A DECEPTIVE NAME – A DECEPTIVE ASSERTION

I get totally frosted when Jews for Jesus get better coverage than we real Jews do in this quirky little burgh of Greenville. Yesterday, I turned to the religion page and quickly noted that the paper had again failed to carry the announcement of a forthcoming schule adult education program. An instant later, I was greeted by a front-and-center picture of local Jews for Jesus leader, Reverend Paul Cohen, sounding a long blast on a Yemenite shofar to celebrate the dedication of a new Christian outreach center in Easley. Again. Again and again.

[Reverend Cohen, by the way, attended a lecture that I once delivered on “The Jewish Messiah.” He raised a couple of generic “Isaiah 53” questions from the floor and then reassured me afterward that he had “gone easy” so as not to embarrass me.]

Aaaaaaaaaaargh!

I offer no apology for making the politically incorrect contradistinction between Jews for Jesus and “we real Jews.” I by no means intend to impugn the Jewish legitimacy of anyone born of Jewish lineage, nor to deny hope that a Jew who has been drawn into Christianity might one day return to authentic Judaism as a penitent.

I do by every means intend to impugn the claim that the contrived Judeo-Christianity practiced and promoted by the vast majority of Jews for Jesus is a legitimate expression of Judaism for those Jews who embrace Jesus as messiah.

All historical evidence points to a core of Jews who in the early Common Era accepted Jesus as the fulfillment of the Jewish promise of messiah as understood and articulated by the Prophets and Rabbinic tradition. We have every indication that they remained fully observant Jews (kosher, Sabbath, circumcision, and so on) and did not adulterate the concept of messiah with notions of vicarious atonement, the exclusivity of salvation, or Jesus being God incarnate.

On the other hand, the supercessionist Christianity put forth by Paul and his colleagues was clearly directed not at the Jews of their age, but at the Gentiles inhabiting the crescent of the Mediterranean, with whom they were tremendously successful. The observance of Biblical commandments and even the most venerated Jewish rituals was condemned, Sabbath transferred to the sun-worshippers’ Sunday, and doctrines wildly at odds with classical Judaism were injected into the messianic platform. They proffered a religion that was foreign to the early Jewish Christians, and it remained that way until Gentile Christianity took hold in the Roman Empire.

To the extent that today’s Jews for Jesus emulate the practices and beliefs of the early Jewish Christians, they can at least credibly claim the mantle of historic authenticity. We may disagree with them, but we cannot argue with their consistency.

However, we know that that is not the case. The vast majority of self-proclaimed Jews for Jesus place themselves squarely within the arena of Gentile Christianity. Moreover, my sense is that even there, they are treated largely as a sideshow curiosity. Save an occasional ephemeral whiff of Jewish custom (like sounding the shofar), their doctrines, beliefs, liturgy, rituals, disposition to mitzvot, and proselytizing zeal, are all distinctly forms of Gentile Christianity. Worst of all, despite their protests to the contrary, they do not venerate the Jewish Testament (even as the secularist David Ben-Gurion did), but simply use it as a weapon, as the rest of the garden-variety evangelists do, to prove that the rest of us Jews are wrong in clinging to our beliefs and practices.

Folks who call themselves Jews for Jesus are thus engaged in a double-deception, particularly as they attempt to convince ignorant and credulous Jews that Christianity is the fulfillment of – not a digression from – classical Judaism. They grievously misrepresent Judaism, and at the same time, practice and promote a form of Christianity that history indicates was never intended for Jews. Were they to make themselves known not as “Jews for Jesus,” but as “Jews Who Have Chosen to Practice Gentile Christianity,” the results might be equally lamentable, but the honesty would be refreshing.