In the past 2,000 years there have been numerous descriptions of Jesus of Nazareth, but the image of an Arab Jesus – “the first Palestinian fedayin who carried his sword” – as depicted by Yasir Arafat at a sideshow of the United Nations in 1983 was probably the most grotesque. Present at his first press conference at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on September 2, 1983, I heard the words from the UN simultaneous English interpretation of his spoken Arabic: “We were under Roman imperialism. We sent a Palestinian fisherman, called St. Peter, to Rome. He not only occupied...