Paula Fredriksen is right that Jesus was NOT a Palestinian Jew. Palestine as a Roman province did not exist until after the Second Jewish Revolt. (That said, contra some Zionists, Greek has a "Ph as F" sound so don't go there with your pseudo-semantics.)
She is right (numbers don't lie) about the decline in Christian percentages of modern Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.
She is wrong, though, when she implies that the Palestinian decline in the West Bank is due to the Palestinian Authority the same way in which the decline in Gaza is due to Hamas:
Bethlehem has been administered by the Palestinian Authority since 1995. Once a significant majority there, the Christian population plunged from 86 percent in 1950 to less than 12 percent in 2016.
As for the Gaza Strip, it is even less hospitable to Christians. As the New Yorker reported in January, a count by the Catholic Church in Gaza, “once home to a thriving Christian community,” found just 1,017 Christians, amid a population of more than 2 million. After seizing control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas ended the designation of Christmas as a public holiday and discouraged its celebration. The dwindling population of Gazan Christians has been harassed, intimidated, even murdered. Were Jesus to show up in modern-day Gaza, he would find an extremely hostile environment.
In fact, the National Catholic Register piece to which she links directly refutes her attempt at bright-line causation in the West Bank:
Many people explain that the declining Christian population in Palestine is due to the overall difficulties of living in Palestine, not because of overt discrimination towards Christians. "Even Muslims are leaving; of course, it will not be as evident to see how many Muslims are leaving compared to the Christians, because the Christians are really a minority," said Sr. Lucia Corradin, a Elizabethan sister from Italy who works at the Caritas Baby Hospital.
In Israel, where Arab Christians have comparatively more opportunities than their Palestinian counterparts, the Christian population has stayed stable. The Christian population grew by about 5,000 in the past 20 years. Today Christians in Israel number 164,700, about 2 percent of the population, a similar ratio to past decades. ...
Nabil Giacaman, a Catholic shop owner of the "Christmas House" store on Manger Square, said media emphasis on the shrinking Christian population was part of an effort to create an internal divide in Palestinian society. "It's not about Christians and Muslims, it's not that I'm facing these issues only because I'm a Christian," said Giacaman. "As Muslims suffer, Christians also suffer. At the end, we are all Palestinian, we get the same permits and the same treatment at the checkpoints."
As I see it, per that second paragraph, it's like how the government of Israel gives special consideration to the Druze. Divida et impera, Fredriksen.
Oh, and by the way, the column doesn't mention that Fredriksen converted to Judaism and has taught at Hebrew University. Nor that she, at least until recently, split her living time between Boston and Jerusalem. At least it's West Jerusalem.
That said, as an ex-Christian Jew speaking less than fully skeptically about the Resurrection story, or trying to have her cake and eat it too on Augustine, or appearing to give higher credibility to John's historicity than warranted (given it's likely the latest of the four canonicals is problem one) her intellectual chops aren't all that. I got the above hits while Googling to see if she's Zionist. No, really. With her name and "Zionist" both in search quotes on DuckDuckGo, no hits. With "Zionism" instead, one hit, not much help; it's in the first paragraph of a book review by her.
I await her commenting on the Yahweh-ordered holocaust against Amalek and with more honesty than the lack thereof from Michael Hudson.
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