NY Times Claims Jesus Spoke in “Palestine”

Update: New York Times corrects — see below.
An additional update clarifies on why a correction was needed — see below.

In an April 22nd New York Times article, “In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives“, reporter Robert Worth asserted that Jesus spoke Aramaic “in Palestine two millennia ago.” There was no such place as “Palestine” in the time of Jesus*, since the Romans didn’t rename Judea as “Palestina” until a hundred years after the death of Jesus. During the time of Jesus, Bethlehem and Jerusalem were in what was commonly called Judea and Nazareth was in what was commonly called the Galilee. The New York Times should correct their factual error of calling Judea and Galilee by a name that didn’t exist* until a hundred years later.

One only has to flip open the Christian bible to see references to Judea and Galilee. For example, in Luke 1:5, Herod (the Great) is “King of Judea.” In Luke 2:4, “And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.” In Luke 3:1, Pontius Pilate, “governor of Judea.”

In 132 (Common Era or AD), approximately 100 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, the Jews fought against Roman rule for a second time in what is known as the Bar Kochba Revolt. After the Romans defeated the rebellious Jews in 135, they renamed the land of the Jews Palestina to punish the Jews and to make an example of them to other peoples considering rebellion. The Romans took away the Jewish name, Judea, and replaced it with the name of an ancient enemy the Jews despised. The Philistines were an extinct Aegean people whom the Jews had historically loathed as uncultured and barbaric.

[The Arabs that are only since the 1960s known as “Palestinians” had nothing whatsoever to do with the non-Arab Philistines or the land at that time, and only in modern times did they take the name of the land their ancestors had immigrated to only relatively recently.]

It’s bad enough that the Romans attempted to erase the evidence of Jews’ connection to the land of Judea; no need for the Times to aid their effort. Please write to the New York Times to ask for a correction and to educate the editors and the public with a letter to the editor.

Asserting that Jesus lived in “Palestine” is unfortunately a common error due to Palestinian propaganda claiming that Jesus was not a Jew but a “Palestinian.” Please ask for a correction whenever you see this inaccuracy.

UPDATE:

On June 20th, the New York Time published the following correction:

The Malula Journal article on April 22, about efforts in the village of Malula, Syria, and two neighboring villages to preserve Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, referred incorrectly to the name of the region where Jesus spent most of his time. It was Galilee – not Palestine, which derives from the word Palestina, the name that Roman conquerors gave to the region more than 100 years after Jesus’s death. The error was pointed out by a reader in an e-mail message on Monday.

CAMERA Note: The Times claims they were not notified of the error until it “was pointed out by a reader in an e-mail message on Monday [June 16].” They were actually notified by dozens of letters from CAMERA members and staff the first week of May. It’s also interesting how they managed to not include anything about Judea or Jews in a correction about how the Romans renamed the Jewish land of Judea with the name Palestina.

*Clarification: . The region in which Jesus spoke was known, including by its inhabitants, as Judea and not Palestine. Bernard Lewis has noted that the word “Palestine” was sometimes used by Greek and Latin authors prior to 135 CE, though that appears to have normally been used as an adjective in apposition to “Syria” (Palaistine Syria or Syria Palestina) and in reference to the coastal area formerly inhabited by the Philistines but not “Judaea,” a region that “in Roman times was still officially and commonly known by that name,” as Lewis explained, or the region around Nazareth (“Palestine: On the History and Geography of a Name,” The International History Review, January 1, 1980).