As the New York Times takes flak for publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that offended the religious sensibilities of millions, the gaffes that expose the basic religious ignorance of the establishment media continue to accumulate.
A Palestinian Jesus
In op-ed that fixates on the race and physical appearance of Jesus, published on April 20, author Eric V. Copage made the claim that “a white Jesus is still deeply embedded in the Western story of Christianity,” and that “it has become often impossible to separate Jesus and white from the American psyche.” He also claimed, in a phrase since deleted, that “Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.”
The area in which Christ was born and lived was, at the time, the Roman province of Judea. It would not officially assume the name of Syria Palaestina until the second century A.D., after the Jewish-Roman wars. According to some scholars, the Roman Emperor Hadrian intended with the new name to erase the region’s associations with the Jews.
The same day, Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar retweeted Omar Suleiman, a professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University, who likewise expressed the idea that Jesus was a Palestinian. Many rebuked her for this, including Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who called the revisionist history “a grotesque insult to Jesus born in the land of Israel and to Christianity,” in an interview with The Jewish Journal.
[Editor’s note: This is an excerpt. To read the entire article, please click here.]
