Rabbi Joseph Telushkin explains why Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah:
From Judaism’s perspective, Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies and therefore is not regarded as the Messiah. The best-known of the prophecies concerning the messianic days is that “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). Since world peace must accompany the Messiah, and world peace (or, for the past 2,000 years, anything remotely approaching it) has not come, clearly the Messiah has not come either. In addition, Jewish tradition teaches that the Messiah will enable the Jews to lead a peaceful and independent existence in Israel. This, too, was not achieved by Jesus.
[. . .]
Though it has been apparent for almost 2,000 years that the messianic days of peace have not arrived, Christians still assume that Jesus was the Messiah. How do they explain this? By arguing that there will be a Second Coming, during which Jesus will return to Earth, and fulfill the messianic functions originally expected of him. For Jews, however, this argument is unconvincing, since the idea of a Second Coming is nowhere found in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians refer to as the Old Testament). This idea seems to have been unknown to Jesus as well, since the New Testament cites him as telling his followers that some of them will still be alive when all the messianic prophecies will be fulfilled (see Mark 9:1 and 13:30). I would guess that the idea of a second coming was formulated by later Christians to explain Jesus’ failure to fulfill the messianic prophecies. In short, from Judaism’s perspective, to call someone who does not bring about the messianic era the Messiah does not make sense.
Telushkin’s answer raises an obvious question: Why did so many Jews convert to Christianity in the first century? Presumably, they were well-versed in the Hebrew Bible and would be skeptical of the claims about a Messiah who disappeared after coming back to life after dying by crucifixion. Why did they believe in Christ? Is the second coming theory a plausible explanation?
(For what it’s worth, I believe that the claim in Mark 9:1 was fulfilled in Mark 9:2-8 and that Mark 13:30 prophesied events that occurred in a.d. 70 with the destruction of the temple.)
September 16th, 2010 | 9:35 am
Isn’t it odd, from a Christian standpoint, that the Rabbi’s explanation nowhere touches on the matter of “resurrection”?
The New Testament describes a resurrected Jesus who appeared to the eleven remaining apostles, to seventy or so disciples, and to five hundred others. Perhaps that’s why conversion in the first century was so widespread. Perhaps that’s why the gospels and Paul’s letters are filled with “stray” names — men and women who were, perhaps, witnesses to the resurrection who could attest to it through the Christian diaspora that followed the killing of James.
Bill Buckley once said that if he were given irrefutable proof that the resurrection had not occurred, he’d have no choice but to become a Jew, since the commandments were, to him, so obviously proof of the divine. Today, irrefutable proof of the resurrection is not to be had. But perhaps something like that was readily available in the first century — believable testimony from the hundreds who witnessed a resurrected Jesus.
For a Christian, isn’t that an easy explanation for the massive conversions that occurred at a time when just being a Christian bore mortal risks?
September 16th, 2010 | 9:45 am
The Jews who converted and came to accept Jesus as Messiah, when He did not meet the Jewish requirements for a Messiah, clearly changed their views on what Messiah means, from a great God-led worldly leader like David or Solomon, to God-become-man whose life, death and resurrection make eternal life with the holy God possible. Undoubtedly they were most influenced by the witness of the early Christians, their bravery and peace, rather than a theory. We should all be such good witnesses.
September 16th, 2010 | 12:23 pm
First, do we know if the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus were convinced he was the Messiah?
Second, do we know how many Jews became followers of Jesus? And were they educated or uneducated? Did a sufficient number of Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah to refute the claim that Jesus did not fulfill Jewish expectations of what the Messiah would be?
Does the large number of non-Catholic Christians in the world imply that the claims of the Catholic Church are not credible? If Luther’s objections to Catholicism were not valid, why did so many follow him out of the Catholic Church?
Also, see “The One Who Is to Come” by
Joseph A. Fitzmyer.
September 16th, 2010 | 12:45 pm
“Why did so many Jews convert to Christianity in the first century.’
They didn’t. I don’t think Christians even considered themselves a separate religion at that time. A number of Jews belived that Rabbi Schneerson was the messiah, but that doesn’t make them non-Jewish.
September 16th, 2010 | 2:35 pm
While it would be interesting to see, no one is going to produce a completely reliable demographic (or even geographic) account of Christianity’s development in the first few decades after the Crucifixion. There simply isn’t enough data. We know at least some Jews converted because Judaism is where Christianity began. (Other early converts almost certainly included Greek “God-fearers” in the area in and around Jerusalem.) At that point, what we know for certain stops.
One sometimes sees early Christianity described as “a religion of slaves,” but again, there is no real evidence for that.* There is evidence, however, that by the time of Paul’s execution, thirty-some years after the Crucifixion, there were a significant number of Christians in Rome, including at least some wealthy Romans. There is also some evidence that Christianity reached into the extended Imperial family a few decades after that.
It would be nice to know just where the Apostles went and what they did. But while there are legends and traditions, some of them supported by small bits of evidence, we can’t really be sure. Did they begin their journeys by traveling among other Jews and preaching to them? Did they concentrate on far-flung Jewish settlements? Or did they make it a point to avoid fellow Jews? We can’t know.
It’s been suggested that by the time Mohammed’s armies stormed out of Arabia, six centuries later, half the world’s Christians lived east of Damascus. How did that happen? Why was it that there were more Christians in the East than the West? Who were the people who became Christians in both places? What were their ethnicities, social class, and previous religions, if any? All this would be good to know with a high degree of certainty.
____________________
*It’s helpful to remember, in this context, that slavery in the ancient world wasn’t based on race, as it was in the Americas. In an age when when whole cities were enslaved (and the remnants of armies, too), a slave could easily have been born the social equal of his master, and might well be, in the case of the Greeks, much better educated.)
September 16th, 2010 | 5:36 pm
Part of it is definational. It’s like bachelors who marry — then they are no longer bachelors!
I note that the Apostles agreed with the rabbi. “the kingdom of God is among you” Jesus warned — it’s not God’s clearing up your environment so you could go on living as you always did, it’s your being cleared up so you can live as child of God.
September 16th, 2010 | 5:37 pm
“How do they explain this? By arguing that there will be a Second Coming….”
No. We explain this by understanding prophesy to be non-literal and the divine logos to yield an astonishing but not untrue reckoning that — in the light of mere human reason and in the persistence of faith and free will — can be missed. Jews then were, and Jews now are, not expecting the Father to throw us the ultimate curveball and present our Savior to be God Incarnate, born in a manger, and massacred on a cross.
To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of rococo of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the “Bible,” as “The Book in Itself,” is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the Spirit” which literary Europe has upon its conscience. — Nietzsche BG&E 52
Coming from the unfriendly and brilliant atheist, the self-styled Antichrist, take it as conclusive.
The conventionally conquering Mashiach is a misinterpretation. The nations are no longer at war within the Body of Christ. Outside the church, where all saints and sinners have occasionally strayed, is strife and death and hell. Christian love is unconventional warfare, but deployed in no less a war, and endowing nothing less than the profoundest peace.
Could not the Lord deliver his people through his people? How are we to identify the Messiah? Through precise human measurements and literal scriptural markers? The conventional reading of the messiah only recognizes the peace of the prison, an enforcement of tranquility from without rather than the well-spring of caritas from within. My Savior says Shalom. “Peace be with you.”
“Why Aren’t Jews for Jesus?” Because the chosen people in the flesh have a role to play yet in history. Confer David Goldman elsewhere on this site. The God of the Hebrews, and His ineffable peace, has been brought to the nations by His Son. Where do I, the child of formerly pagan gentiles, fit in the soteriology of the literally-minded Jew? I want to adore his God, the true God! I want to confess His greatness!
September 16th, 2010 | 7:10 pm
[...] piece in TabletMag (and discussed on FirstThings) by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, who has a new book out about [...]
September 17th, 2010 | 1:38 am
Rodney Stark claims actually that a large number of Jews became Christians over the first four centuries or so.
I also agree with a comment above which states that the Jews as Jews have still a role to play in the history of salvation.
However, not long ago, I was struck while reading someone who claimed that the greatest reason is that Jews, unlike Gentiles go through two deaths in baptism. Like all of us they die to sin in Christ but unlike the rest of us-they also die to ‘being the Chosen People’, the People of the (Old) Covenant as they enter the New Covenant. I was struck deeply by that.
September 17th, 2010 | 5:15 pm
Mr. Nickol, I think the Gospels and Acts make it pretty clear that the earliest disciples of Jesus of Nazareth believed He was the Messiah.
Moreover, while we don’t have an exact number of 1st Century Jews who believed in Jesus, Acts gives us some pretty big numbers. We also have stories of both educated (Paul, Stephen, Barnabas) and uneducated (Peter, John) Jews believing in Jesus.
This, of course, requires that one believe the Biblical record, and that requires Grace.
September 17th, 2010 | 9:18 pm
It is interesting to note that on the whole, Jews do agree with us that the canon has been closed, and the sacrifices in the temple abrogated.
September 19th, 2010 | 8:50 am
Here’s how the people could believe after everything else failed.
The Resurrection Belief of the Earliest Church: A Response to the Failure of Prophecy?
Author(s): Hugh Jackson
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 415-425
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1201712
September 19th, 2010 | 5:26 pm
A more likely explanation for this ‘resurrection belief’ is having met the risen Jesus.
September 21st, 2010 | 3:19 pm
Jesus WAS the Jewish Messiah (http://www.jesusblogspot.com/2010/08/prophecies-of-jesus-in-jewish-bible.html)
The jewish bible prophecised about Jesus, and Jesus will fulfill the final prophecies in His second coming. More and more jews are realizing Jesus was indeed the messiah (jewsforjesus.org).
YESHUA is your savior.
September 22nd, 2010 | 5:33 pm
Why Aren’t Jews For Jesus? It’s a catchy title, but it begs the question. Since Jewish authorities by-and-large defined Jesus-believers as outside the camp for many centuries, they defined a Jew as someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus—hence Jews aren’t for Jesus!
But there have always been Jews who *are* for Jesus. In the first 2-3 centuries, Jews who believed in Jesus didn’t become Christians or convert, or imagine that they had somehow left the chosen people. Rather they simply became followers of Yeshua within the wider Jewish community. Numerous recent writers, among them Daniel Boyarin in “Border Lines” (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), argue that the Jewish-Christian partition took centuries. And in the past century or so, many thousands of Jews have become followers of Yeshua, and an increasing number of us have retained a visible, measurable degree of Jewish loyalty.
So, “Why aren’t Jews for Jesus” is a circular argument, and with all due respect, I’d say that Rabbi Telushkin makes another one, namely, “From Judaism’s perspective, Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies and therefore is not regarded as the Messiah.” There are many and diverse messianic prophecies in the Tanakh, and first-century Judaism accordingly had a wide range of different messianic expectations. Judaism tended to close ranks and sharpen its focus on what the Messiah would and would not do in the long process of its separation from emerging Christianity. But the Talmud retains pictures of a long-suffering Messiah who must await the day of vindication (for example Sanhedrin 98b). Messianic prophecies in the Tanakh make compelling sense in light of the life-changing encounter with Yeshua as Messiah.
September 22nd, 2010 | 7:51 pm
I really do value Rabbi Telushkin and his writings, and wish him and everyone else hag Sukkot sameach.
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