We didn't *all* reject Jesus!

David Klinghoffer believes the time has come for an unapologetic explanation of "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus." Of course, as Klinghoffer admits, it would be more accurate to explain, "Why the Jews who rejected Jesus did so." Such rejection was by no means unanimous.

Despite this admission, however, Klinghoffer argues that the Jews had to reject Yeshua because of loyalty to Torah. Ironically, this argument makes the contemporary rise of a Jewish movement loyal both to Torah and Yeshua all the more significant.

Klinghoffer builds his case by attacking Yeshua himself as a defective teacher of Torah who failed to fulfill the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures. And Paul fares even worse, emerging in the book as a bogus Pharisee who probably wasn't even Jewish!

To back such statements, Klinghoffer quotes modern scholarship when convenient, but dismisses it as needed. He recognizes that "today's dominant academic opinion" (p. 115), sees Yeshua and Paul as loyal Jews. But Klinghoffer argues that they actually sought to introduce an entirely new, anti-Torah, religion.

Klinghoffer's disregard for scholarly details results in other errors. He consistently cites Talmudic material, recorded in the fifth or sixth century, to define the Judaism of Yeshua's day. He places the decisive break between Judaism and Christianity in the first century. Modern scholarship, in contrast, views the break as gradual, not becoming final until the fourth or fifth century. Klinghoffer's handling of biblical prophecy is shaky on numerous points as well.

Despite such flaws, the book has some value for its impassioned presentation of Jewish objections to faith in Yeshua. The Messianic Jewish community, as well as the Christian community, needs to understand and interact with such arguments.

Oddly, the book's main thesis echoes Romans 11. Klinghoffer sees Jewish rejection of Jesus as "The turning-point in Western History." Without it, the Jesus movement would have remained a small Jewish sect, and Christianity, with all of its historic benefits, would never have developed.

In Romans 11, Jewish rejection of Yeshua results in salvation for the nations. But for Paul, Jewish acceptance of Yeshua is consistent not only with Jewish identity, but with the very words of Torah and the prophets. Jewish rejection of Yeshua had its purpose, but Jewish acceptance will be "life from the dead."

--This review appears in the June/July issue of the Messianic Times.

Maybe Jews owe something to Paul

This book is a good survey of Jewish literature on Christianity through the centuries and makes a number of thought-provoking points. It is definitely worth reading for the familiarity it gives you with a variety of Jewish viewpoints as well as the variety of possible objections to Christianity. I particularly appreciated Klinghoffer's frankness and the challenge he gives to Christians to read the New Testament through Old Testament eyes.

However, I do have some reservations about the book. First, Klinghoffer seems to suggest that if Jews had accepted Jesus, it would have fundamentally affected Christianity, but not Judaism. Why not? He also seems to think Islam would have arisen as it did in spite of Christianity petering out after the fall of Jerusalem. This in spite of the fact that the Koran makes a number of references to Jesus and his rejection by the Jews and generally sides with Jesus against them. It seems that both Judaism and Christianity are essential to the foundations of Islam.

Like Hyam Maccoby, Klinghoffer seems real attached to the idea of "normative Judaism." Because Paul did not take a position like the Talmudic Judaism that developed later, both suggest that he wasn't really a Jew. But as I pointed out in my review of Maccoby's Mythmaker, there's quite a bit of evidence that the anti-Torah Gnostic movement started out as a movement among Jews. There have been "dissident" Jews throughout their history, and trying to impose a "normative" viewpoint that really developed later on people like Paul and Jesus is questionable.

A related point is that both Maccoby and Klinghoffer cite Acts 22:3 for the claim that Paul was a disciple of Gamaliel. While I agree that this seems doubtful, it's important to recognize that Paul never made such a claim in any of his own books, so this need not reflect negatively on his honesty. Maybe Gamaliel really would have given him an "F" for his theological reasoning, but that doesn't prove he couldn't have identified with Pharisaism before his conversion. And the composition of such speeches as Acts 22:1-21, telling us what figures "should have said" or "might have said," is a known device of ancient literature.

Klinghoffer's master point is that Jews could not accept Jesus because of their adherence to the Torah. I don't find that fully convincing. Though he raises some good questions about the Christian interpretation of Jeremiah 31:33, there are some questions one could raise about Israel's continuing adherence to the Torah. What about the apparent abrogation of Deut. 23:1 in Isaiah 56:4-5? What about the difference between the fates of Hezekiah (see especially II Kings 18:5-7) and Josiah (II Kings chap. 22-23), which raises some questions about the Deuteronomic understanding of righteousness and reward? It seems highly likely that the Book of Job is an attempt to deal with this theological failure by making a place for truly undeserved suffering.

To close, I'd like to offer my own alternative to Klinghoffer's bold and fascinating theory of the foundations of Western civilization. I propose that Paul's teaching was one of the preconditions for Western, pluralistic society. Both Judaism and its younger daughter Islam are religions of law, attempting to govern not just our inner piety but our behavior in society. I think Paul's teaching that "the letter kills, but the spirit gives life" (II Cor. 3:6) may have been an important ingredient in the development of a pluralistic society, because it put limits on anyone's ability to regulate others. If spirituality could not be codified in a set of laws, then the way was open for many varieties of it. After the Roman Church attempted to create a "Christian law" in the Middle Ages, it was at least in part this teaching that enabled Luther to resist it. And once Christianity could not be controlled from Rome, varieties that even Luther could not have foreseen or embraced, such as churches with women pastors, became possible.

Could it be that Reform Judaism would have been impossible without Paul? After all, it started in Germany, the homeland of Lutheranism. And what if even Orthodox Jews live more freely today than they would have without it? I hope a "Reform Islam" will arise, too. I'm not interested in "converting" Jews and Muslims to Christianity in the normal sense, but perhaps they should recognize Paul as part of their religious/cultural heritage.

I hope this book will lead to understanding

David Klinghoffer is a political conservative who has much in common with Evangalist Christians on a political and social level. In this book, he explains why Jews cannot share their belief in Jesus, however. Belief in Jesus encompasses two concepts, that Jesus is the Messiah and that he is a deity. In looking at purported messianic prohesies of Jesus in the Jewish Bible (in books such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekial, and other prophets), there are two different viewpoints. Christians, who have already accepted Jesus as the Messiah see passages, such as Isaiah 53 as pointing to Jesus. Messianic prophesies are cryptic and somewhat obscure but, if you have accepted Jesus, these verses seem to make sense. On the other hand, if you have not accepted Jesus as the Messiah, these verses do not lead to the conclusion that Jesus is the Messiah and any such Messianic proof seems like circular reasoning. In other words, since X happened to Jesus, prophesy Y must apply to him. But, if you were to say, prove that X happened to Jesus, the proofs don't add up. Stated differently, Klinghoffer says that there is a certain "heads I win, tails you lose" quality to many Christian proofs. For example in Jeremiah, there is the specific reference to a "new covenant." The argument is that this new covenant is the abrogation of Torah which is replaced by Jesus. But, when the next sentence makes it clear that this new covenant means that Torah will be etched in our hearts and not replaced, the words are considered symbolic. So if there is a specific reference to a new covenant, it is "heads I win." But, if there is a specific reference to something that would disprove the alleged prophesy, another, symbolic interpreation is given to that verse and it becomes "tails you lose."

Besides being the Messiah, under Christianity, Jesus is the son of God and, indeed a deity himself as part of the Trinity. Jews also don't accept this. To Jews, this goes beyond monotheism.

Klinghoffer looks at the prophesies from the standpoint of Jews living before Jesus was revealed. To those Jews, studying such prophesies would lead to no conclusion of someone like Jesus. Anyone ignorant of Jesus would see nothing pointing to him. A little later, Jews living at the time of Jesus saw no Messianic prophesies come true, thus, they did not accept Jesus. When Jesus was not accepted by the Jews of that time, Paul and James met and decided that Torah practice was no longer necessary, thereby opening the nascent Christianity to the Romans and other pagan nations. By breaking away from Judaism, this assured that Jews would not, on any large scale, become Christians.

Klinghoffer states that this Jewish refusal to accept Jesus was actually a benefit to Christianity. If Jews had accepted Jesus, the commandments of the Torah would not have been abrogated. Therefore, Klinghoffer posits that there would have been no large scale conversion by the pagans because the requirements of circumcision, keeping kosher, strictly observing the Sabbath, etc., would have had an appeal only to the Jews. However, when the Jews did not accept Jesus and these commandments were abrogated so as to appeal to the pagans, Christianity grew to become the major force in Western Civilization. So, Klinghoffer concludes that if Jews had accepted Jesus, the course of Western Civilization would have been markedly different. I'm not sure history would have unfolded the way Klinghoffer envisions but, this is a very interesting thesis. Anyway, I hope that this book will be read by Christians, not as a disputation, but rather as an attemppt to understand Jewish thinking leading, to mutual acceptance.