Doesn’t belief in Jesus mean you’re no longer Jewish? As I understand it, belief in Jesus and Jewishness in any form are incompatible.
You have unknowingly repeated one of the great lies of the Inquisition, namely, that one can be faithful to Jesus only by totally repudiating one’s Jewishness. To the contrary, everything about belief in Jesus was and is Jewish, in the purest and most biblical sense of the word.
I understand what you’re thinking. You obviously believe that Jesus was the founder of a new religion called Christianity, a religion for the Gentiles. And so, if a Jew follows this “goyyische” (Yiddish for “Gentile”) religion he is no longer a Jew. Right?
This would be like a Hindu becoming a Muslim. We wouldn’t call him a Hindu for Muhammad, would we? Why then do we call ourselves Jewish believers in Jesus, something our critics call a contradiction in terms? The answer is simple: Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the one spoken of in our Hebrew Bible. Believing in him is the most Jewish thing a Jew can do.
Let’s think this through for a moment. Although Yeshua came into the world that all people might be saved from their sins and brought into right relationship with God, he came first and foremost for his own Jewish people. It was only when we rejected him as a nation—just as, centuries earlier, we rejected the Torah and the prophets as a nation—that his message was taken to the Gentiles, who embraced him by the thousands.
In time, there were so many Gentile believers in the Messiah—many of whom forgot the Jewish, biblical roots of their faith—that it almost seemed as though Christianity was a new, foreign religion, something not for Jews at all. 5
What made matters even worse was that the emerging Rabbinic Jewish community began to disassociate itself from the many thousands of Jews who were followers of Jesus the Messiah. These Messianic Jews now found themselves between a rock (the increasingly Gentile church) and a hard place (the increasingly unfriendly Rabbinic community).
Over the course of the next thousand years, Gentile Christians began to welcome Jews into their midst only if they renounced all ties to their Jewishness, while the Rabbinic community would welcome them only if they renounced all ties to Jesus. You need to see this for what it is: a monstrous perversion of the truth and a tragic twist of history.
Do you remember what happened after the Vietnam War? It was bad enough that we fought a war we had little intention of winning. It was bad enough that so many lives were lost. But there was something even worse: As these courageous veterans returned from the jungles of Vietnam—many of them mentally and physically scarred, others now addicted to drugs—we gave them almost no welcome. We were embarrassed about the war, and we took out our shame on them.
Rather than welcoming them back as heroic Americans (as we did with our previous veterans), we almost disassociated ourselves from them, and many of them never recovered from that emotional wound. They of all people should have been embraced by their fellow Americans, in whose name they went to Vietnam and under whose flag they fought.
Now, there is something strangely similar about the fate of Jewish followers of Jesus. The Jewish apostles brought the message of the Jewish Messiah to the Gentile world, and yet, centuries later, these Gentile Christians told Jews who wanted to know more about Jesus, “If you want to believe in him, you must abandon everything Jewish!” 6 Jews who were baptized during the Middle Ages even had to promise to eat pork. 7
Talk about forgetting your roots! In fact, when it was alleged that one of the medieval popes was actually Jewish, Bernard of Clairvaux exclaimed, “To the shame of Christ, a Jew now occupies the seat of St. Peter.” Really! (By the way, this “St. Peter” is none other than Shimon Kepha, the Jewish fisherman who became one of the first disciples of Jesus.) So it was that, figuratively speaking, Jews helped build the house from the foundations up, and then they were told that as Jews they were not welcome.
After the forced conversions of the Crusades, some Jews outwardly professed faith in Jesus while secretly practicing Judaism. It was one of the purposes of the Inquisition to weed out and destroy these people even if, in theory, there were sincere Jewish Christians who believed that faith in Jesus and being Jewish were compatible. Unfortunately—and I’m sure, quite unknowingly—you have repeated the lie of the Inquisition. 8
As in the case of the Vietnam veterans, Jewish people have often treated Jewish Christians as if there is something wrong with us, as if, by being loyal to our God and our Messiah, we are sinning. Instead of recognizing that we have had to go against the grain of tradition (both Jewish and Christian) for the sake of the truth, and instead of understanding that our faith in Jesus has caused us to rediscover just how Jewish we are (see below, 1.5, for more on this), Jews have called us deceivers, mercenaries, and apostates.
In fact, by the end of the first century, there is evidence that religious Jews were taught to curse Jewish Christians three times daily in their prayers, a practice that persists (in some circles) to this day. (This practice was instituted at least two centuries before the persecution of Jews by so-called Christians. At some point toward the end of the first century, some of the Rabbinic leaders either composed or adapted a prayerful curse to be recited against believers in Yeshua—specifically Jewish believers in him.) 9
Of course, we are willing to suffer these things and we embrace them gladly (see Matt. 5:10–12; Acts 5:41; Phil. 1:29; Heb. 13:12–14). Jesus even told us that we would be put out of the synagogues and that whoever killed us would think he was doing God a service (John 16:2). The fact is, however, that belief in the real Jesus (i.e., the Yeshua of the Bible and not the one of later, man-made tradition) and true Jewishness (which does not always equate with traditional Jewishness) are compatible, and when a Jew embraces Yeshua the Messiah, he becomes more Jewish than ever before. Just ask any of a thousand Jewish followers of Jesus what happened in their lives once they believed in him. You’ll be amazed at what you hear.
The bottom line is this: Being a faithful Jew and believing in Jesus the Jewish Messiah are totally compatible.
5 For historical discussion, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, Who Was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian Schism (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1985), and see 2.7.
6 Already, in just the second century c.e., the church leader Ignatius could say that “if any one celebrates the Passover along with the Jews, or receives emblems of their feast, he is a partaker with those that killed the Lord and His apostles,” cited in David A. Rausch, A Legacy of Hatred: Why Christians Must Not Forget the Holocaust, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), 20. More broadly, Ignatius claimed that “it is wrong to talk about Jesus and live like the Jews. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism but Judaism in Christianity.” See his Epistle to the Magnesians 10:3, cited in Samuel Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity (Rome: Pontificial Gregorian Univ. Press, 1977), 214. For the interesting view that the primary factor behind such polemicizing was the tendency of Christians to embrace Jewish people and Jewish forms of worship and ritual, see Oskar Skarsaune, “The Neglected Story of Philo-Semitism in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages,” Mishkan 21 (1994): 40–51.
7 For a sampling of some of these medieval baptismal formulas, cf. Brown, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood, 95–97, with references.
8 See 2.7; for important, recent studies on the Inquisition, cf. B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1995); idem, Toward the Inquisition: Essays on Jewish and Converso History in Late Medieval Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1997), esp. 183–200; Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New Haven: Yale, 1998); and see the works cited in Brown, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood, 237.
9 For discussion of this “malediction against the heretics” (the birkat hamminnim), cf. Reuven Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity,” in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E. P. Sanders, A. I. Baumgarten, and Alan Mendelson, vol. 2, Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 226–44; and contrast with Schiffman, Who Was a Jew?, 53–61. For further references, cf. Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1994), 18–19 (with n. 53 on 220–21), and see also 2.6–2.7.
Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 1: General and historical objections. (7). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.