Israel and the Palestinian Territories/History: Rise of Christianity

According to Christian traditions and the New Testament, somewhere around 1-4 BCE, Jesus, whose name in Hebrew would be Yeshua ben Yosef, was born in Bethlehem of Miryam bat Yehoyakim, better known as Virgin Mary. According to Gospels, before Mary was formally married to Joseph(Yosef ben Ya’akov), she received a call from angel Gabriel that she would conceive a child. As Joseph found her pregnant, he wanted to annul the marriage, but God called him not to do so. Later, as they went to Bethlehem for the census of Quirinius, the inn was full, and Mary gave birth to Jesus in a stable, where they were greeted by three magi. Later, the family fled to Egypt as Herod ordered all children below 2 years old in Bethlehem to be massacred, until Herod the Great died, and then they moved to Nazareth in Galilee. While some parts of the story did not seem to be plausible(while Luke and Matthew seemed to contradict each other on the year of birth of Jesus), it’s believable that Jesus came from a humble family that could nevertheless trace their ancestry to King David.  

St. Anne's Church in Zippori, the locality where Virgin Mary was believed to be born.

According to the Gospels, Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist(Yuẖanan maˈmdana in Aramaic, Yoẖanan hammatbil in Hebrew). He preached a message that included peace and love and the idea of a heavenly kingdom, instead of an earthly one as many of his Jewish contemporaries might have hoped. He was disliked by the Jewish establishment but nevertheless enjoyed a large number of followers, mostly poorer people from Galilee, as well as some sympathizers from the Hillelite Pharisaic rank.

For some reasons, Jesus was convicted with insurrection and crucified. His followers believed that he had risen from dead, and the movement continued to grow under Jesus’ disciples. Later, Paul the Apostle(born Sha’ul), a Romano-Jew from Tarsus, developed the sect and transformed it into a universal religion. As a result, Christianity gradually became a separate religion, a process completed shortly following the destruction of the Temple.  

CONTEMPORARY CONNECTION: WHOSE JESUS?

In recent years, the issue of whether Jesus was Israeli or Palestinian had become a common issue among modern readers. It would sound ridiculous at first, as Jesus was certainly a Jew from the Zugot and Tannaim Era and one of the claimants for the position of Moshiach among the heavily Messianic-oriented Jewish population. However, amidst the return of Jews to the Southern Levant and the rise of Palestinian Nationalism, both sides began to claim that Jesus was theirs. For example, Linda Sarsour, one of the prominent Palestinian-American activists today, once claimed that Jesus was Palestinian, earning rebuke from the Jewish readers. The dispute, combined with the classical antisemitic theme of Jewish deicide, has continued to haunt the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.