Jesus wasn’t a Palestinian

Last week Netflix released their long-promised film on the life of the Virgin Mary. It’s not bad but in all honesty it’s not that good either. Nothing too heretical, an over-the-top but still compelling portrayal of Herod by Sir Anthony Hopkins, and rather convincing scenery – most Biblical epics are now filmed in Morocco. Some crucial parts of the Christmas story are omitted for no apparent reason, and some imagined scenes have been added that do nothing to clarify or magnify. The lead actress is competent enough and certainly looks the part, probably because 22-year-old Noa Cohen is Israeli.

And here’s why there are protests against the film and calls to boycott it.

With the literal and metaphorical open wound that is Gaza filling our screens, and the understandable anguish of Palestinians, there have been roars that the lead should have been given to a Palestinian actress. Director Daniel John Caruso replied that, “It was important to us that Mary, along with most of our primary cast, be selected from Israel to ensure authenticity.”

Frankly, I’m not overly concerned with the casting, although to be fair I’d challenge you to find many Jewish, let alone Israeli, actors who’ve ever played Mary, Jesus, or any of the disciples on the screen. For many years the leads in biblical movies looked more Scandinavian than Jewish. More perniciously, for centuries European art emphasized the non-Jewish appearance of Jesus, and the Jewishness of Judas.

A war over Jesus’ identity

But what has been most troubling is less the anger of Palestinians than a painful attitude among some Western Christians.

There’s long been a minority within the broader Church who embrace replacement theology or supersessionism, the idea that the Christian church has superseded the Jews as being God’s covenanted people. It diminishes, even denies, but is it antisemitism? Sometimes yes – I’ve seen it personally - but often not. It does, however, tend to show a lamentable lack of empathy with Jewish people, who have suffered the most repugnant crimes at the hands of Christians for centuries. Regularly at the direct bidding of Christian monarchs, leaders, and bishops.

With the terrible escalation of the situation in Israel and Palestine, some Christians have developed a sympathy with the Palestinian cause, which is something even those of us who have lived in the region and reject some of the propaganda, fully understand. There is grotesque injustice taking place and all of us who follow Christ must work for peace, equality, and dignity. Yet in some Christian circles it’s led to a questioning of the Jewishness of Jesus and the now fashionable tendency to describe him as a Palestinian.

I even read a Church of England bishop refer to, “the dead flesh of a first-century Palestinian man nailed to a cross on a hill outside Jerusalem.” In that Palestine was established by the Romans in the 2nd-century after yet another expulsion of the Jews, and in a direct attempt to remove any Jewish link to Judea, this is grimly inaccurate. I’m sure the bishop in question meant no harm and perhaps thought that she was using an innocuous and generic geo-political term. But even so.

Jewish in every way

Yeshua was a Jewish man born to Myriam, a Jewish woman, and he lived and died as a Jew. We know him as Jesus and I worship him as the Son of God, the Messiah. But his immediate claim, the conduit to being the saviour of all people, was as King of the Jews. The prophecies by the Jewish prophets in the Old Testament, Jesus’ own statements about himself, and the entire narrative makes no sense whatsoever unless we acknowledge him as being Jewish. With the possible exception of Luke, who was likely a Hellenized Jews but may have been a Gentile, the entire New Testament is written by Jews. Even those negative references to “The Jews” especially in John’s Gospel (and my goodness, how they sting!) are inside references to the division with the Jewish world between supporters and opponents of Jesus. Tragically, they’ve been used countless times to justify the slaughter of Jewish people – it was a clergy-inspired pogrom that led my paternal family to flee eastern Europe in 1905.

The sad truth is that if Christendom had treated Jews decently, modern Israel may not have been created. Support the right of Palestinians by all means, protest Israeli oppression, but understand how and why all this started in the first place.

An Israeli Jewish actress who has nothing to do with crimes or brutality has a perfect right to play the mother of Christ, and I’m glad she did so. I hope with all my heart that one day she and her Palestinian sisters can live and work and act together. I pray this to the Jewish Jesus, and will never deny him or who he was and who he is. Thanks be to God. Shalom.