Claim: A movement is underway to change the Bible by removing all references to Israel and claiming Jesus was not a Jew but a Palestinian.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, January 2015]
Presbyterian Church USA and Arab Palestinian Group are rewriting the Bible to remove references to Israel. Is this true, they are also removing reference to Jesus being a Jew?
Origins: On
an article titled "PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND ARAB PALESTINIAN GROUP REWRITING THE BIBLE TO REMOVE REFERENCES TO ISRAEL." References to Palestinians' "rewriting the Bible" predate their claim, going back at least as far as 2013; but in those references it's clear those using the term "rewriting" were objecting to a different interpretation of scripture and not a literal change to Biblical texts.
The claim cited above primarily focused on a Palestinian priest named Naim Ateek and his organization, the Sabeel International Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. According to the article, Ateek is at the forefront of a movement to alter the Bible to remove all mention of Israel or Jesus' faith (Judaism):
This new version blatantly changes God's Word. Any mention of
The Palestinian and Sabeel Liberation Theology groups have partnered with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as their main support for this satanic doctrine. And no wonder, the Presbyterian Church in recent years has become rabidly anti-Israel and ferociously
As no sources are cited, it's impossible to tell the source of the information contained in the article in question. However, Atik's name turned up on
Most distressing, this fiction is now a popular trend in mainline Anglican, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and even a substantial number of evangelical churches in the USA and throughout Europe. The biblical narratives described in the Gospel books are twisted and manipulated to suit Ateek's bogus claims. He promotes a "Palestinian" Jesus to whom he attributes all of the "universal" sufferings of the contemporary Palestinians. Of course, he conveniently omits acknowledging the "universal" sufferings of the Jews. This fabricated Jesus, whose story is nowhere to be found in any ancient secular or biblical records, is a figment of Ateek's politicized imagination.
That article itself was derivative of an earlier work from the Jewish publication Commentary, an editorial published in
It is a variant of liberation theology, the doctrine propounded in the 1960s to suggest that socialist revolution was the proper fulfillment of the Christian duty to the poor. In this iteration, Jesus becomes a Palestinian persecuted by the Jews while Jesus's These malevolent concepts, spreading from Palestinian Christians to churches in the West, are rooted in an audacious strategy adopted by the Palestinian Authority to deny Israel's right to exist by changing Jewish history to suit its own end. Part of this strategy involves denying that Jesus was a Jew from Judea and turning him into a Palestinian who preached Islam.
For now [replacement theology] has returned with a fresh geopolitical impetus furnished by "Palestinian liberation theology," itself a fusion of Palestinian political aspirations and Christian thinking.
To recap: In June 2014, an opinion piece was published addressing the use of Jesus as a recruitment tool by Palestinian Christians. In what looked to be a variation on the game "Telephone," a January 2015 article linked back to the
Even if we were to accept such an initiative actually had support from a mainstream denomination of Christianity such as Presbyterians, there is still no credible threat to the Bible if such a revision were to occur: There are few texts in human history as well known and widely read as the Bible, and Christians the world over would notice if Israel were suddenly absent from its pages. Even if the issue at hand weren't what looked to be a simplistic misinterpretation of a twice-recycled
Last updated: 27 January 2015