Would Syrian Refugee Baby Jesus be allowed to immigrate to the US? - By Juan Cole
So the toddler Jesus got to be a Nazarene because of having been a Syrian refugee twice,once from Herod the Great in Egypt, and once from Archelaus in Judah.
The toddler Syrian refugee would later say,
“31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ ”
Maybe when they were refugees in Egypt, Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus were hungry and thirsty, or lacked proper clothing, having had to flee their homeland abruptly. Maybe Jesus grew up hearing those stories about the Syrian refugees.
There are politicians arguing that Syrian refugees should not be admitted to the United States, even though the US has taken in 750,000 refugees since 2001, and only a handful have gotten into security-related trouble.
Jeb Bush said that only Christian Syrian refugees should be let in.
These American, Christian politicians would not have admitted the holy family when they fled Herod the Great. They were Jews and that was before Christianity. So they were non-Christian Syrian refugees. Out of luck.
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the rest (worth the read for sure):
http://www.juancole.com/2015/12/would-syrian-refugee-baby-jesus-be-allowed-to-immigrate-to-the-us.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Who knows? Possibly relatives, as well. And it's unclear how long they stayed--within a decade or so they had returned from being refugees.
He wasn't a refugee from Archelaus. A closer term would be "fugitive," but since he was fleeing a despot it's unclear that the word carries the same opprobrium.
In any event, both instances weren't fleeing one country to another, but being a kind of internally displaced person.
But I know what you're really doing--you're saying that by saying on "Christian Syrian refugees" you mean to say that the US would be excluding all those Jewish Syrian refugees. All two dozen or so of them. (There used to be many thousands. Some emigrated for economic reasons before Israel/Palestine became an issue. Others were forced out by Muslim repression that nobody much cared about. The remaining few thousand after the big wave of emigration in the '50s and '60s trickled out since the early '70s.)
By pointing out such an absurd claim in an utterly anachronistic manner, you can only be employing irony. This kind of oppression of the Muslims' "Other" has been going on for a long time, with both intermittent but intense repression of Jews and Xians in Syria (particularly the Sunni Arab areas), so what we see now isn't really new. Just more of the same old story that's resulted in the de-Hellenization, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation that matches the horrors that Xianity inflicted during the Dark Ages and into the times of the Crusades. (Because, really, aren't ISIL, Hamas, Hezbollah in many ways just Crusaders fighting for their faith, to extend it and to retake or protect holy sites against the unfaithful?"
