Obama’s former paster Jeremiah Wright stirred up controversy recently when he said that Jesus was a Palestinian. At the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March, he spoke of “Palestinian justice,” calling Palestinians “the original people” going back to the book of Judges. Europeans have taken their land in “illegal occupation,” he said, declaring that the Palestinians “have been done one of the most egregious injustices of the 20th and the 21st century.” To drive his point home, he told the audience “Jesus was a Palestinian.”

Dr. Michael Brown, a Christian scholar, has been quick to correct him, saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me” and calling the statements “outlandish.” Brown posted a ten-minute video rebuttal of the comments. He points out that those currently called Palestinians are not descended from the Canaanites of the book of Judges, as Wright suggested. Jesus could not have been a Palestinian because there was no Palestine then — the Romans named the territory after the Philistines to mock the Jews in the 2nd century A.D. “Calling Jesus a Palestinian is completely anachronistic historically,” Brown said, ”it’s like saying that Native Americans were citizens of the United States of America in the 1500s.” It also “takes away his Jewish roots, his Jewish identity.”