the Great with events following the exile of Archelaus, and that in so doing he wrongly associated the census of Quirinius with the later event.
Any idea that Luke must necessarily be second-best to Josephus when it comes to comparing their accounts of the census should therefore be set aside. Rhoads himself acknowledges that the overall case he builds may not be persuasive to all, yet his article does establish clearly that Josephus’s account—no less than that of Luke—needs careful analysis and should certainly not be prioritised over Luke by default.
Has Luke been misunderstood about the date of the census?
Whilst the question about the census might be resolved by claiming that either Luke or Josephus was wrong, another possibility is that Luke has been misinterpreted, and that—understood correctly—his account is compatible with Josephus.
The Greek language of Luke 2:2 is not straightforward, and there is some ambiguity. The description of the census is as follows:
αὕτη ἀπογραφὴ πρώτη ἐγένετο ἡγεμονεύοντος τῆς Συρίας Κυρηνίου
hautē apografē prōte egeneto hēgemoneuontos tēs Syrias Kureniou
This is regularly translated as something like ‘this was the first registration when Quirinius was governing Syria’. As already observed, Quirinius, at least according to Josephus, was governor of Syria following the ousting of Archelaus—too late to coincide with Jesus’s birth in the time of Herod the Great. It is possible, though, that Quirinius could previously have held another significant administrative post in the region, during which a separate earlier census occurred. This would make sense of the fact that—in this translation—Luke 2:2 refers to the first census. It is difficult to find space for a previous governorship of Quirinius in the known chronology of governors of Syria, but Sabine Huebner (Professor of Ancient History at Basel University) has recently argued that the key term ἡγεμονεύοντος (hēgemoneuontos) need not necessarily refer to the actual post of governor, but is flexible enough to encompass other roles such as that of a financial procurator—a position which could well be associated with registering property.[3] Not enough is known of Quirinius’s earlier career to confirm or exclude such a possibility.
Others have proposed that the Greek could mean: ‘this was the registration before Quirinius was governor of Syria.’ This would mean that before the ‘famous’ AD 6 census of Quirinius, another one was carried out by someone else, and that Luke is clarifying for his readers that he is referring to this earlier one. Whilst some respected commentators (for example John Nolland[4] and David Garland[5]) have evaluated this approach positively, others are less persuaded, regarding it as a strained way of reading the Greek. As Nolland points out, though, 'On any reading, the Greek of Luke's sentence is awkward'.
Corroborating evidence for an earlier census (whether under Quirinius or someone else) is lacking, but this does not mean the possibility can be excluded; our sources of information for the period are far from comprehensive. It is nonetheless possible to enquire whether Luke’s account plausibly belongs in the setting in which he places it. In view of evidence of relevant ancient census practices, particularly as reflected in papyri, Huebner concludes that Luke’s account does credibly fit in its purported context. Whilst certainly not claiming that the historicity of Luke’s specific story is thereby established, she does suggest that—even if fictional—it is ‘thoroughly realistic’ and that the author of the Gospel ‘knows and respects the historical circumstances of the time in which he places the birth of Jesus’.[6]
Has Luke been misunderstood regarding the connection between the census and the nativity?
The options described above assume that the traditional reading of the nativity story is correct: that it was because of the census that Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. There is a more radical possibility: that Luke 2:1-5 does actually refer to the AD 6 census as described by Josephus, and that Luke introduces it as part of a brief digression—what we might call a ‘flash-forward’—in which he describes a return visit by Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem some years after Jesus was born there. Mentioning this return visit, which could have involved registration of property that Joseph still owned in Bethlehem (his original hometown), would presumably serve to emphasise the official connection of the family of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ with Bethlehem, the town of David.
This approach works from the assumption that Luke knew that the census of Quirinius happened some years after the end of the reign of Herod the Great—and, crucially, that he thought his readers would also know this. If this was so, naming Quirinius would be a deliberate way of indicating to these ‘knowledgeable’ readers that he was jumping forward in time and introducing events later than the main thread of the story (something that he clearly does elsewhere; see Luke 3:18-20).
According to this reading of the Greek text, Luke 2:6 then resumes the main thread of the narrative, explaining that it was in the very place that Joseph had property to register—his true family hometown—that Jesus was born. Given this interpretation, the text does not conflict at all with Josephus’s account, and moreover can be reconciled much more straightforwardly with Matthew’s (census-free) telling of the story of Jesus’s birth than can the traditional interpretation. It is beyond the scope of this article to set out in detail the case for this alternative hypothesis; interested readers can find the full argument in my 2018 Tyndale Bulletin article Detaching the Census: An Alternative Reading of Luke 2:1-7 .
Certainty and the census?
Where does this leave us? Howard Marshall suggested in his commentary on Luke that for this question ‘no solution is free from difficulty’.[7] This surely includes the commonly advanced ‘solution’ that Luke was just wrong. Given Luke’s professed aims, his careful use of external historical markers elsewhere, and his probable access to at least one of Jesus’s family members, the idea that this story is a fiction invites scepticism. On the other hand we cannot ‘prove’ any of the other proposed solutions. But this is the nature of historical work in general: it cannot provide scientific-style certainty about individual events in the past, but rather can establish plausible grounds for reasonable reconstructions. For such reconstructions, dependence on the testimony of others is inevitable. Judgements about particular events will inevitably be bound up with one’s overall assessment of the author whose testimony one is using, and also whether their claims about specific events cohere with the wider circumstances in which those events are ostensibly set.
Regarding questions about the census in Luke 2, it is important to emphasise that the author of Luke-Acts does more widely show real care regarding historical details.[8] Consequently, when Luke makes claims related to Graeco-Roman history for which the fit with other sources is less obvious (as with Luke 2:1-2), there are good historical reasons to at least take his version of events very seriously, being open to the possibility that our wider historical reconstructions, and our interpretations of other sources, may need to be adjusted.
The reference to the census in Luke 2:1-2 is arguably the most difficult historical problem in the New Testament; there are few other texts which present comparable challenges. Yet even in this instance, whilst we may not be able to point to a single definitive solution, we can be clear that the frequent claims that Luke has been shown decisively to be wrong are unwarranted; historically credible and coherent interpretations of Luke’s account are undoubtedly possible.
CONTRIBUTOR
David Armitage
Academic Administrator
NOTES
[1] Andrew E Steinmann, “When Did Herod the Great Reign?” Novum Testamentum 51 (2009): 1-29.
[2] John H Rhoads, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 54 (2011): 65-87.
[3] Sabine R Huebner, Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 46.
[4] John Nolland, Luke 1–9:20 (Word Books, 1989): 101-2.
[5] David E Garland, Luke (Zondervan, 2011): 117.
[6] Huebner, Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament, 50.
[7] I Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Eerdmans, 1978): 104.
[8] For discussion of this, see for example The Historical Value of Acts —a Tyndale Bulletin article which reviews a major book on the historicity of Acts, especially in relation to its Graeco-Roman context, by Colin Hemer, a former librarian of Tyndale House.
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