#15 As I understand it, Jesus was born into the Herodian kingdom of Judea, a Roman client state since they’d been invited in to settle a Hasmonean (the Maccabee family) civil war in 63 BC. After Herod’s death, his kingdom, which extended into Syria, Lebanon, and east across the Jordan, was divided among his remaining unmurdered children, being Judea (including Samaria and Idumea), Galilee plus Perea (cis-Jordan), and some other bits. See map here. Eventually it all was directly ruled by Rome as Judea, incorporating the Galilee and some other bits. It was only after the third Jewish-Roman war, the Bar Kochba revolt (132-135 AD) that Emperor Hadrian renamed the province Syria Palaestina after the Philistines, to erase the Jewish connection. The invading Arab Muslims retained the designation, as did the League of Nations when they named the British Mandate there.
After the Minoan eruption, the Philistines founded the cities of Gaza, Ashdod, and Ashkelon along the Mediterranean coast, and the now lost cities of Ekron and Gath inland. They disappeared as a people after being conquered by Babylon, but as Bibi points out, genetic studies published just this year reveal they were originally from southern Europe.
So there is no way that Jesus was either a Philistine or any kind of Palestinian.
Mohammed was not a Jew, but an Arab pagan turned monotheist using garbled versions of Jewish and Christian bible stories to provide a respectable deep history for his brand new faith. He originally anticipated converting the local Jews to his new revelation, then turned vicious when they rejected him.
Modern Palestinians are a mixture of all sorts of peoples who immigrated to the area over the millennia, including latterly Arabs and sub-Saharan African slaves; Ammonites and Moabites would certainly be included. In the West Bank they are a mix of Syrians, Jordanians, and locals, while in Gaza they are mostly locals plus Egyptians, the “foreigners” having come to work for the Jews since the beginning of the 20th century, then got caught in the movement of borders over the years. To be legally considered a Palestinian, the person or ancestor had to have been on the land for at least three years before 1948. |
