Why The Jews Did or Did Not Reject Jesus

It’s coming on ten years since Thomas Cahill published How the Irish Saved Civilization. The book gave new life to a genre of tribal literature in which extraordinary claims are made on behalf of one people or another to whom we are indebted for their crucial contribution to creating or preserving almost everything we hold dear. Now we have David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History (Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95). We should all be very grateful that the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah because, if they had not, the Christian movement would have remained merely a sect within Judaism rather than becoming the world-transforming force that gave us Western civilization. That’s the argument in a nutshell, most of the rest of the book being devoted to why Jews must continue to reject Jesus. And, in fact, says Klinghoffer, “the Jewish rejection of Jesus has remained a constant.”

As a young journalist, Klinghoffer discovered and fervently embraced his Jewish identity. This story is told in his frequently moving spiritual memoir The Lord Will Gather Me In. He has also written for these pages. His “Anti-Semitism Without Anti-Semites” (FT April 1998) prompted a stinging rebuke from Rabbi David Novak of our editorial board (FT August/September 1998). Nothing daunted, Klinghoffer continues on his somewhat eccentric way, provocatively probing the Jewish-Christian connection. He is closely associated with Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition who has been a prominent defender of Christians falsely accused of anti-Semitism and has argued, in the face of powerful Jewish animosity, that the “religious right” is, all in all, a good thing for America and a good thing for Jews.

In his new book, Klinghoffer is admiring of Christ-ianity’s civilizational achievements, although not of its theology. He rebuts the claim that it is anti-Semitic to say that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, citing Maimonides and other Jewish authorities who say the Jews were right to eliminate a false messiah. He debunks the notion that Nazism and the Holocaust were a product of Christianity, and he underscores Nazi hatred of Christianity and the Judaism from which it came. He treats sympathetically Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, and is witheringly critical of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations that thrive by exploiting irrational fears of anti-Semitism in America. In sum, Klinghoffer is in many respects Christian-friendly.

Except for the fact that Christianity itself is premised upon the fatal falsehood that Jesus is the Messiah. Much of the book is given to a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of the claim that Jesus fulfilled the messianic promises of the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament. These arguments will be of interest mainly to those who describe themselves as Hebrew Christians or Messianic Christians, and who believe they are fulfilled as Jews by becoming disciples of Jesus. The arch-villain in Klinghoffer’s story is the apostle Paul who, he says, radically rejected Judaism and invented a new religion dressed up in “biblical trappings.” Although Klinghoffer excoriates the liberal theological reductionisms of the nineteenth century, both Jewish and Christian, at this point his argument is oddly similar to a long liberal tradition of blaming Paul for distorting the more attractive religion of Jesus. Along with many Christians, he fails to appreciate the implications of the fact that Paul’s epistles were written well before the gospel accounts of Jesus. In part because of their prior placement in the New Testament, it is a common error to think that the seemingly more straightforward gospel accounts were later and complicatedly “theologized” by Paul, whereas, in fact, Paul’s writings reflect what was generally believed about Jesus in the community that later produced the gospel accounts.

This tendency to get things backwards is at the crux of Klinghoffer’s argument. He writes, “We arrive here at the very heart of the difference between Judaism and the religion that Paul originated. The difference is still observable in the faith of Christians, as compared with that of Jews, down to our own time. Followers of Paul read and understand the Hebrew Bible through a certain philosophical lens—they bring to it the premise that Jesus is the savior, that salvation is from him. They read the Old Testament from the perspective of the New. They prioritize the New over the Old.”¨C11C¨C12CWell, yes, of course. Only some Messianic Christians and Jews such as Klinghoffer think that the truth of Christianity stands or falls on whether, without knowing about Jesus in advance, one can begin with Genesis 1 and read through all the prophecies of Hebrew Scripture and then match them up with Jesus to determine whether he is or is not the Messiah. As with Saul on the road to Damascus, Christians begin, and Christianity begins, with the encounter with Christ. As with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the first Christians, who were Jews, experienced in that encounter the opening of the Hebrew Scriptures, revealing, retrospectively, how they testify to Jesus as the Christ. Klinghoffer writes, “The resurrection works as a proof that Jesus was ‘the Christ’ only if you have already accepted his authority to render interpretations of Scripture contrary to the obvious meaning of the words. That is, it works only if you are already a Christian.” The more one takes seriously Old Testament prophecy, writes Klinghoffer, “the more convinced he becomes that it is awfully hard to make Christian doctrine sit naturally on its presumed foundation, the Hebrew Bible. Yet even the arguments based on prophecies obviously aren’t perfectly invulnerable to refutation. Otherwise there would be no Christians, or at least no thoughtful Christians. They would all be Jews.”¨C13C¨C14CThis is, I’m afraid, gravely muddled. The argument, in effect, is that Jews reject Jesus because they are already Jews, and the mark of being a Jew is that one rejects Jesus. This is quite unconvincing in its circularity. Christian thinkers, including Paul, viewed Christ and the Church as the fulfillment of the promise to Israel not because they were engaged in tit-for-tat exegetical disputes with Jews over what Klinghoffer recognizes are often ambiguous and enigmatic Old Testament prophecies. Christians early on, and very importantly in engagement with Greek philosophy, developed a christology that entailed an understanding that all of reality, including the history of Israel, finds its center in Christ who is the Word of God (the Logos), the image of the invisible God in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1), and, finally, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. These philosophical and theological developments, almost totally ignored by Klinghoffer, form the matrix within which the Church—mainly Jewish in its beginnings—understood Israel and its Scriptures. For the early Christians, as for Christians today, the person of Jesus Christ was revelatory also of the history and sacred writings of Israel, of which he is the fulfillment.

The Other Jews

Klinghoffer is involved in an exercise of “what if” counterfactual historical revisionism. In fact, the early Christians, both Jewish and gentile, made no secret of the Jewish grounding of their faith. The second century Marcion who pitted Christianity against the history of Israel was condemned as a heretic. Many pagans did deride Christianity as a “Jewish sect,” which did not prevent its continuing growth. Moreover, those Jews who did not accept Jesus were themselves involved in reinventing Judaism after the destruction of the second temple in 70 ad. It is not too much to say that there were two competing versions of the history of Israel that were presented to the world: what became known as rabbinical Judaism on the one hand and the Church on the other.

The very title of the book, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, is highly problematic. Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire (for some reason, Klinghoffer says five million). That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including today’s State of Israel, while those in the diaspora were very much part of the establishment in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople. At one point Klinghoffer acknowledges that, during the life of Jesus, only a minuscule minority of Jews either accepted or rejected Jesus, for the simple reason that most Jews had not heard of him. Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians. What if the great majority of Jews did not reject Jesus? That throws into question both the title of the book and Klinghoffer’s central thesis. The question can be avoided only by the definitional legerdemain of counting as Jews only those who rejected Jesus and continued to ally themselves with rabbinical Judaism’s account of the history of Israel.

There are other parts to Klinghoffer’s telling of the story of Judaism. He is admittedly uneasy about “revealing” some of the nastier and very crude aspects of Jewish polemics against Christianity over the centuries. There is, for example, the rabbinical claim that Jesus and those Jews whom he misled are forever consigned to suffering in boiling excrement. But, as he notes, such unpleasantries have long been a staple in anti-Semitic literature and are today widely circulated on the Internet. He does not mention that they are vibrantly alive today in hyper-Orthodox literature, mainly written in Hebrew, in both Israel and this country. The viciousness of anti-Jewish polemic by Christians over the centuries is, of course, much better known. Determining who has said nastier things about whom is a bootless enterprise—as bootless as beginning with Genesis 1 and trying to connect the dots of prophecy in order to “prove” that Jesus was or was not the promised Messiah.

Klinghoffer ends on the note that Jews are elected by God to be the “nation of priests” whose duty is to minister spiritually to the “congregation” of Christians, Muslims, and others who will, God willing, one day come to recognize the truth of the religion preserved by those who reject Jesus, which is the decisive mark of being a Jew. While he is deeply appreciative of the gift that America has been for Jews, he does not seriously engage the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue here as represented by, for instance, David Novak’s writings. Nor does he mention the historically unprecedented statement of 2000, Dabru Emet (“To Speak the Truth”), signed by hundreds of Jewish scholars and proposing a constructive understanding of Christianity (see FT November 2000). That statement says, among other things: “Jews and Christians worship the same God. Before the rise of Christianity, Jews were the only worshipers of the God of Israel. But Christians also worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, creator of heaven and earth. While Christian worship is not a viable religious choice for Jews, as Jewish theologians we rejoice that, through Christianity, hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel.”

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point of Western History is not a work of scholarship, which is not necessarily a criticism. The author is a journalist who has read widely, if somewhat eclectically, and offers a provocative thesis that will, I expect, receive considerable attention. His many and contentious pages on the details of Old Testament prophecy will be chiefly of interest to a minority of Jews and Messianic Christians who will likely continue their exegetical disputes until Our Lord returns in glory. The larger claim that the Jewish rejection of Jesus made Western civilization possible is an exercise in tribal boosterism that, like Thomas Cahill’s stylish pandering to Irish pride, will not stand up under closer examination. As I said, David Klinghoffer is in many ways a friend of Christians and Christianity, but his latest book contributes little to understanding what it means to be a Christian or a Jew—an understanding that, as St. Paul ponders in Romans 9 through 11, continues to be deeply problematic in a manner that is not untouched by the mystery of God’s hidden purposes.