The Inheritance of Abraham

The Church of Scotland owns an hotel which brings plenty of business to Tiberias. It also maintains a hospice which does plenty of good in Jerusalem. Both institutions long predate the foundation of the State of Israel.

But woe betide it if it express the only understanding both of Judaism and of Zionism, which are by no means the same thing, that can be borne by the New Testament, not to say by the historical record in general.

It can expect hysterical screaming that it had not subjected its doctrinal position to the veto of self-appointed representatives of Scotland's Jewish community. Well, no. It hadn't. Nor will it.

And it can expect hysterical screaming that it is in receipt of anti-Semitic funding. Whatever that might be. As if it needed the money, anyway!

That Harry's Place regards The Life of Brian as the last word tells us all that we need to know about those who object to this Report.

Heaven forfend that anyone were to ask about the belief that Mary was a prostitute (whereas Muslims believe that she was a virgin, and the Annunciation is a public holiday in Lebanon because it unites Christians and Muslims), or that Jesus is not only in Hell but is being boiled in semen there.

To be fair, the Harry's Place crowd would not believe the latter. But it would, and does, believe the former. And its depiction of Christ and of Christianity would be, and is, heavily influenced by the Talmud's pornographic and scatological abuse of them, an influence also so strikingly evident in the American entertainment industry.

Heaven forfend that anyone were to ask about the reaction when the Palestinian Authority recently managed to secure World Heritage Site status for the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which the Israelis had wanted to demolish in favour of a Wal-Mart or something.

The Israelis were and are incandescent that the PA has secured World Heritage Site status for what, whether or not you believe (as I do, because I can see no reason not to) that it stands on the site of the Birth of Jesus, is undeniably the world's oldest Christian church in continuous use.

How was it not already a World Heritage Site? Who has been stopping that designation? And why would they not want it to be so designated? What else do they want to do with the site? One really does shudder to think. But it is academic now, so they may as well tell us.

The howling over the impending prospect of a Palestinian State also includes, as if it were self-evidently a bad thing, the possibility of World Heritage Site status for the Tomb of Rachel and for the Tombs of the Patriarchs. But then, the present Israeli Government wants to denaturalise the ultra-Orthodox Jews as well as the ancient indigenous Christians.

The war that Israel ordered up in Iraq has already turned the Shrine of Ezra the Scribe, who invented both synagogues and the square Hebrew script, into a mosque. The Shrine of Ezekiel, featuring some of the oldest Hebrew inscriptions in the world, is next on the hit list.

Across the border in Iran, whatever regime the Crazies sought to install would be just as conservative of the Shrine of Habakkuk, of the Shrine of Daniel, and of the Tomb of Esther and Mordechai. It says in the Bible that those figures were Persian. Where did you think that they were buried? Or did you just not believe it...?

Heaven forfend that anyone were to ask about incidents such as this, which are common, and increasingly so, and which are carried out by supporters, members or officers of parties that are in government in Israel.

Heaven forfend that anyone, even if it would not be very likely to be the Church of Scotland, were to ask about how the Tomb of Saint George at his birthplace, which is now known as Lod and which is the location of Israel's principal airport, has become a shadow of its former self.

It was once a major focus of unity between Christians and Muslims in devotion to the Patron Saint of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt before, and as much as, the Patron Saint of England. Three quarters of those who practised that devotion were violently expelled in 1948. Ask about that. Go on. I dare you.

The Latin Catholics and the Syrian Catholics, the Melkites and the Maronites, the Arab Orthodox and the ancestrally Orthodox Palestinian Anglicans (it's a long story), founded Arab nationalism in general and the whole concept of Filastin in particular.

They provided almost the latter's entire leadership inside the Green Line until 1973, despite the overwhelming Sunni Muslim majority among Israeli Arabs, as among Palestinians generally.

The former Balad MK Azmi Bishara, who was driven into exile as recently as 2007 because of the bombardment of Lebanon, was a Catholic from Nazareth, where, in an echo of the roots of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, he was educated by the Southern Baptist Mission.

Oh, yes. American Protestant missionary activity has had an important impact. Its universities, untainted by association with British or French colonialism, nurtured generations of Arab nationalist leaders, Muslim as well as Christian.

As did those with the most interest in defining the local and putatively national identity as Arab rather than Islamic, namely the ancient indigenous Christians. That was, and it very largely still is, Arab nationalism: the fruitful encounter between indigenous Catholicism and Orthodoxy on the one hand, and the educational opportunities opened up by American "mainline" Protestants on the other.

Alas, the numerical decline of Episcopalianism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and Methodism in American society has had an impact on, especially, the Republican Party. Meanwhile, the decline of those bodies in doctrinal and moral orthodoxy, and the transformation of the Baptists, especially the Southern Baptists, into something utterly different in a different but no less heterodox way,  has cut them off from the wider Anglican, "Calvinist", Lutheran, Methodist, and more than you might think Baptist worlds.

But the Middle East is still part of those worlds. The wonderful Melkite Catholic Archbishop of Galilee, Elias Chacour, one of the greatest men of the present age and whose Nobel Peace Prize is long overdue, has founded and heads the first Arab university within Israel's pre-1967 borders.

It is a branch of the University of Indianapolis, an institution of the United Methodist Church, the largest "mainline" denomination. He also holds honorary doctorates from Duke and Emory, both of which are United Methodist foundations, and he has been honoured with the World Methodist Peace Award. And the most sought after school in the West Bank is still run by the American Quakers.

Where did these Christians come from? Did you really just ask yourself that? Their ancestors were the people whom the Bible clearly describes the Israelites as having conquered but never exterminated. They founded Jerusalem. They became Christian when the Roman Empire did, those who had not already done so by then.

They adopted Arabic, not much of a change from what they were already speaking, during an Islamic Conquest which occurred exactly when the Anglo-Saxons were conquering another abandoned former Roman province, so that Palestine and England are exactly as old as each other.

When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem, it was an entirely Christian city, and had been for several centuries. Add together the post-Constantinian Roman, the Byzantine, the Crusader and the British periods, and Christian sovereignty is far and away the Holy Land's historical norm.

Remember all of that when you hear some ludicrous myth of the indigeneity to that Land of Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, of Russian Nazis, of East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, of Peruvian Indians "converted to Judaism" and then put on the plane in a single and remunerated action, of absolutely anyone at all.

Even the Pashtun, who are now classified as a Lost Tribe with a view to airlifting them to Israel in future, since at least they are not Arabs. They are Sunni Muslims, of course. But that is not the same thing. Not the same thing at all.