A malicious anachronism

=”font-size: 11pt”>So why the controversy over the Mary movie? Why are so many people eager, even desperate, to deny Mary’s Jewishness?

It is clear that partisans for the Palestinian side in the current war wish to do anything they can to delegitimize Israel and Judaism in order to gain credibility for their cause. They understand well that many American Christians, especially evangelicals, sympathize with the Israelis in part because they know their Bible. If they can sever Christianity’s roots from Judaism in the Christian imagination, they reason, they can gain sympathy among followers of Jesus. But to claim the historical Mary as a “Palestinian”—a people and a concept that did not exist at the time of Jesus’s birth—is a malicious anachronism.