Christians and Judaism

April 28, 2024

Most discussions regarding Jews and Christians involve oversimplifications on both sides of the equation.

With regard to Jews: modern Judaism is not simply Old Testament religion, minus Jesus. To think otherwise is to pretend that history occurs in a vacuum.

1) The first thing we ought to observe is that even in Old Testament times, a great deal changed from beginning to end. The situation of Israel’s identity was radically different toward the end of the Old Testament period compared to what it had been earlier. This is not merely because Israel had moved through the stages of clan to tribal nation to kingdom, but in particular because there was an early royal rift between the so-called “ten tribes” and the kingdom of Judah (which comprised the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Simeon, and most of Levi). In the first years of that rift, the first northern king invented new forms of worship for Yahweh so that his people would not be going to Jerusalem; and after a few generations, almost every northern king worshiped other gods altogether. Within a couple hundred years, God judged the northern kingdom and most of the northern tribes were relocated and eventually sown into the peoples of those lands.

The point is that “Jews” does not equal “Israelites” (as Jason Staples has so insistently and ably pointed out). “Jews” is shorthand for “people from the kingdom of Judah,” which is not the same as “Israel.” (This is one crucial point when considering whether a Jewish nation-state actually fulfills the Old Testament promises toward Israel. Answer: it does not, and cannot. The promises envision a reunified Israel, which is not something human beings can achieve.)

2) Even in the first century before Jesus’ ministry, Judaism had evolved and was evolving and was not exactly the faith of the Hebrew Scriptures. Various groups were trying to mark out that faith in various ways, in the face of several centuries of prophetic silence, and in particular, in the face of an awareness of living in a “post-exilic” age of wrath.

This variety of Judaisms already present before the outset of Jesus’ ministry is evident in his interactions with his contemporaries. The Sadducees and Pharisees, quite obviously, were very different, but even the Pharisees had significant differences among themselves; and that does not even take into account other groups (e.g. the Essene community etc).

3) Post-Christian Judaism shifted even further, both from interaction and reaction to the claims of Jesus, as well as to the destruction of the temple and the attending dissolution of what little independence Judea had enjoyed since the return sponsored by Cyrus.

With regard to Christians: modern Christians too are very far removed from the situation of the first generation of believers in the first century. One big reason for this is that early in its history, the Church went from being completely Jewish to overwhelmingly Gentile, and (shortly thereafter) increasingly indebted to thought forms and philosophies more at home in the Greek and Roman world than in the Hebrew Scriptures.

This means that even if we are emphatically opposed to Marcionite tendencies (Marcion pitted the God of the Old Testament against the God of the New as two different, opposing deities), we have to labor significantly to overcome (centuries of) conceptual baggage in order to understand and appreciate the Old Testament. And that understanding and appreciation is actually critical to understanding the New.

It is not the task of Christians to rehabilitate Judaism. Jews who come to Christ will do so by way of seeing Scripture through new eyes.

If we want to be the means God uses toward that end, as we proclaim the good news of Israel’s Messiah, a good start would be in our own backyard, by seeing Scripture through new eyes ourselves.

And, as Paul reminds us, we are not to “boast against the branches.” We have been grafted into our position in God’s people out of mere grace, and God’s purpose is to re-graft branches presently broken off.

Our mission is neither to treat Jews as our enemies, nor to find ways to force some sort of fulfillment of supposed prophecies regarding a Jewish nation-state (there aren’t any).

Our mission toward Jews is the same as our mission toward Gentiles: to treat them with humility and yet with faithfulness, confident in the power and love of the Messiah.