It’s often claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian. But that’s not true!

The area where Jesus lived was not yet called Palestine. It was a hundred years later when after the suppression of the third Jewish uprising – called the Bar-Kochba Uprising – from 132 to 135, that Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the province to Syria Palestina and destroyed the capital city of Jerusalem. Until then the province was called Judea. So Jesus was Jewish!

Hadrian’s aim was to erase Jerusalem and Judea from collective memory. Even today there are those who are determined to deny Jesus his Jewishness.

The Nazis for example tried to Aryanize Jesus. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in his novel “Michael”:

„Christ was hard and relentless. He drives the Jewish money-changers out of the temple. (…) We modern Germans are something like Christ socialists. Christ is the genius of love, and as such the most diametrically opposed pole to Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate. The Jew is the lie personified. When he crucified Christ, he crucified everlasting truth for the first time in history. (…) Christ is the first enemy of the Jews. (…) Christ could not possibly have been a Jew. It is not necessary to prove that scientifically—it is a fact.“

The National Socialist chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg wrote in his “Mythos of the Twentieth Century”:

„The great personality of Jesus Christ, whatever form it might have taken originally, was distorted and confused immediately after his death with all the rubbish of Jewish and African life. In the near east, Rome ruled with great firmness and exacted the taxes efficiently. Accordingly, among their subject populations there arose the desire for a liberator and leader of the slaves; hence the legend of Christos. Beginning in Asia Minor, this Christos myth spread to Palestine, where it became linked with Jewish messianic yearnings, and was finally attached to the personality of Jesus. Besides his own utterances, there were falsely attributed to him the words and doctrines of near eastern prophets and, ironically indeed, in the form of an extension of ancient Aryan moral precepts; for example, the nine commandment table which had already been appropriated by the Jews as their ten prohibitions. (…) Accordingly, the so called old testament must be abolished once and for all as a book of religion. By this, the unsuccessful attempt of the last one and a half thousand years to make us spiritually into Jews will be eliminated. (…) Jesus appears to us today as self conscious master in the best and highest sense of the word. It is his life which possesses significance for Germanic man, not his tortured death. The success of that idea was the work of the Alpine and Mediterranean people. The powerful preacher and the angry man in the temple, the man who impelled others along with him and whom they all followed, not the sacrificial lamb of Jewish prophecy,…”

Adolf Hitler claimed:

„Jesus was certainly not a Jew. (…) The Christian religion was created only for the Aryans, for other people it would be absurd. (…) I cannot imagine Christ any differently than blond and with blue eyes, but the devil only with a Jewish grimace. (…) Christianity was all-destructive Bolshevism. The Galilean, who was later called Christ, wanted something completely different. He was a leader of the people who took a stand against Judaism. Galilee was certainly a colony in which the Romans settled Gallic legionaries, and Jesus was certainly not a Jew. The Jews also called him a son of a bitch, the son of a whore and a Roman soldier.“

But back to Alfred Rosenberg. He wrote further:

„Almost all painters of Europe have divested the face and the figure of Jesus of all Jewish racial characteristics. However, distorted by teachings of the lamb of god, it had to paint Jesus as the Saviour of all men. All great artists of the Nordic west showed Jesus as Aryan, and represented him as a slim, tall, blond, high browed and long headed man. Even the great artists of the south have not shown any understanding for a hooked nosed, flat footed saviour.“

The Catholic theologian Karl Borromäus Adam explained:

„We are already acquainted with the Aryan Jesus in Hitler’s first speeches of 1921, often in the Passion and Advent period, ending often in an appeal to actively fight against Judaism. Hitler’s Aryan Jesus is often reduced to the image of Jesus of the Gospel of John driving the merchants out of the temple. Hitler had at times identified himself with him, publicly swinging a leather whip.”

Jesus was a Jew and he was active in the Jewish capital of Jerusalem. Only those who have a problem with Jews can ignore the facts.

To call Jesus an Aryan is crazy. So is calling him a Palestinian.

***
Translation: William Wires