(The following article was written for the use of Jewish Chaplains by the late Rabbi
Abraham J. Feldman, D.D. of Hartford, CT.)
Why Jews Do Not Accept “The Christ"
It seems strange that after twenty centuries, there are still Christians and Jews
who do not know why Jews are not Christians, why Jews do not accept the Christ.
This question is asked of me at almost every church group to which I am privileged to
speak; and many Jews, especially young Jews, because they are confronted by this
question in school and college, in business and social relations, are also asking it. This
is why I decided to attempt to give an authoritative Jewish answer to this question.
Note that I worded the title of this article carefully. I did not say--Why Jews
Reject Jesus. I said --Why Jews Do Not Accept "The Christ". There is a difference
between the two. So far as Jesus was concerned, he was not rejected by Jews or
Judaism. In the words of Julius Wellhausen, a German scholar of the late 19 th and
early 20th centuries, one who was not at all sympathetic to Judaism, "Jesus was not a
Christian; He was a Jew." He did not preach a new faith, but taught men to do the
will of God; and in his opinion, as also in that of Jews, the will of God was to be found
in the Law of Moses and in other books of Scripture. The New Testament accounts
indicate that Jesus was born a Jew of Jewish parents; that he lived his life, which was
brief, as a conscious, convinced, faithful Jew; that he ministered exclusively to Jews -"I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel" (Matthew 15:24); and again,
in the Gospel according to John (4:22), Jesus is reported as saying that "Salvation is
from the Jews." He worshipped as a Jew, where other Jews worshipped and as they
worshiped. When he began to preach, he made it clear: "Think not that I have come
to abolish the law (i.e. the Torah) and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them
but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota,
not a dot, will pass away from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then
relaxes one of the least of the commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called
great in the kingdom of heaven."(Matthew 5:17). "It is easier for heaven and earth to
pass away, than for one dot of the Law to become void" (Luke 16:17)
There was no rejection of Jesus, the man or the teacher. But, he was not
accepted and is not accepted today by Jews, at the valuation which his disciples placed
upon him.
He was one of many preachers in his day in Judea. He was one of many
miracle workers, in his day in his country which was Judea. To be sure, his followers
believed that he was the Messiah who came to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth
in their day. But the Jewish people of his generation was not convinced that he was
the hoped-for-Messiah, and certainly the Kingdom of God was not established on
earth then, neither has it been established to this day. Despite the fact that the New
Testament speaks of "multitudes" which heard him preach, when the first Nazarene
congregation was organized in Jerusalem after the death of Jesus, there were,
according to the Book of Acts (1:15), only about 120 people who were part of it. In
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other words, in his lifetime, Jesus did not create a mass movement. His fellow Jews
had no reason either for rejecting him or accepting him. He made no significant
impact upon his Jewish contemporaries.
Again, the title of this article does not say – “Why Jews do not accept Jesus.” I
worded it rather, why Jews Do Not Accept "The Christ," and this wording is very
deliberate.
Remember the early Nazarenes (i.e., those who believed that Jesus of Nazareth
was the Messiah), the Jewish-Christians in ancient Judea, did not shock the rest of
their fellow Jews. They were Jews in good standing. They were strictly observant
Jews. They were followers of the Torah, the Law and the prophets, and the traditional
interpretations of the Torah. They were respectable members of the community. They
differed from the rest of the Jewry only in their belief that the Messiah had already
come. They believed that while the Messiah had met an ignominious death on the
cross, as did thousands of other Jews during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, he
had been physically resurrected and they awaited his momentary reappearance. The
major body of Jewry was not convinced either that Jesus was the Messiah or that the
Messiah had come.
But outside of Palestine, there was Paul. Indeed, he spent the greater part of
his life outside of Judea. Paul, who was not one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, Paul
before the crucifixion and shortly thereafter, actively opposed the early followers of
Jesus. This Paul later had a change of heart and became a devoted follower to Jesus
although he, personally, had had no personal contact with Jesus, had never spoken to
him and was never spoken to by Jesus. This Paul, after his conversion, became a
missionary to the Gentiles; and he was a zealous, skillful, tireless missionary. Paul, it
was who laid the foundations of a new religion and of a new church, which was not
the intention of Jesus and of which he had no knowledge.
How did Paul do it?
He did it by describing Jesus in a way which no loyal Jew could possibly
accept. The word Messiah is a transliteration of the Hebrew word "Moshiach", which
means "the anointed". Anointing with oil was a method of consecration. The kings of
Judea were always anointed, as are the kings and queens of England to this day. The
High Priest in the Temple of Jerusalem was anointed, as are the priests of the Christian
church even now. And the redeemer for whom the people looked to remove from
them the yoke of Roman oppression was to be one who was consecrated to that task;
hence, the word Moshiach or Messiah, i.e., the consecrated one. In Greek, the word
was translated into "Christ". So Paul, writing in Greek, used the word "Christ" when
he spoke of Jesus, the Messiah who, he believed, had come. Step by step, Paul
departed from the concept of Jesus, the physical man, whom he did not know, and told
of the Christ who appeared to him in a vision on the road to Damascus when Paul was
converted. Step by step – Paul moved to a concept of this Christ of his vision, not the
Jesus of flesh and blood but of a "heavenly man" whom he beheld in his vision. This
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supernatural Messiah or Christ, in Paul's definition, became more and more an integral
part of God, identified with God, "His Son, born of woman" (Galatians 4:4) who was
sent to earth as God's representative with powers and authority which were divine and,
by virtue of this authority, "the Lord of all" (Romans 10:12) and "Lord both of the
dead and the living" (Romans 14:9). As Dr. Joseph Klausner of the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, in a great book entitled "From Jesus to Paul", points out,
Paul went so far as to place God and Jesus on the same footing, "Grace to you and
peace from our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (I Corinthians 1:3). Paul went so far
that twice in his epistle, he put Jesus before God: "Now may our Lord Jesus Christ
himself and God our Father..." (II Thessalonians 2:16); "...the Kingdom of Christ and
of God" (Ephesians 5:15). He preached "Jesus Christ as Lord" (II Corinthians 4:5),
whereas, the Jews applied the name "Lord" only to the One and Only God. Paul
proceeded in this way until it appears that, as Klausner puts it, "God does not do
anything; everything is done by 'His Son' the Messiah. Not only so but men 'are' or
'live' not 'in God'... but 'in Christ' His Son..." Of course, this, no Jew, not even Jesus,
would ever accept.
The first century world in which Paul lived was a world in many respects not
unlike ours. Society was in turmoil; approaching catastrophe was sensed. There was
awareness of decay, danger, destruction, war. Paganism was in collapse. There were
many people, especially among the educated in that pagan world, who had a yearning
and were searching for some kind of escape from the imminent catastrophe. They
asked: How can we be saved? Who will save us?
To them, as "apostle to the
Gentiles", Paul went. He told them of the god who came to earth in the person of
Jesus Christ, who died and rose from the dead, and through whose death salvation was
assured to those who believed in him. And so he urged them: Believe in him and you
will be saved. Paul succeeded in his effort. He gained followers. He established
societies of believers (churches) and thus, the new religion began.
Why do I say the "new" religion?
Because, while Judaism believed in the coming of a Messiah who would
redeem Israel and mankind from the evils of the social order, this Messiah, however
godly and righteous he would be, was, so Judaism believed, to be a man, only a man, a
human being. The Messiah was not the alter-ego of God, not God incarnated in
human form, but a supremely righteous man. The idea of God appearing in human
form meant a surrender of monotheism, of the belief in One God, a belief which for us
Jews is summarized in what has become the watchword, the motto and the slogan of
our faith. Sh'ma Yisrael – "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Such
surrender, Judaism, neither then nor now, would make; and the belief that God would
appear in human form, Judaism neither then nor now would accept.
Paul – once started on this road – went on. To make this Christ who was
somehow identified with Judaism, acceptable to the Gentiles, he took the next step.
He announced that if one believed in this supernatural Christ, one was free of every
obligation to obey the Torah. He preached, "Now we are discharged from the Law,"
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(Romans 4:6) and "Christ is the end of the law (Torah)," (Romans 10:4). And,
because the Christ, according to Paul, thus replaced the Torah, there was, therefore, no
longer any need to keep the rite of circumcision, the seventh day Sabbath and all the
rest of the religious observances of Judaism. Even in the face of the protests of the
Jewish-Christians in Palestine, amongst whom were Peter and James, the brothers of
Jesus, Paul persisted in his abrogation of the Torah and the whole religious discipline
of Judaism. Obviously, then, how could the Jews to whom the Torah and the
commandments were their very life, "their inmost soul", how could they accept this
new doctrine enunciated by Paul? And, of course, they did not accept it.
But, though he abolished the Jewish ceremonial observances, it is a fact that
religion needs ceremonies, as all life does.
So Paul proceeded to establish new
ceremonies to take the place of what he abrogated. He took, for instance, two
ceremonies, that of Baptism and the Fellowship Meal (both of which were known to
Judaism) and he transformed them into sacraments. The "Fellowship Meal" especially
became the Eucharist with its dogma of transubstantiation, whereby the bread and
wine of the Fellowship Meal became, literally, the body and blood of Christ whom
Paul identified with God Himself. "In this divine sacrifice", according to the
declaration of the Church Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, "the same Christ is
present...who offered Himself... on the altar of the cross. "Christ is truly and
substantially present in the Eucharist, body and soul, humanity and divinity.
We, today have no quarrel with Jesus – the man. We rejoice to acknowledge
that through him (and in all truth, we might add Paul, too) Judaism, its Holy
Scriptures, its prophetic idealism, its ethical passion, became known to the whole
world. Nevertheless, on the basis of the facts as we know them and understand them,
we cannot and do not place him above Saadya and Maimonides. We do acknowledge
him as being one who taught Judaism, taught it skillfully and, admittedly, through
circumstances not of our making, has influenced the minds, hallowed the souls and
caught the imagination of a large part of mankind. It pleases us to know that –
considering what Jesus has come to mean to millions of people; considering the
knowledge of God which they acquired because of him; considering the comfort and
spiritual reassurance which, in his name, have been vouchsafed unto so many
generations of God's children; considering the departures from paganism which his
name inspired; I say, it pleases us to see in this a partial fulfillment of the promise
which God game to Abraham, the first of our people, "In thy seed shall all the nations
of the earth be blessed; because thou hast harkened to My voice".
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