Would Jesus have been Arabic

Answer 1

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke both contain genealogies that trace Jesus' ancestry back through the male line to King David, thus clearly making him a Jew, and of Hebrew descent. However, Raymond E Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that neither genealogy is likely to be literally true.

As we can not rely on the genealogy in either Matthew or Luke, we can look at his background. Matthewindicates that the home town of Joseph and Mary was Bethlehem, which would probably mean that they were Jews of Hebrew descent. Luke says that their home town was Nazareth in Galilee, which makes things a little more complicated. Under the Maccabees, the Jews invaded Galilee and forcibly converted the inhabitants to Judaism, but there were also ethnic Jewish settlers in Galilee. So, if Jesus' home town was in Galilee, he need not have been a Jew of Hebrew descent. Nevertheless, he probably would not have been of Arabic descent. The native Galileans who had been converted to Judaism were rather more likely to have been of Canaanite descent.

If only we knew that Matthew was correct in placing the family home town in Bethlehem, we could say with some certainty that Jesus was a Jew of Hebrew descent. If Luke was correct, we can only say that it is unlikely that he was of Arabic descent, but also that he need not have been of Hebrew descent.

Answer 2

First you may need to explain how do you define an Arab. But generally speaking, Abraham had two sons Ishmael and Isaac. Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael Jews the descendants of Isaac and we can read from the Chapter one in the Gospel of Matthew that Jesus comes from the line of Isaac, not of Ishmael and is therefore a Jew, not Arab.