Vatican removes nativity display featuring baby Jesus lying on keffiyeh

[u/Educational_Board888]

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/vatican-removes-nativity-display-featuring-baby-jesus-lying-on-keffiyeh-fvrdcbbf

The wooden statue was criticised by Jewish groups for reinforcing the trope that Jesus was a Palestinian.

The backlash came almost immediately from religious entities and individuals worldwide.

On Monday, B’nai B’rith International described feeling “disturbed by the Vatican display of a Palestinian-made nativity scene featuring Jesus on a keffiyeh and the pope’s appearance with it.” The group said the display “isn’t just politicisation, but revisionism. It presents (only) Palestinians as innocent victims—and Jesus as a Palestinian, not a Jew.”

In response to the display’s removal, David Parsons, senior vice president and spokesman for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, noted that “we are relieved at reports that the Vatican has decided to remove the provocative nativity display with an infant Jesus resting on a black-and-white keffiyeh, which is an unmistakable symbol of Palestinian nationalism.”

He said “This crèche not only denigrated Jewish heritage, it also undermined core tenets of the Christian faith. Indeed, millions of Christians worldwide were instantly incensed by this exhibit ahead of the Christmas season. The Vatican did the right thing in taking it down.”

Parsons described the display as “theological malpractice for the Holy See to allow this display to remain. For if Jesus was a Palestinian Arab, then he would not have qualified to be Christ, the promised messiah and savior of the world.”

[u/SirPansalot]

Yeah, exactly!

To be clear, this is very much a political statement identifying Jesus with the oppressed, the marginalized, the sick, the hungry, the thirsty, blah blah blah.

No modern national identities existed back then, (Israeli or Palestinian national identity) but Jesus was indeed Palestinian in that he was an Aramaic-speaking middle-eastern Jew native to Palestine, a part of the Jewish culture associated with the land of Palestine, and was thus Palestinian in the geographical sense, as well as in the endonymic and exonymic sense.

We don’t how Jesus would have identified, as information is scarce, the categories of identification we use are modern, and the very concept of identity is distinctly modern and does not fit pre-modern conceptions.

These people need to get a grip and realize that Palestine was a term denoting the land is extremely old as well; going as far back as 3,000 years.

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2023/10/23/no-the-roman-emperor-hadrian-didnt-invent-palestine/

There are two general definitions of historical Palestine over time:

(1) It is true that the Greek name Palaistínē is most likely either etymologically derived from or cognate to the Hebrew name פְּלֶשֶׁת (Pəlešeṯ), which is commonly rendered in English as Philistia. In Hebrew, this name refers specifically to the slim coastal territory controlled by the five Philistine city-states of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron. Today, writers in English sometimes refer to these five city-states collectively as the Philistine pentapolis or Philistine confederacy.”

However, this OG meaning that only referred to the slim slip of coastal territory ruled by the Philistines changed after in 604 B.C.E, King Nebuchadnezzar II and the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the Philistine city-states and annexed their territory, as well as most of the region.

(2) The first Greek attestation of Palestine was 2 centuries after the conquest by Nebuchadnezzar II in classical antiquity. “[F]rom the very first attestation, Greek sources clearly use this name to refer to a much broader region than just the relatively small territory that the Philistine cities once occupied.”

The one and only Herodotos being behind this. In his view, the Hebrews or even Jews were “Syrians who are in Palestine who practice circumcision who learned the practice from the Egyptians.” Syria-Palestina) Philistines were included in this broader ethnic category of “Syrian Palestinians.”

The new definition of Palestine used in Greek and Latin encompassed well… all the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

“Herodotos describes the geography of West Asia in his Histories 4.39.2 and, in doing so, makes reference to “Συρίη Παλαιστίνη” or “Syria Palaistínē” as the coastal land that lies between Phoinikia (i.e., Phoenicia, in what is now Lebanon) and Egypt:

“μέχρι μέν νυν Φοινίκης ἀπὸ Περσέων χῶρος πλατὺς καὶ πολλός ἐστι: τὸ δὲ ἀπὸ Φοινίκης παρήκει διὰ τῆσδε τῆς θαλάσσης ἡ ἀκτὴ αὕτη παρά τε Συρίην τὴν Παλαιστίνην καὶ Αἴγυπτον, ἐς τὴν τελευτᾷ:” This means (in my own translation):

“The land from that of the Persians to that of the Phoinikians is wide and great and, from Phoinikia, this headland extends through the sea along Syria Palestine and Egypt, to where it finishes.” Later, in his Histories 7.89.2, Herodotos explicitly defines the name Palaistínē to encompass the geographic region of the southern Levant along the Mediterranean coast extending from Phoinikia to Egypt, writing:

“οὗτοι δὲ οἱ Φοίνικες τὸ παλαιὸν οἴκεον, ὡς αὐτοὶ λέγουσι, ἐπὶ τῇ Ἐρυθρῇ θαλάσσῃ, ἐνθεῦτεν δὲ ὑπερβάντες τῆς Συρίης οἰκέουσι τὸ παρὰ θάλασσαν: τῆς δὲ Συρίης τοῦτο τὸ χωρίον καὶ τὸ μέχρι Αἰγύπτου πᾶν Παλαιστίνη καλέεται.”

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Roman Latin usage:

“By the late first century BCE, the Romans had adopted the name Palaistínē into Latin as Palaestina. In a relatively early Latin use of the name, the Roman poet Tibullus (lived c. 55 – c. 19 BCE) in his Elegies 1.7.17–18 asks the rhetorical question:

“Quid referam, ut volitet crebras intacta per urbes alba Palaestino sancta columba Syro” This means:

“Why should I tell how, through the packed cities, the white dove sacred to the Palestinian Syrian flutters unharmed?” Although Tibullus’s use of the name Palaestina is geographically ambiguous, other Roman authors before the time of Hadrian use the name in a way that clearly encompasses the entire land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Some even, like Herodotos, refer to Jews as “Palestinian Syrians.”

“[T]he name Palestine etymologically derives from the Greek name Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which Greek-language authors were already regularly using as a name for the geographic region of the southern Levant that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as far back as the fifth century BCE—over six hundred years before Hadrian. Roman authors writing in Latin and Jewish authors writing in Greek were likewise already using this name long before Hadrian was born.“

TL;DR - Palestine in all usages and cases encompassed all the land from the river to the sea, could encompass the country of Syria, and even the entire geographical region that extended as far as the Euphrates River!

Some authors refer to Jews as Syrians living in Palestine. This general terminology of Jewish people living in Palestine is also used by educated elite Jewish authors who knew how to write in multiple languages. As the Jewish diaspora expanded during classical antiquity (Hellenistic period), hellenization during the Hellenistic period that started with Greek colonization kickstarted a new era of Greek as the lingua Franca of the eastern Mediterranean and near east. This means that so many key Jewish intellectuals who became “Hellenized” or adopted new customs in this context, used and knew not only the name of Eretz Israel - but also the Greek term Palestine in their writings. These include some of the most beloved and iconic writers in the entire Jewish canon:

“Jewish authors writing in the Greek language before the time of Hadrian also frequently use the name Palaistínē to refer to the geographic area between Phoinikia and Egypt. The Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BCE – c.  50 CE), who died over half a century before Hadrian was born, in his treatise Every Good Man Is Free 75 describes “Palestine Syria” as the land where a large portion of the Jewish people reside:

“ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἡ Παλαιστίνη Συρία καλοκἀγαθίας οὐκ ἄγονος, ἣν πολυανθρωποτάτου ἔθνους τῶν Ἰουδαίων οὐκ ὀλίγη μοῖρα νέμεται.” This means:

“And even Palestine Syria is not barren of kalokagathia [i.e., the Greek ideal of aristocratic beauty and cultural refinement], where a not small portion of the much-peopled nation of the Jews reside.”

Titus Flavius Iosephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 CE) states in his conclusion at the end of his Antiquities of the Jews (AJ 20.259) that, in accordance with his original intent when he began writing, he has recorded

“τῶν ἡμῖν συμβεβηκότων τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις κατά τε τὴν Αἴγυπτον καὶ Συρίαν καὶ Παλαιστίνην” (“the things which befell us Jews in Egypt and Syria and Palestine”).

Some problems with the claim that Hadrian was the first to name the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as “Palestine” as part of an explicit campaign to demoralize and punish the Jews post Bar-Kochba revolt by erasing Judea are:

(A) He could have done it to deemphasize Jewish ethnic connection to the land, but the above claim does not match Roman precedent. There is no source explicitly stating this was the goal, and there is no case of a Roman emperor renaming a province to punish a particular group; if this actually was the case, it would have been a very strange aberration

(B) It wouldn’t even have worked. Most people who lived in the ancient world used informal region names anyway (rather than very formal official province names) meaning that changes to official nomenclature wouldn’t affect popular usuage. The name Judaea is still consistently used after Hadrian’s rebranding well into the Middle Ages. So much for erasure.

(C) the timeline is fuzzy, and Hadrian could have renamed the province 2 years before the revolt broke out, when he visited Judaea in 130 C.E. Some scholars have argued for this interpretation (Syme, “The Wrong Marcius Tubro,” 90).

(D) Its very unlikely that Hadrian gave a flying crap about what some random Jews in Palestine thought about provincial nomenclature. His actual audience were elite Roman and Greek citizens of the empire, senators and equestrians. “Thus, he may have approved the new name in part as a form of propaganda to signal to Roman citizens that Judaea, which had been a notoriously rebellious province in the past, would be so no longer.”

(E) Hadrian loved Greek shit

“Whatever the case may be, Hadrian’s formal renaming of the province followed upon centuries of Greek, Roman, and Jewish informal use of various forms of the name Palestine to describe the region. He did not invent the name or apply it to a larger territory than what speakers of Greek and Latin had applied it to before him.”

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I cannot emphasize just how dominant Greek was as the universal language of the Eastern Roman Empire by the 5th century. (See Warren Treadgold’s A history of the Byzantine state and society and a concise history of Byzantium. See also Anthony Kaldellis’ 2023 the new Roman Empire) The Late Roman Empire of the East, had inevitably vastly expanded its centralized state control over the various independent city councils - an era of “big government” made possible due to the universal endowment of **Roman citizenship to all free people within the confines of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century. That meant more laws, more jurists, more judges, more governors, more bureaucrats, more everything to accommodate and integrate these new Roman citizens. Diocletian had utterly obliterated any last traces of systematic privileges given to native Italy and its population as in the earlier days of Roman domination over non-Romans.

See Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland

The fundamental Roman quality of quality, that is legal fiction/societal imagination and treating something as something else, allowed for the Romans to establish a Nova Roma in the East that replicated the old one

https://www.academia.edu/98742862/_Roman_Quasity_A_Matrix_of_Byzantine_Thought_and_History_in_M_Garani_D_Konstan_and_G_Reydams_Schils_eds_The_Oxford_Handbook_of_Roman_Philosophy_Oxford_Oxford_University_Press_2023_548_567?source=swp_share

“The Byzantines inherited it directly from ancient Roman law and practice and they applied it to many domains of their life, political, social, and religious. Calling it a mode of thinking is perhaps not entirely accurate, for it was in addition “a power that transforms the order of things, that remodels them,” 5 and so was an activating force behind the history of Byzantium in many areas. But at heart it was a conceptual move that originated in a feature of Roman law that I call “quasity,” from Latin quasi. This was the ability of Roman law to treat a thing fully “as if it were” a different species, to subsume it under a category to which it did not belong “by nature” and thereby normalize it within a preexisting order. This legal fiction enabled the court (or other controlling legal authority) to act on the basis of a state of affairs that was not, strictly speaking, true, but that served the purposes of policy or convenience, or extended the domain of a certain rule or power into territory that it could not otherwise claim. “Legal fictions” are a recognized, albeit minor problem in the philosophy of law. 6 Quasity therefore has two fundamental components: an act of the imagination that enables one to fictively transfer a thing between categories within a taxonomy, followed by a legal and social practice which treats that conceptual transference as an accomplished fact and respects it as fully real. It is aware of, but pragmatically overlooks, its fictive origins. A mere thought experiment or literary metaphor does not count, for the fictive act must also become a social fact. The ancient Romans deployed quasity to treat non-citizens as if they were citizens for the purposes of adjudicating a dispute; to adopt non-kin and treat them as if they were kin; to create pro-magistrates, who did not hold a certain office but were treated as if they did; to cope with the complex diversity of cults and social orders among the subjects of their empire; and in other contexts where a faulty interface between reality and legal norms created dark spaces that needed to be bridged by legal fictions.” (p. 2)

This allowed the Romans to make non-Romans into Romans very casually and swiftly.

https://www.academia.edu/43683474/_How_Was_a_New_Rome_Even_Thinkable_Premonitions_of_Constantinople_and_the_Portability_of_Rome_in_Y_R_Kim_and_A_E_T_McLaughlin_eds_Leadership_and_Community_in_Late_Antiquity_Essays_in_Honour_of_Raymond_Van_Dam_Turnhout_Brepols_2020_221_247?source=swp_share

“Gatherings of Romans outside of Rome took various forms. There was the army, almost half a million strong by the time of Constantine, strung like a ribbon along the frontiers. For over a century, the emperors had likewise spent little time at Rome, traveling with their mobile courts and armies along the frontiers and through the provinces. Before that, colonies had acted as miniature extensions of Rome in the provinces—some of them claiming that they too had seven hills 15 —until the non-Roman spaces between the colonies and the metropolis were filled in by Caracalla’s universal grant of citizenship in 212. 16 Now Rome was everywhere because Romans were everywhere.” (p. 232)

Rome was wherever Romans were, since Rome was a people - not a place. The multiplication of emperors and of armies and of entire capitals was made possible by this and the legal fiction associated with the Roman people. The Romans had always, from the days of the republic, tinkered and experimented with the idea of there being duplicate Romes, mobile Romes, copies of Romes, miniature Romes, and new Roman homelands. Whenever Romes split, and

[u/SirPansalot → u/SirPansalot]

The gradual decline of the city of Rome politically was inversely linked to the Romanization of the periphery - the Oikoumenê, the entire known world under Roman domination. Slowly, the Roman people that now constituted the majority of the inhabitants of the empire grew to call (by the 4th century) the Roman Empire Romanía - land of the Romans or Romanland.

This was done by taking the Greek Romaios and combining with the suffix ía to create an abstract noun or entity that acts as the abstract representation of the word. Therefore, Romanía (not to be confused with modern Romania) meant area (Res Publica or politeia) pertaining to the Romans. This meant that everyone, including Jews, had to deal with the central government and its bureaucracy and administrative apparatus, unlike in previous centuries on a semi-regular basis at the least. They too adopted Greek as one of the core languages at their disposal.

The dominance of Greek helped by the creation of a center of Roman imperial power (Constantinople), and the dealings of this vast concentration of Greek-speaking Romanía with the caliphate led to Palestine being the dominant word for the lands between the river and the sea by early Arab geographers in Arabic. Greek continued to be a trading lingua Franca and major language of the Ottoman Empire, and thus Palestine was used to describe the lands between the river and the sea as the dominant term for the region by gentiles and Jews alike in the eastern Mediterranean for many centuries.

Conclusion: The supposed incompatibility of Palestine with Eretz Israel, and of Palestinian identity with Jewish identity, and of people having more than one name to refer to a region, is quintessentially a modern creation that is fundamentally the result of a modern political conflict and nation-state formation/identity invention after the discontinuity and situation of 1948.