Christian views on Jesus’ Jewish identity are complex. Even more so is Christianity’s understanding of Judaism. A quick review of both helps explain former President Jimmy Carter’s skewed position on Israel.

Christianity has thousands of theological, political, and social fault lines. Two broadly defined alignments within Protestantism — itself a division of the larger Christian world — are liberal, or mainline, Protestants and traditionalist Protestants, a category that includes Evangelicals.

Liberals and traditionalists — like liberal and traditionalist Jews — tend to emphasize those aspects of scripture with which they are most comfortable. When it comes to the Hebrew Bible — what Christians call the Old Testament — liberal Protestants favor the ethical teachings. Traditionalist Protestants often, but not always, focus on the Jewish eschatological role, or the messianic period culminating in what they believe will be Jesus’ return to Earth.

Israel plays a central role in the drama, which is why some traditionalist Protestants become outspoken Christian Zionists. Without a sovereign Israel and the ingathering of the Jews, they believe, there can be no “second coming.”

This means that Israel — like the battles over sex and gender issues — is a bitter point of contention in the ongoing theological culture war between liberal and traditionalist Protestants. Carter, a Baptist, has long been a vocal partisan for the liberal side. Of course no one asked Israel — which, in truth, might not have come into being if not for early Christian Zionist support — whether it wished to participate.

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar at Nashville’s liberal Protestant Vanderbilt Divinity School, notes a key aspect of Christianity’s historical problems with Jesus’ Jewishness, and how that remains problematic today for Christian understanding of contemporary Judaism and Israel.

“Judaism becomes in such a discourse a negative: Whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn’t it; whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category,” she wrote recently in Christian Century, a leading liberal Protestant magazine that often judges Israel harshly.

How this came about is a long story. Suffice it to say it was not so much because of what the historical Jesus preached as it was a product of later teachings by early Christian leaders who were Christianity’s true architects. Their motives included fending off Roman hostility, appealing to Gentiles, and expressing their anger toward Jews for their rejection of Jesus as the messiah.

What matters here is that among Christians who employ Jesus for political ends — both liberals and traditionalists do this, but here Levine speaks of liberals — the Old Testament calls for justice too often are twisted today into anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rants. “Jesus becomes the Palestinian martyr crucified once again by the Jews; he is the one killed by the ‘patriarchal god of Judaism’….” Adds a disapproving Levine: “The intent is well meaning, but the history is dreadful, and the impression given of Judaism is obscene.”

Carter’s book, then, is as much meant to influence the struggle between liberal and traditionalist Protestants as it is intended for the larger political debate over the difficulty of a Jewish state surviving in a largely Muslim Middle East, where Christians are caught in the middle.

Carter’s deeply flawed and one-sided book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, repeatedly refers to the plight of Christians in Palestine, a population so in decline that Bethlehem, Jesus’ traditional birthplace, is no longer a Christian-led town, and Nazareth, the city where he is said to have grown up, is quickly losing its Arab Christian majority.

In this light, the former president’s book is a rallying cry for liberal Protestants who have lost much ground in the Middle East and in North America. Traditionalist Protestantism, on the other hand, is on the march, a galling proposition for a committed liberal such as the former president. The recent Presbyterian and other liberal church divestment campaigns against Israel can be seen in this same light.

For Carter, blaming Israel for the Middle East’s problems is an indirect attack on traditionalist Christian Zionists, his bitter theological rivals.