The Jews, Yeshua, and the Language
Christians Must Reject
Bob Mendelsohn | Sydney
I opened Saturday’s newspaper and was confronted by the enormous headline: “Brethren leader calls Jews ‘wicked’.”
As a Jewish man who believes in Yeshua, I couldn’t simply dismiss it as another story about antisemitism. Much of the language reported in the article is explicitly Christian language. It speaks about sin, unbelief, Judaism, Messiah and the death of Yeshua. Those are among my subjects too. I have spent 47 years speaking with Jewish people about them.
So let me begin somewhere that may surprise some readers.
Jewish people are sinners. I am a sinner. Jewish people need forgiveness. I need forgiveness. We have just remembered that on Yom Kippur this last week. Jewish people need Messiah. I have spent most of my adult life saying precisely that. So my objection to the reported comments of Exclusive Brethren leader Bruce Hales is not that he takes sin seriously, nor that he believes Jewish people need Yeshua.
My objection begins when the word “Jew” itself becomes a category of condemnation.
According to the report, Hales has spoken of “the poor Jew, still in the darkness of Judaism,” of Jewish “lies” and “iniquity,” and of Jews falling “into evil.” More disturbing is the old accusation that Jews are “Christ-killers,” collectively responsible for the death of Yeshua.
There are biblical truths hovering around some of those statements. But putting biblical words together does not necessarily produce sound biblical theology.
Who killed Yeshua?
Some Jewish leaders certainly participated in the events leading to Yeshua’s death. The New Testament does not conceal that fact, and there is no reason Christians should conceal it either.
But neither should we stop there.
Yeshua was executed by Rome. Pontius Pilate sentenced him. Roman soldiers crucified him. Herod was involved. And in Acts 4 Luke gives us an extraordinarily useful summary: Herod and Pontius Pilate gathered together “with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” against Yeshua. That is quite a crowd.
It becomes very difficult after reading that passage to point across history at one ethnic group and say, “You killed Christ.” Christian theology takes us further still. Yeshua said, “I lay down my life of my own initiative.” The Gospel does not ultimately present him as the helpless victim of either Jews or Romans. Christians believe his death was purposeful and voluntary, and that he died because of human sin.
Including mine.
That changes the posture of the person standing at the cross. I cannot stand there pointing at someone else.
The cross is not an indictment of an ethnicity. It is God’s answer to the sin of humanity.
Paul had something to say about this
There is another reason Christians should be extraordinarily careful about how we speak about Jewish people. Paul anticipated the problem. Romans 9–11 contains some of the New Testament’s strongest language about Jewish people and some of Israel’s unbelief. Paul does not pretend that rejecting Messiah is insignificant. But notice what that conviction produces in him.
Not contempt. Grief. He wrote, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart,” he writes. He even says that he could wish himself accursed for the sake of his Jewish brothers and sisters. Later he writes, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.” That sounds very different from disdain for “the poor Jew.”
Then Paul turns directly to Gentile believers and gives them a warning that the Church has too often forgotten: “Do not boast over the branches.” In other words: you have no grounds for superiority. Paul can simultaneously believe that many of his fellow Jews have rejected Messiah and insist that, concerning God’s election, “they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.”
Those two thoughts have to be allowed to stand together.
Evangelism is not antisemitism
This matters particularly to me because I have spent nearly five decades doing something many people in the Jewish community strongly oppose: telling my Jewish people about Yeshua.
I understand why some regard that activity itself as antisemitic. I disagree.
If I believe Yeshua is the Jewish Messiah foretold by Jewish prophets in the Jewish Scriptures, it would be a strange kind of love that required me to keep that conviction away from Jewish people. Christians are entitled to proclaim their beliefs. Jewish people are equally entitled to reject them. But evangelism and contempt are not remotely the same thing.
I don’t speak to Jewish people about Yeshua because I think Jews are uniquely wicked. I speak because I am a Jew who became convinced that Yeshua is our Messiah. I don’t believe Christianity gives me permission to despise the people from whom my Messiah came.
Quite the reverse. Yeshua was Jewish. His mother was Jewish. His apostles were Jewish. Paul was Jewish. The Scriptures from which the earliest believers preached were Jewish Scriptures. The first congregation of Yeshua-followers was overwhelmingly Jewish.
Christianity cannot detach itself from that story and then turn around and treat “the Jew” as an object of contempt.
Words have a history
And Christians cannot pretend that the expression “Christ-killer” arrives without historical baggage. For centuries, collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Yeshua was used to justify exclusion, humiliation, persecution and violence against Jewish communities. That history should make Christians particularly reluctant to use language that transfers the actions of particular people in first-century Jerusalem onto Jewish people living two thousand years later.
We can speak honestly about the New Testament without doing that. In fact, I would argue that we read the New Testament more faithfully when we refuse to do it. The question Christians should ask when confronted with Jewish unbelief is not, “What is wrong with those people?”
Paul gives us a much better response: sorrow, prayer, humility and hope. There is room in Christian proclamation for disagreement. There is room for calling people—including Jewish people—to repentance. There is room for saying that Yeshua is Messiah and inviting others to believe in him.
There is no need to soften those convictions in order to oppose antisemitism. But there is no room for contempt. After 47 years of telling my own Jewish people about Yeshua, I remain convinced of both things: the Gospel should be proclaimed without apology, and Jewish people should be spoken of without disdain.
Those convictions do not compete with one another.
For a Christian, they ought to belong together.
Bob Mendelsohn
Sydney
Email: Bob.Mendelsohn@gmail.com
Web: TheRealBobM.com
Thank you for your consideration of this submission.
