Sometimes journalists further multiply their errors when publishing corrections:
(1) Despite the claim of “Boston College law lecturer Elliot Hamilton”, the land of Israel was called Palestine long before Jesus. Herodotus wrote of it way back back in the 5th century BCE (calling it Palaistine.) I can think of many other Greek and Roman writers who called it Palestine: Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Pausanias, and Ovid, to name a few. Yes, like it or not, Jesus lived in first century Palestine. [Yes, the word originally applied more to the coastal area where the Philistines had first settled. But it wasn’t that long until it got applied further inland as well.]
(2) Obviously, it is an equivocation fallacy to casually confuse the modern day denotations and connotations of the word Palestinian with related words of Jesus day.
(3) Obviously, Palestinian is NOT a synonym for Muslim. Indeed, there are many thousands of Christian Palestinians.
(4) Blue eyes are probably more common in Israel today because of admixtures explained in the Diaspora–and in conversions to Judaisms–but it is important to keep in mind that there was already some degree of such admixture at the time of Jesus due to the captivities and the resettlement of various peoples by the conquerors. (Blonde hair is also not all that unusual among Jewish people today. To a degree, it is a neotony feature.)
(5) As for the amazing claim that Jesus “had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man”, young people have a very appropriate and exasperated response for that: “Duh!!!”
