Jesus Was Palestinian — King Herod Would Have Agreed
If you used a time machine to ask King Herod whether Jesus was a Palestinian, he would have looked at you strangely for many reasons, not the least of which was that you came from a time machine, but after he got over that and after you explained who you thought Jesus was, he would still be looking strangely at you because Herod was an educated man of his time — he would have known what all educated Greeks and Romans knew, which was that their name for the region that included Judea, Samaria, Galilee and Idumaeia was Palestine. He would have been astonished that you, a visitor from the future, did not know what everyone he considered civilized knew.
People who say Jesus was not a Palestinian either don’t know or hope you don’t know the following easily-verified facts:
The first clear use of the term Palestine to refer to the entire area between Phoenicia and Egypt was in 5th century BCE ancient Greece,[iii][iv] when Herodotus wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê” (Ancient Greek: Συρίη ἡ Παλαιστίνη καλεομένη)[9] in The Histories, which included the Judean mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley.[10][v] Approximately a century later, Aristotle used a similar definition for the region in Meteorology, in which he included the Dead Sea.[11] Later Greek writers such as Polemon and Pausanias also used the term to refer to the…
