On September 3, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, appeared at the Bradford Literature Festival in a wide-ranging conversation with former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf about Palestine, identity, history, diplomacy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It was in that broader discussion that Zomlot made a series of striking claims about Christianity and the Bible. According to MEMRI, he said Palestinian history had been “stolen,” that “the Bible is a Palestinian book,” that it had been “rewritten to be used against the people of the book,” that “we are the original Christians,” and that Jesus was “our gift to you” and “to the rest of the world.”

The conversation was not primarily about Jesus. But that is precisely what makes the remarks worth examining. They emerged from a broader account of Palestinian history and identity in which Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all presented as fundamentally Palestinian: “All of them are Palestinians.”

This raises a larger question: what happens when a modern national identity is projected backward onto a central figure of Christianity and becomes part of a broader narrative about who belongs to the land?

The claim that Jesus was Palestinian is not new.

An Old Struggle Over History

During the 2000 Camp David negotiations, Yasser Arafat reportedly told President Bill Clinton that the Jewish Temple had never existed in Jerusalem and that the Temple Mount had instead been a Muslim site from antiquity. Clinton later recalled being stunned by the claim.

A year later, in February 2001, Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian politician and scholar who had served as spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and........

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