A former pastor of US President Barack Obama appeared to be trying to rewrite Christian history and the Bible when he declared last weekend that Jesus Christ "was a Palestinian."
Jeremiah Wright, a controversial religious leader who once served as pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago -- which Obama attended intermittently from 1988 to 2008 while he was still a senator -- was one of the speakers in Washington, D.C. on Saturday during the event called "Justice or Else!" to mark the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.
In his speech, Wright compared African-Americans to Palestinians, The Hill reported.
"The same issue is being fought today and has been fought since 1948, and historians are carried back to the 19th century ... when the original people, the Palestinians — and please remember, Jesus was a Palestinian — the Palestinian people had the Europeans come and take their country," Wright said.
However, the Bible—particularly in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke—clearly describes Jesus as of Jewish descent as attested by Jewish patriarchs and Jesus Christ Himself.
For instance, it is written in Matthew 27:11: "Meanwhile Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, 'Are you the king of the Jews?' 'You have said so,' Jesus replied."
Wright was not the first person to cast doubt on Jesus' nationality and distort biblical history. In December 2013, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Jesus "a Palestinian messenger who would become a guiding light for millions around the world," according to the Christian Post.
But Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor quickly rebuffed Abbas then, saying the Bible does not support his claim. Palmor accused Abbas of "outrageous rewriting of Christian history."
"He [Abbas] should have read the Gospel before uttering such offensive nonsense, but we will forgive him because he doesn't know what he's doing," Palmor said.
On Saturday, Wright also accused Israel of being an apartheid state. "As we sit here, there is an apartheid wall being built twice the size of the Berlin Wall in height, keeping Palestinians off of illegally occupied territories, where the Europeans have claimed that land as their own," Wright said.
Wright made one of his most controversial remarks right after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. Quoting assassinated American Muslim leader Malcolm X, Wright said, "America's chickens are coming home to roost," which was widely interpreted as meaning that America had brought the devastating terrorist attacks upon itself because of its policies.
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he said.
In his previous speeches, Wright also spoke about the United States taking land from the Indians, bombing Grenada, Panama, Libya, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and supporting state terrorism against the Palestinians and South Africa.
