Was Jesus a Palestinian?
Was Jesus a Palestinian?
Every Christmas season, the internet finds a way to drag the Israel Palestine argument into the nativity scene.
This is not new. The claim that “Jesus was a Palestinian” has been circulating for years, reappearing in slightly different forms depending on the political moment. Sometimes it is offered as a simple geographic statement. Sometimes it is framed as a moral one, that Jesus would naturally have stood with the oppressed today. And sometimes it slips into outright fabrication, including the claim that Jesus was not Jewish, a view that is not just ahistorical but part of a recurring pattern in which Jewishness becomes inconvenient and is quietly erased.
The counter arguments are just as familiar. “There was no such thing as Palestine.” “Palestine was invented by the Romans.” “Calling Jesus Palestinian is an attempt to erase Jewish indigeneity.” And on the other side, “You are denying Palestinian identity.” “You are doing colonial pedantry.” “You are proving the point.”
Most people are not actually arguing about first century history. They are arguing about legitimacy, looking for rhetorical tools that elevate their own narrative and delegitimise the other. Jesus is just the prop.
Two meanings of “Palestine”
Part of the confusion is that “Palestine” is doing two different jobs at once.
One is an ancient regional label. Variants of the term were used by Greek and Roman writers to refer, loosely, to parts of the eastern Mediterranean.
The other is a modern national identity, developed over time in the late Ottoman and twentieth century periods, then sharpened by the modern conflict.
Those are not the same thing, but online arguments depend on blurring categories until they become politically useful.
It’s true that after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE, Rome renamed the province of Judaea, Syria Palaestina. That is where the “Romans invented Palestine” talking point comes from. But that renaming happened more than a hundred years after Jesus lived.
So, if historical precision matters, the relevant first century terms are things like Galilee, Judaea, Samaria, and the Roman imperial framework around them, not the modern national categories people are fighting over today.
Galilee, Judea, and the politics of geography
Jesus is remembered as a Galilean Jew. That’s important because it reminds us how unstable geographic and administrative labels can be.
In Jesus’s lifetime, Galilee and Judaea were not the same political unit. Galilee was governed by Herod Antipas as a Roman client ruler, while Judaea, including Jerusalem, was under direct Roman oversight. Yet across Jewish history these borders changed constantly. At various times Galilee was part of Judaea, at other times separate, and often under different rulers or empires entirely.
This transient geography exposes the futility of trying to anchor modern political legitimacy in ancient administrative lines. Borders and names shifted repeatedly, under Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Caliphates, Crusaders, Ottomans, and the British. If legitimacy depends on which empire happened to be drawing the maps at a given moment, the argument has already left history behind and entered narrative combat.
And that instability applies in both directions. It’s true that there was no modern State of Israel for nearly two millennia before 1948. But it’s also true that Jewish political life in the land is not a twentieth century invention. Across antiquity there were periods of Jewish sovereignty and self rule, including the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Hasmonean state, and later forms of communal and religious autonomy under successive empires. When Jews describe Israel as an ancient homeland, this is what they mean, not an unbroken modern state, but a long historical and cultural continuity in the same landscape.
Anti Zionist rhetoric sometimes relies on a similar kind of selective framing. By insisting that only the last two thousand years “count”, or by treating Jewish connection as purely religious myth rather than historical peoplehood, it tries to erase the idea that Jews ever had sovereignty, or legitimate rootedness, in the Levant at all. That move does not strengthen the case for Palestinian rights. It just replaces one denial with another.
Then there is Bethlehem, today part of the West Bank. It’s often treated as a decisive proof in these discussions, as though the location of Jesus’s birth could settle modern political questions.
But this, too, is built on shaky ground. Much critical scholarship suggests that Jesus was not actually born in Bethlehem at all.
In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Bethlehem serves a theological purpose. It connects Jesus to the Davidic messianic tradition, the belief, rooted in Jewish scripture, that the Messiah would come from the line of David and from David’s city, Bethlehem. Scholars such as Bart D. Ehrman and E P Sanders have argued that these birth stories were constructed to make that point rather than to record literal history. Ehrman has written about this directly in a piece titled “The Myth of the Bethlehem Birth” on his blog.
Luke’s mechanism for moving a family from Nazareth to Bethlehem is the famous census story. But this census doesn’t fit what we know of Roman administration. There’s no evidence that people were required to travel to an ancestral town for registration. Censuses were conducted where people lived. The idea that everyone had to return to their family’s ancient home is not a bureaucratic detail, it is the mechanism used to reinforce the mythological claim that Jesus was a descendant of David.
Even on common sense grounds, the idea does not hold up. What would “ancestral” even mean, your grandparents’ town, your great grandparents’, your forebears from a thousand years ago. The story starts to unravel the moment you test it against lived reality, which is precisely why historians often treat it as theological storytelling rather than administrative memory.
None of that makes Bethlehem irrelevant to those who live there now, including Palestinian Christians. And it doesn’t mean Bethlehem is irrelevant to Christianity, either. For Christians around the world, the nativity story is not only a question of historical reconstruction, it is a story of meaning. Bethlehem functions as symbol as much as geography, a place name that carries theological weight and emotional resonance, whatever a modern historian concludes about the logistics of Roman censuses.
The point is simply this. If someone is trying to use Jesus’s supposed birthplace as a contemporary political argument, as though it settles questions of identity or legitimacy today, they are leaning on a claim that many scholars doubt is historically solid. That scepticism is not a demand that Christians stop venerating Bethlehem, or that the story loses its religious truth. It is just a reminder that faith narratives and historical claims operate in different registers, and that treating the nativity as courtroom evidence in a modern political dispute often says more about present day identity battles than about first century life.
One of the most striking features of this debate is how casually it erases Jesus’s Jewishness.
Jesus was a Jew, born into Jewish society, shaped by Jewish scripture and debate, teaching among Jews, arguing with other Jews, and intelligible only within the Jewish world of his time. Historical revisionism that tries to detach him from that reality only undermines the credibility of those making the claim.
At the same time, the response that “there was no Palestine” is often deployed less as historical precision and more as identity denial, implying that Palestinians are recent inventions with no authentic past.
Both moves amount to delegitimisation. One erases Jewish continuity. The other erases Palestinian identity. Both are dishonest.
So, was Jesus a Palestinian? A careful, historically defensible answer might read:
Jesus was a Galilean Jew living under Roman power in the early first century, in a region that later writers sometimes referred to as Palestine.
That phrasing acknowledges the ancient geographical term without pretending modern national identities can be projected backwards.
The argument’s persistence is not really about ancient history. It’s about present day identity, about who gets to claim continuity, whose story counts as authentic, and whose connection to the land is treated as real.
A better question than “Was Jesus a Palestinian?” might be: why must he be claimed by either side at all.
Care for Palestinians does not require rewriting Jewish history. Defence of Jewish continuity does not require denying Palestinian peoplehood.
If those two truths can be held together, then perhaps history can be discussed as history, rather than as another arena for identity conflict.
