Born and raised as a secular Jew in a university town, I grew up predisposed to consider Christianity irrelevant and impossible. Like many American Jews born in the 1950s, the North Star of my Judaism was the Holocaust, not the Hebrew Scriptures, and certainly not the Christian scriptures.
But in my late teens, through conversations with friends, study of the Bible and other writings, and enlivened by profound yearnings for a deeper reality, I came to understand Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and the New Testament scriptures as a credible source of information about him. I won’t delve deeper into that story here, but will seek to express for my Jewish (and Christian) friends how I, as a modern Jew, find in Jesus of Nazareth the ultimate hope of the world.
My confidence in this perspective and its coherence with my Jewish heritage take their cues from at least four historically-based realities:
- Jesus’ Jewish persona, perspective, and milieu
- The counterintuitive nature of Jesus’ earthly life and teachings
- Jesus’ acquaintance with suffering and grief
- The testimony of Jesus’ Jewish disciples
While not exhaustive, but rather summary in scope, the following exploration of these four themes seeks to explain how and why a modern Jew can follow an ancient Messiah.
Source of Confidence 1: Jesus’ Jewish Persona, Perspective, and Milieu
The Jesus we read about in the four gospels is an itinerant Jewish teacher whose preaching draws from a profound understanding of the Torah, other Hebrew scriptures, and time-honored Jewish traditions. Born to devout Jewish parents, Jesus was an observant Jew who practiced Torah and observed the Jewish feasts. He was called “Rabbi” and “Teacher.” He spent time in Judean and Galilean synagogues and in discourse with people belonging to diverse sects within Judaism as well as people on the margins of respectable society. He visited the Temple in Jerusalem for sacred days and feasts including Passover, Tabernacles, and Dedication/Chanukkah.
Thus, as one fully embedded in the Jewish milieu, Jesus was not introducing a new religion, as some might assume, but rather announcing and actualizing the fulfillment of the one in which he was raised as a child. His teaching aligned perfectly with the ethical proclamations of the Hebrew prophets who called the people of Israel to be faithful to Torah and fulfill its unique mission to be a light to the nations. As Jesus put it, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17). When asked by a righteous young man what he must do to have eternal life, Jesus tells him, “If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” Relatedly, Jesus chastised the outwardly religious people of his time for not faithfully discharging their duties under Torah. If Jesus called out hypocrisy—which he frequently did, e.g., Matthew 23—it was in the name of faithful Jewish living. His zeal for the sacredness of the Jerusalem Temple was such that upon seeing the unholy commerce being conducted there, he physically chased out the culprits, turned over their tables, and thus purified the Temple, echoing the temple purification by the Maccabees 200 years earlier.
Relatedly, all of Jesus’ chosen disciples—later designated Apostles—were Jewish. So were the vast majority of his followers and friends. In fact, it wasn’t until a decade or so after Jesus’ time that Gentiles began flowing into the community of believers in large numbers. That means that the many thousands of Christians living during this time were nearly all Jewish. They were still reading and practicing Torah but now seeing it in the new light of Jesus’ teaching, which often began, “You have heard it said…but I say to you,” as seen in the Sermon on the Mount. It is thus impossible to separate the Christian faith from its Jewish foundations.
Tragically, after Christianity was wedded to the political state of ancient and medieval Rome beginning in the fourth century, a devastating system of marginalization and persecution of Jews began to separate Jesus from his Jewishness in the minds of Christians and Jews alike. Today, even when no malevolent motivation is at work (it has been my experience that the vast majority of Christians harbor no antisemitic feelings), ignorance of the Jewish roots of the Christian faith prevents Christians from appreciating their own religious history and prevents Jews from seriously considering the claims of the Christian faith. I believe that understanding Jesus’ as a Jew offers a bridge back to the foundation that unites Jews and Christians.
Source of Confidence 2: The Counterintuitive Nature of Jesus’ Earthly Presence and Teachings
Periodically fanned into flame by men claiming to be the Messiah and continuously oppressed by Roman occupation, the Jewish people of Jesus’ time cherished messianic hopes that envisioned the re-constitution of the kingdom of David and Solomon. This would be a kingdom where Jews were no longer subjugated by, or answerable to, their Gentile overlords—a condition under which they suffered for centuries with a few exceptions such as the Maccabean period in the second century BCE.
But in the long tradition of the Jewish prophets of old, Jesus offered an entirely different, counterintuitive kingdom—an upside-down kingdom in which “the first will be last, and the last will be first” and where “the greatest among you shall be your servant.” This was the kingdom envisioned by Isaiah and the other prophets, but only dimly perceived until Jesus announced the advent of its presence in the very midst of his fellow Jews.
Everything Jesus taught was counterintuitive to human expectations and priorities. Blessed, Jesus said, are the poor in spirit, as well as the meek and the persecuted. Whoever would find his life would lose it, but whoever would lose his life for His sake would find it. Following the Messiah means taking the road of humility, servitude, and self-sacrifice. Sitting at the table with the ultimate Davidic King requires drinking the cup of His suffering.
The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was unlike the amalgam of expectations that had accrued over the previous centuries. Fast-forward to his death on a criminal’s cross: for the Messiah to be executed by the Gentile Roman occupiers of the Jewish homeland made no sense at the time. One who refused to call down legions of angels to his rescue, who was silent before his accusers, who submitted to being bound and led away to humiliating treatment and gruesome crucifixion was not a picture of the deliverer of Israel in the first century.
So while his close followers and friends accepted Jesus as Messiah, most people at the time found the humble carpenter’s son and victim of Roman brutality to be an unlikely bearer of Jewish messianic expectations. This radically counterintuitive nature of Jesus’ messiahship seems to me to have been impossible for any but the God of Israel to have produced. The Jews were certainly used to the idea that God was in the business of doing the unexpected. And there were many hints of this upside-down kingdom and the Messiah’s role as the suffering servant of God. These clues were strewn throughout the Jewish law, prophets, and writings. One oft-cited example:
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Isaiah 53:6-8a (ESV)
Just as Messiah would be a lowly suffering servant, this counterintuitive reality would also apply to the people who sought to be obedient to God:
For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
Isaiah 57:15 (ESV)
Today, this Messianic kingdom remains as radically different from the institutions of power as it was in the time of Jesus and his friends. Despite attempts to co-opt the Christian faith into political capital, the Messianic kingdom that Jesus proclaimed has nothing to do with such corruption. In a world that rewards strength, worships wealth, and seeks out autocratic political leaders to achieve nationalistic and imperialistic crusades, the upside-down kingdom of Jesus remains counterintuitive in our time. It even serves as a rebuke to the unholy alliance of church and political power. To follow Jesus as Messiah today means to be disciples who hear and follow instructions like these:
You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Matthew 20:25-28 (ESV)
I have come to see this radically counterintuitive worldview as a component of Christian apologetics. This upside-down approach to life cannot have been man’s invention. It is the opposite of mankind’s nature inclinations and the world’s definition of greatness. This was hard for the people of Jesus’ time to grasp, and it is terribly difficult for us to grasp today. Tragically, history is replete with examples of the church aligning itself with earthly power structures, promising to bring about Jesus’ kingdom, only to produce oppression, persecution, crusades, genocide, and pogroms. The counterintuitive kingdom of Jesus is not found in the powers and authorities of this world. In fact, it threatens such powers.
Source of Confidence 3: Jesus’ Acquaintance with Grief and His Personal Suffering
For every Jew, myself included, suffering is an overwhelming aspect of Jewish consciousness. It is a centuries-old trauma stored within the Jewish psyche. Jews have suffered over and over again, most often at the hands of people claiming to be Christians. Suffering as a people touches every aspect of Jewish life. Even as Jews utter the words “never again,” they live in fear that it all could happen again. As a result, the understanding of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah must reckon with the Holocaust and any number of murderous persecutions perpetrated over nearly two millennia.
So my understanding of Jesus as “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” as foreshadowed in Isaiah 53 is essential to my ability to understand and trust in His messiahship. His suffering, his acquaintance with grief, seems to me necessary for embracing the unlikely nature of his place in messianic Jewish/Christian faith. This doesn’t provide a simple solution to theodicy, but it does provide a foundation for engaging with this most difficult of all challenges to faith. Put another way, while Jesus’ sufferings are perhaps not alone sufficient to validate his being Messiah, they are necessary to the divine project and plan for salvation of the people of Israel. Jesus’ personal experience of suffering and his solidarity with those who suffer make him one to whom we can come when we are weary, heavy laden, and looking for rest.
The book of Hebrews in the Christian scriptures, describes Jesus as one who can sympathize with our weaknesses because of his human suffering and temptation. The same book lauds the heroes of the Hebrew scriptures who, like Moses, chose “rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.” (Hebrews 11:25). Enduring suffering while awaiting the restoration of Israel is shared by the Messiah and his people alike. Jesus embodied—quite literally—this painful reality.
Source of Confidence 4: The Testimony of Jesus’ Jewish Disciples
As noted above, Jesus’ immediate followers, his chosen apostles, and people who accepted their testimony, were nearly all Jewish. The entire New Testament was written by or attributed to Jewish authors (with the possible exception of Luke/Acts, which may have been written by a God-fearing Gentile who followed the Judaism of his day without being born into it). The New Testament scriptures as well as secular history tell us that many of the early Jewish Jesus-followers suffered indignity, marginalization, persecution, suffering, torture, and death rather than disown the Messiah in whom they now believed. These are the same sufferings that faithful Jews endured throughout their history as enumerated in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. By the 60s and 70s CE, the Jewish Christians found themselves suffering alongside their Jewish brethren when Roman persecution and destruction came to the whole nation. They fled together in the Diaspora.
The Jewish Christians who followed Jesus could not contain their testimony, even at very high personal cost. They had witnessed something of supreme significance, and we are the beneficiaries of their faith, courage, and testimony. Paul, who having met Jesus in the most unusual way—a divine vision—said of his Jewish pedigree, that he was
circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Philippians 3:5-6 (ESV)
His credentials within Judaism were impeccable, and he continued throughout his life to identify as a Jew. Yet he too suffered many overwhelming trials and tribulations in his mission to preach the good news of Jesus as he went from synagogue to synagogue. Thus we see that Jesus’ closest disciples were devout Jews who saw themselves as apostles—people sent with a mission—ushering in the Messianic age. Their trust in the Rabbi of Nazareth was so strong that they preferred persecution and death to denying Him as Messiah.
Conclusion
There are, of course, many other reasons beyond the four described above why a modern Jew can believe in the ancient Jesus. But the point here is that Jews today, among whom I am one, can embrace Jesus as Messiah—Yeshua HaMashiach | ישוע המשיח—without abandoning their identity as Jews.
Looking back on the pogroms, the ghettoization, the persecutions, the forced conversions, the executions, the antisemitism perpetrated by self-proclaimed Christians against Jews is staggering. It is enough to turn any Jew away from the Christian faith. Thus, any effort by a Gentile Christian to explain his or her faith with a Jewish friend must involve sitting alongside them in acknowledging and grieving this horrendous history. Only then can Jesus be presented, just as Andrew the Jewish fisherman did with his Jewish brother Simon, by saying, “We have found the Messiah.”
Millions of other Jews through the centuries have found Jesus to be the Messiah—the unexpected, counterintuitive Messiah. They have come to see him as the deliverer of Jew and Gentile alike from a spiritually bankrupt and broken world. He is the Messiah who will return, not to build a political empire, but rather “a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 3:13 ESV). Notably, that kingdom can be found already here in its infancy, in the community of disciples in which “there is neither Jew, nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free.” (Galatians 3:28 ESV)
This modest effort to explain how a modern Jew can believe in the ancient Jesus is meant to be a first step for my Jewish friends to see how faith in Jesus is possible. It is predicated on the reality that to believe in Jesus as Messiah does not require one to give up one’s Jewishness. Jesus was Jewish. His best friends were Jewish. His teaching was Jewish. May God grant the reader of these words the ability to grasp this unlikely, unpredictable, yet counterintuitively perfect Yeshua HaMashiach in whom I have found the hope of the world.
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.
Granolativity 