Jesus cannot be the Messiah because more Jewish blood has been shed in his name than in any other name or for any other cause
Certainly, much Jewish blood has been shed in Jesus’ name by violent and ungodly men who have been a total disgrace to Christianity. This is reprehensible and completely inexcusable. Still, your statement is quite exaggerated and also misses a crucial point.
First, more Jews have been killed by people who professed no faith at all in Jesus than by those so-called “Christians” who persecuted our people in Jesus’ name. For example, the atheistic Stalinists who slaughtered our people did not do so in Jesus’ name, nor have the militant Islamic terrorists.
Second, there is something important we must recognize, even though it is terribly painful even to consider. From a biblical perspective, the most common reason Jewish blood has been shed is that we Jews have strayed from God, violated his covenant, broken his laws, and failed to heed his prophets. Just look at the curses for disobedience promised in the Torah of Moses. We could not have suffered so much if we were guiltless as a people. As for hypocritical goyyim (Gentiles) shedding Jewish blood in Jesus’ name—no true follower of Jesus could ever murder in his name—this terribly sinful act is also alluded to in the Torah.
In the next few answers, I’ll address in detail the difficult subject of “Christian” anti-Semitism, discussing the relevant issues with complete honesty and candor. Right now, I want to ask you a question. Honestly, why do you think so much Jewish blood has been shed through the years? Do you believe this was what God intended for us, that this is the demonstration of his love to us and the proof of his blessing upon us? Or do you think something went wrong and that the Lord did not intend for us to suffer as we have? Do you really believe Jesus is the cause of our suffering?
Let me take this one step further and ask you an even more difficult question: What if Jesus really was our Messiah and we were given a choice to receive him or reject him? What would be the consequences of our saying no to our God-sent deliverer?
Almost two thousand years ago, when Jesus the Messiah came to the city of Jerusalem for the last time before his death, he wept over the city, foreseeing the terrible suffering that was about to come:
As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”
Luke 19:41–44
He had longed to do good to his Jewish people, but as a nation, we were not willing. Forty years later Jerusalem was sacked by the Romans. Yeshua knew it was coming. Listen to his words of lamentation:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
Matthew 23:37–39
Right up to the moment of his crucifixion, even after he had been severely whipped and beaten, Yeshua was more concerned with the suffering that was about to come to his people than with his own physical and emotional agony:
A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then ‘they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” ’ [quoting Hosea 10:8] For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Luke 23:27–31
Tragically, this was part of a pattern: Just as we repeatedly rejected the Torah and the prophets, we rejected the Messiah when he came (see also above, 2.1–2.2). Look at how one of the ancient biblical authors described our history during biblical times:
The Lord warned Israel and Judah through all his prophets and seers: “Turn from your evil ways. Observe my commands and decrees, in accordance with the entire Law that I commanded your fathers to obey and that I delivered to you through my servants the prophets.” But they would not listen and were as stiff-necked as their fathers, who did not trust in the Lord their God. They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made with their fathers and the warnings he had given them. They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They imitated the nations around them although the Lord had ordered them, “Do not do as they do,” and they did the things the Lord had forbidden them to do. They forsook all the commands of the Lord their God and made for themselves two idols cast in the shape of calves, and an Asherah pole. They bowed down to all the starry hosts, and they worshiped Baal. They sacrificed their sons and daughters in the fire. They practiced divination and sorcery and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, provoking him to anger. So the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them from his presence. Only the tribe of Judah was left, and even Judah did not keep the commands of the Lord their God. They followed the practices Israel had introduced. Therefore the Lord rejected all the people of Israel; he afflicted them and gave them into the hands of plunderers, until he thrust them from his presence.
2 Kings 17:13–20
(Remember: This is the historical summary provided for us in our own Hebrew Bible. Yes, God’s Word is ruthlessly honest.)
The fact is, we were warned. Few sections in the Torah—or the Bible as a whole—are more clear than Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, the chapters promising blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. There, in explicit detail, God promised our people prosperity and well-being in this world if we were careful to obey his commandments, and threatened us with terrible judgments if we refused to obey (see also the discussion above, 1.10). Unfortunately, as the Lord foretold Moses, our history was to be marked by national disobedience and curses as opposed to national obedience and blessings:
And the Lord said to Moses: “You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them. On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed. Many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?’ ”
Deuteronomy 31:16–17
At this point you might be asking, “What does this have to do with my objection? What does this have to do with all the suffering our people have endured at the hands of Christians who persecuted us in Jesus’ name? What is the connection?”
The connection is simply this: We have suffered primarily because of our sins not the sins of those who persecuted us. In other words, while every hypocritical Christian or fanatical Muslim or murderous Nazi who has done harm to a Jew will be judged by God for his or her own sins, there must have been something wrong on our part as well for us to have suffered so terribly on a national level. This is absolutely explicit in our Scriptures. 71 If we were in good standing with God on a national level, we would be blessed not cursed. Therefore, even though you may find this difficult to swallow, in reality, your argument is with the Torah, not with me. In fact, the Orthodox Jewish author Meir Simcha Sokolovsky, examining Israel’s history in light of the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy 28, makes an interesting observation:
The uniqueness of the Jewish People—the Chosen People—is evident not only in the miracles and the marvels which are an integral part of its history, but also in its chronicles of unmatched suffering and travail. No other nation in the world has been so persecuted, so beleaguered by evil decrees, so victimized by libels, so repeatedly expelled from so many lands as the Jewish nation… . This alone would constitute clear proof that the suffering and agonies which have been visited upon the Jewish people are not mere chance, but the inevitable consequence of the unique relationship between God and his people Israel, whom he has chosen to draw near to himself, meticulously meting out both its reward and punishment. In the words of the prophet:
Only you have I known (befriended) of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your sins. (Amos 3:2)
A son whose father rebukes him for unseemly conduct senses his father’s love and closeness to him even as he is punished. He realizes that his father would not have bothered to punish a strange child who behaved similarly since the matter would have no import for him.
Thus it is with the Jewish People: the irrational nature of its suffering demonstrates that it comes from Heaven. It is a sign and a wonder testifying to the everlasting bond of love between the people of Israel and their God. 72
What I am urging you to consider is that even our suffering at the hands of the church—an agonizing subject that I have written on in depth 73—is partially due to the fact that our continued rejection of God’s messengers, from Moses to Jeremiah to the Messiah, took us out from the place of blessing and protection and made us vulnerable to an onslaught from hell. It seems that the Torah prophesied about this too. 74
Look at Deuteronomy 32:19–21 as rendered in the New Jewish Publication Society Version:
The Lord saw and was vexed
And spurned His sons and His daughters.
He said:
I will hide My countenance from them,
And see how they fare in the end.
For they are a treacherous breed,
Children with no loyalty in them.
They incensed Me with no-gods,
Vexed Me with their futilities;
I’ll incense them with a no-folk,
Vex them with a nation of fools. 75
The principle here seems to be one of tit-for-tat punishment, and it really does apply to the question at hand: Because we rejected the Messiah when he came, the door was opened for us to suffer atrocities at the hands of his false followers. In other words, since we sinned against God (and our rejection of the Messiah was certainly a sin against God), people sinned against us. 76
“But why do you keep saying that the Christians who tortured and killed our forefathers were false followers of Jesus? It seems to me they were the most devoted and zealous followers of all!”
Not at all. The words of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament are absolutely clear: Anyone persecuting, torturing, or killing another human being in Jesus’ name—especially with the goal of converting that person—is not one of his. To the contrary, Yeshua pronounced blessings on the meek and on the peacemakers, praising those who joyfully endured persecution and insult for his sake (see Matt. 5:3–12). He taught his followers to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecuted them and do good to those who hated them (see Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:35). He made it absolutely clear that his people were not to take up the sword in an attempt to defend him or extend his kingdom, warning that “all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matt 26:52; see also John 18:36). In fact, the earliest Christians were so committed to nonviolence that they refused even to serve in the Roman army.
Paul taught the believers to “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse,” calling on them not to “repay anyone evil for evil” and counseling them not to be “overcome by evil” but rather to “overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:14, 17, 21). Peter reiterated this, reminding his readers that they were called to patient suffering, even when it was completely unjust. Why?
… because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.
1 Peter 2:21–24
That is the example every Christian is to follow. 77
So emphatic was this teaching that John, one of the men closest to Jesus during his days on earth, could actually write, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him” (1 John 3:14–15). That is what the New Testament says!
In point of fact, I could cite dozens of similar New Testament passages, along with thousands of moving stories of followers of Jesus being imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered for their faith—true followers of Jesus will be the persecuted, not the persecutors 78—but I can sum up my point here with one statement from the Messiah: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21). In other words, not everyone who calls himself a Christian or Messianic Jew really is one. Rather, all those who do not do God’s will are not followers of the Messiah—even if they perform miracles in his name (Matt. 7:22–23). They may call him Lord, but they deny him by their evil deeds.
To summarize, because we rejected the Messiah when he came (the rejection of no other person could cause such suffering for us as a people), we forfeited the blessings of God and inherited his curses instead, one of which included being persecuted and hounded by godless people, some of whom could even be professing Christians. This is in keeping with a pattern we find several times in the Scriptures: When we sinned against God and were deserving of his punishment, he gave us over to the hands of other godless nations to afflict us, nations such as Assyria or Babylon. 79 The problem is that these nations then went too far in their actions and became themselves the objects of judgment.
Consider God’s words to Assyria:
Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath! I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets. But this is not what he intends, this is not what he has in mind; his purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations… . [Therefore] when the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.”
Isaiah 10:5–7, 12
Some of Israel’s suffering was due to her own sin, and some was due to the sin of her oppressors. As the Lord declared in Zechariah 1:15 (after Judah suffered at the hands of Babylon, Edom, and others), “I am very angry with those nations that are at ease; for I was only angry a little, but they overdid the punishment” (njpsv). Or, as rendered in the NIV, “I was only a little angry, but they added to the calamity.”
This has been the pattern throughout history, from the Old Testament period until today. To one extent or another, we have often deserved punishment as a people, but the punishment was often too extreme, and God then had to punish the punishers too. Yeshua warned us that the Romans would inflict terrible judgment on Jerusalem and its people because we missed the time of our visitation, but the Romans no doubt were far too ruthless and as a result were judged by God as well. So it has continued to this hour. Until we return to God in repentance and acknowledge the Messiah, we remain vulnerable to the malicious attacks and malignant devices of those who hate the Jewish people, and these Jew-haters, who by their very actions prove that they too do not know the Messiah, will be judged by God as well.
This much is clear: The consequences of our rejecting the Messiah certainly cannot be used as a criterion to deny his messiahship!
Wouldn’t it be tragic to perpetuate the error of rejecting him, remaining ignorant of his teachings, and blaming him for the atrocities committed by his false followers, instead of coming to him in faith and reversing the pattern of judgment? I tell you with complete confidence: Jesus is the cure of our every problem, individually and nationally, not the cause of our every problem.
71 For the appeal to Psalm 44 as an apparent contradiction of the Sinai covenant (cf. Ps. 44:17, “All this happened to us, though we had not forgotten you or been false to your covenant …”), see vol. 3, 4.11, with reference to Isa. 52:13–53:12.
72 Meir Simcha Sokolovsky, Prophecy and Providence (Jerusalem/New York: Feldheim, 1991), 79–80.
73 See Brown, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood.
74 Cf. also Sokolovsky, Prophecy and Providence, 63–64, with reference to Deuteronomy 28:64; Sokolovsky notes that the Ramban in his Letter to Yemen “explains this curse as meaning that the Gentiles will coerce Jews to worship their gods. And so it was. From the time of the expulsion nearly two thousand years ago, there has hardly been a generation which has not been subject, in one land or another, to decrees of shemad (forced conversion), when Jews were commanded to renounce their faith and worship other gods on pain of death.” See also his reference to Rashi’s interpretation, ibid., of Deut. 28:36; 4:28. Of course, for this Orthodox Jewish author, following Christianity means worshiping other gods, an incorrect concept to which we will give considerable attention. See vol. 2, 3:1–3.4.
75 According to Rashi, the “nation of fools” refers to deniers of the faith (koperim), in accordance with Psalm 14:1 (“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no god’ ”). Cf. also W. Gunther Plaut, ed., The Torah: A Modern Commentary (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1985), 1559, explaining the reference to “no-folk” in v. 21 as “meaning either a people who are hardly worth mentioning or who are so uncivilized that they do not deserve the name ‘people.’ The poet may not have had any particular nation in mind, his statement meaning that when the time came God would use even barbarians for His purpose.”
76 This is the Rabbinic concept of middah keneged middah, meaning that we are repaid by God “measure for measure.” Cf., e.g., b. Shabbat 105b; b. Nedarim 32a; b. Sanhedrin 90a; note also a clear biblical example such as Hosea 4:6.
77 See also below, the end of 2.7, for a picture of true Christianity and its relation to the Jewish people.
78 For the Orthodox Jewish persecution of Messianic Jews in Israel today, see 2.7. If someone would say that it seems that whoever is in the majority (or has the political upper hand) does the persecuting, then that would indict neither side (i.e., neither Christian nor traditional Jewish) in and of itself. However, examples could be pointed to (such as America, past and present) that were clearly a “Christian” majority but remained largely tolerant of Jewish expressions of faith, being given to some degree of pluralism and religious freedom; see, however, Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford, 1994); Frank E. Eakin Jr., What Price Prejudice: Christian Antisemitism in America (New York: Paulist, 1998). For a more narrowly focused study on a positive side of the story, see David A. Rausch, Zionism within Early American Fundamentalism, 1878–1918 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1979); cf. also idem, Fundamentalist-Evangelicals and Antisemitism (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1993).
79 Note that Rashi and Ramban explain the reference to a “no-folk” in Deuteronomy 32:21 (cited above, and see n. 75) to the Babylonians (literally, Chaldeans).
Brown, M. L. (2000). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 1: General and historical objections. (101). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.