In her book When Christians Were Jews, Paula Fredriksen argues that one cannot easily point to a historical moment when Christianity ceased to be a Jewish sect and became a wholly separate religion. Rather, the process of disentanglement was a protracted one, remaining incomplete into the 4th century. Noah Benjamin Bickart, in his review, points to a particularly original part of her argument:

Most scholars see a dichotomy between Paul’s letters on the one hand and Matthew’s gospel on the other. The former are usually understood as products of a thoroughly Gentile church, [centered in Syria], whereas the latter seems to speak to a decidedly Jewish, albeit Jesus-worshipping, group [based in Jerusalem]. But Fredriksen argues that there was no daylight between Paul and the early Jerusalem church. It was just the difference between those who lived in the Diaspora and those who lived in Judea—all these early Christians regarded themselves as Jews.

Jews, especially those outside of Judea, had long had to negotiate their status as members of the broader Roman world while standing apart from it. . . . Likewise, many Romans who were not ethnic Judeans were attracted to Jewish practices. Synagogues in Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere already had a class of adherents who worshipped the God of Israel without having been circumcised or obligated to observe the Sabbath. Paul’s insistence that these Gentiles need not undergo circumcision or follow the [laws of the Torah] was neither a rejection of the law for ethnic Judeans nor a radical shift in the audience of the Christian message.

As with other competing forms of 1st-century Judaism, the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE changed everything for early Christianity. The Jerusalem church, made up of many of Jesus’ earliest followers, went up in the same smoke as the Temple. In the ensuing centuries, the vast majority of Christians were Gentiles who imposed an anti-Jewish agenda on the events and texts of their past. Fredriksen peels away these later theological layers to present an early Christian community that was decidedly Jewish.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.