Transcript

We often talk about sharing the faith with Protestants, Muslims, atheists and many non-Christians, but what about Jews?

In today's episode, I'm going to share a few reasons why Jewish people should accept Catholicism as the fulfillment of what God revealed to their forefathers.

Let's start with the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth being the promised Messiah of the Old Testament.

In case you didn't know, we say Jesus Christ or we call him The Christ, because this Greek title means anointed one.

In ancient Judaism, the term was Mashiach, in English, Messiah.

Israel's kings, priests and prophets were anointed with oil and so they were considered messiahs and charged with leading God's people.

But when most people talk about the Messiah or Messiah, they refer to the person prophesied in the Old Testament who would come and usher in an age of peace and restore the Kingdom of David.

The prophesies include, among many others, promises that he would be descended from David, inaugurate a new covenant, suffer for our sins, conquer death and usher in an age of peace in which all people know the true God.

Later, rabbinic interpretations of the Old Testament also claimed the Messiah would bring about the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem which was destroyed in AD 70.

The New Testament shows how Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled messianic prophesies related to his birth in Bethlehem and his entry into Jerusalem while riding a donkey.

When the high priest asked Jesus if he was the Messiah, Jesus said to him, I am and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.

Modern Jews usually reject Jesus as the Messiah because they say either Jesus failed to fulfill genuine messianic prophesies or the Old Testament passages that Jesus did fulfill aren't actually messianic prophesies at all.

For example, consider the suffering servant who is described in Isaiah 53.

It says the servant would be wounded for our transgressions and his wounds would heal us.

He would be like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and assigned a grave with the wicked, but ultimately this servant would make many to be accounted righteous and he shall bear their iniquities.

The earliest church fathers such as Justin Martyr saw these descriptions of a suffering servant being fulfilled in Christ's passion and death.

On the other hand, Jewish critics like Gerald Siegel claim that, quote, The history of Israel down to the ages shows that the servant is none other than Israel personified.

But although Israel was often punished for its own sins or was the victim of other people's sins, neither the Bible nor Jewish history describes the nation of Israel atoning for other people's sins as the suffering servant does in Isaiah 53.

In addition, the earliest Jewish sources after the time of Christ like the Rabbinic Talmud and the Aramaic summaries of scripture that are called the Targums, they all identified the text as referring not to a nation but to an individual, and in many cases that individual was the Messiah.

According to Michael Brown in his book, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, quote, How tempting it would have been for the Talmudic rabbis and their successors to interpret this passage with reference to Israel rather than to the Messiah or any other individual seeing that it played such an important role in Christian interpretation and polemics.

Yet they did not interpret the passage with reference to the nation of Israel in any recorded traditional source for almost 1,000 years.

Nor did they interpret it with reference to national Israel with unanimity thereafter.

However, my favorite Old Testament prophesy referring to Jesus is found in the Deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom, a text not found in Protestant Bibles.

For more on why that is, see Gary Michuta's book, Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger.

In Matthew 27:43 the chief priests say of the crucified Jesus, He trusts in God.

Let God deliver him now if he desires him for he said, 'I am the Son of God.' The passage parallels Psalm 22:8 which says, Let him rescue him for he delights in him, but that verse does not mention the Son of God.

However, the 1611 King James Bible cross-references this passage with Wisdom 2:18, For if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.

The chief priests' appeal to some kind of divinely sanctioned promise that the Son of God which may when the author wrote it was considered an adoptive title, something that Jesus completely fulfilled however in being begotten of God, that the Son of God will be delivered by God.

The parallel between Wisdom 2:12-20 and Christ's life and death are striking.

Here's the passage.

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions.

He reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training.

He professes to have knowledge of God and calls himself a child of the Lord.

He became to us a reproof of our thoughts.

The very sight of him is a burden to us because his manner of life is unlike that of others and his ways are strange.

We are considered by him as something base and he avoids our ways as unclean.

He calls the last end of the righteous happy and boasts that God is his father.

Let us see if his words are true and let us test what will happen at the end of his life, for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.

Let us test him with insult and torture that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance.

Let us condemn him to a shameful death for according to what he says, he will be protected.

I feel like this passage just screams the passion of our Lord more than almost any other passage in the Old Testament, but in response to this many Jews claim Jesus cannot be the Messiah because they said that Jesus did not rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

But although Christ did not rebuild that temple made of stone, he did raise up something even better, his own body which would become the final and perfect sacrifice to which all the previous temple sacrifices were but a precursor.

Christ's resurrection from the dead fulfilled his promise to the Jewish authorities, Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.John tells us Jesus was referring to the temple of his body, and St. Paul makes it clear that all believers make up the body of Christ and have become temples of the Holy Spirit.

In fact, if Jesus truly rose from the dead, then why wouldn't anyone, Jew or Gentile, follow Jesus' command to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit?

Attempted Jewish refutations of Christ's resurrection, like other skeptical arguments, don't work, and these include the very first attempted Jewish refutations, like the claim that the disciples stole Jesus' body.

Check out the link below for my response to Rabbi Tovia Singer's case against the resurrection.

In that response, I show that Rabbi Singer's arguments, like that Christ's followers were mentally ill and hearing voices, his skeptical arguments also cut against Judaism, since one could accuse Abraham and Moses of being mentally ill and hearing voices as well.

In fact, Pinchas Lapide, who was an Orthodox Jew, believed that Jesus rose from the dead based on the historical and biblical evidence.

Lapide writes, If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith based only on auto-suggestion or self-deception without a fundamental faith experience, then this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself.

However, Lapide did not think that Jesus was the Messiah, and so he did not become Christian because he thought that Jesus had not truly brought the Kingdom of God into the world.

This, however, makes a premature judgment based solely on Christ's first coming.

Christians have long held that the Old Testament describes the Messiah coming twice, once as a suffering and rejected servant, as in Isaiah 53, and again as a liberating king, as in Isaiah 11.

Even some Jews from before the time of Christ believed in two comings of the Messiah, though this involved two different messiahs.

For example, the original Hebrew text of Zechariah 6:11 refers to crowns in the plural being made for the king and priest involved in building the temple.

And the first-century apocryphal Jewish work, The Testament of Simon says this, My children, obey Levi and in Judah shall you be redeemed, and be not lifted up against these two tribes, for from them shall arise to you the salvation of God.

For the Lord shall raise up from Levi, as it were, a priest, and from Judah, as it were, a king, God and man.

So shall he save all the Gentiles and the race of Israel.

We should also note that Isaiah 11:9 promises that through the Messiah, quote, The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

In the first century, there were one to seven million Jews and less than 10,000 Christians out of a global population of approximately 300 million people.

That means that less than 3% of the population had knowledge of the one true God, and only 0.0003% possessed the fullness of God's self-revelation as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Today, one-third of the world's population is Christian, and more than half the population, including Jews and Muslims, professes belief in the God of Abraham.

There have been many people throughout Jewish history who claimed to be the Messiah.

In the time of Jesus, this included Theudas or the Egyptian, and more recently it's included people like Sabbatai Savi and Lubavitcher Rebbe.

However, none of these people have come anywhere as close as Jesus to fulfilling the prophecy about causing the knowledge of God to be spread across the face of the earth.

Even Lapide admits the following: The experience of the resurrection is the foundation act of the Church which has carried the faith in the God of Israel into the whole Western world must belong to God's plan of salvation.

Since this Christianizing is based irrevocably on the resurrection of Jesus, the Easter faith has to be recognized as part of divine providence.

Now, it is true that in the ancient Church and during the Middle Ages, some Jews believed horrible things about Christ, like that he was born of an adulterous union, became a sorcerer who misled people, and now suffers torments in hell.

We should pray for anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who curses Christ or even passively rejects Christ.

Damnation is damnation, whether it comes from actively mocking Christ or lazily remaining in ignorance of him.

That's why Catholics pray that Jesus will lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.

In fact, the idea that Christ was a sorcerer was also a common pagan belief as can be seen in the writings of Lucian of Samosata and Celsus, so this wasn't unique to Judaism.

However, while some non-Christians in the past might have ascribed malice to Christ, most non-Christians today, including Jews, consider Jesus of Nazareth to be a misunderstood rabbi whose divine elements can be chalked up to later legends.

They've essentially bought into liberal Protestant theology that tries to turn Jesus into a merely good teacher.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach puts it this way, Once Jesus is stripped of his antisemitic cloak and restored as the wise rabbi and devoted Jewish patriot he was, there is much Jews can learn from him.

But the Jews have not and cannot ever accept Jesus as he exists in Christian theology.

However, Jesus could not be merely a wise rabbi because he made grand claims about himself no self-respecting rabbi would have ever made.

This is a fact C.S.

Lewis made popular with his liar/lunatic lord trilemma.

In Latin, the argument went this way, Aut Deus, aut malus homo, either God or a bad man.

Jesus must either be a morally bad man who pretended to be God, a naturally bad man who hallucinated that he was God, or he really was God.

In Rabbi Jacob Neusner's book, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus, he disagrees with the view of Christ being just a good teacher.

Neusner says Jesus was not like other rabbis who grounded their authority in their interpretations of the ultimate authority for God's people, the Torah.Instead, Jesus made himself the ultimate authority through which the Torah was understood, which leads Neusner to say this: Jesus was not just another reforming rabbi out to make life easier for people.

It is disingenuous to offer Jesus a standing within Judaism that Christianity rightly finds trivial and beside the point.

If not Messiah, God incarnate, then to what grand issue of faith does my affirmation of a rabbi's or a prophet's teaching pertain?

In his response to Neusner, Pope Benedict XVI said, The issue that is really at the heart of the debate is thus finally laid bare.

Jesus understands himself as the Torah, as the Word of God in person.

If Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, God incarnate, then we should put our faith in him and realize how the law has been fulfilled through the incarnation of the Almighty Lawgiver.

Far from rejecting Judaism, the New Testament teaches that faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the one Scripture says would be called Mighty God, fulfills the promises that were first given to the Jewish people.

And unlike other Protestant denominations, Catholicism represents the fulfillment of Judaism in many ways.

Brant Pitre's book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, shows how the one sacrifice of Christ on the altar brings to fulfillment the celebration of the Passover, where a male lamb without blemish and whose legs are unbroken is slain, his blood saves from death, and the lamb is consumed.

In fact, the representation of Christ in the Eucharist is not a mere remembrance, but a sacrifice that makes the past present, which parallels similar mystical elements in the Jewish Passover.

Protestant scholar Anthony Thisleton writes this: The Passover Seder enables Jewish households to participate in the deliverance of the Passover as if they were there.

The Eucharist enables Christians to participate in the deliverance of the cross as if they were there.

They are contemporaneous sharers in the drama.

Hey, guys, after I recorded this episode, I realized there were a few things I needed to add.

First, if you want to help us create content that makes the gospel accessible to everyone, Jew and Gentile, then please hit the subscribe button and support us at trenthornpodcast.com.

Second, like one would find among Muslims, atheists, and Protestants, there are Jews who passionately reject any attempt at dialogue or evangelism.

Consider this clip from Rochelle Leah Boteach.

To say something nice about Aviv Smuly.

I will pray for him.

I will pray for his conversion into Christianity.

Go away with your unholy prayers.

We don't want them.

These Catholic extremists have been trying for 2,000 years to make us Jews Christian, but for 2,000 years, we Jews literally chose to have our throats slit and to be burned alive in public rather than convert to Christianity.

It's not ever going to happen.

We don't want it.

I'd advise my Jewish listeners to not label good faith prayers and attempts to share the gospel as extremism, Jew hatred, which Rochelle calls it later in this clip, or antisemitism.

If everything is antisemitic, then nothing is antisemitic.

I mean, if we truly hated someone, then Christians would withhold the great good of eternal life in Christ and not evangelize Jews.

Antisemitism is evil, but peacefully sharing the true Messiah with those who still wait on him is not antisemitic.

Pope Francis said the following in Evangelii Gaudium: Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus's disciples.

The friendship which has grown between us makes us bitterly and sincerely regret the terrible persecutions which they have endured and continue to endure, especially those that have involved Christians.

And I'd add that Christians who attacked Jews contradicted church teaching that protected Jews from violence.

The pope then says, The church cannot refrain from proclaiming Jesus as Lord and Messiah.

This isn't extremism, it's Catholicism.

Throughout history there have been closed-minded Jews and open-minded Jews.

Saint Paul was a Pharisee who converted, and in Acts 17 he and Silas preached to the Jewish community in Thessalonica.

Acts 17:4 says, Some of them, the Jews, were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, but other Jews started a riot against them.

Paul and Silas then went to Berea where Acts 17:11 says the Jewish population in that city, quote, Were more noble than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with all eagerness.

And while Rochelle may not be interested in the gospel, many modern Jews are interested, as can be seen in books like Roy Schuman's Honey from the Rock, which records 16 Jewish conversions to Catholicism.

And you can find many similar conversion stories online.

That's why I caution fellow Christians against thinking Rochelle's attitude in this clip represents all Jews, or it shows that it's pointless to share the gospel with Jewish friends.

She does not represent all Jews just as ranting fundamentalist pastors do not represent all Protestants, and obnoxious online atheists do not represent all atheists.

Now, some people claim the Catholic Church prohibits evangelism to Jewish people, and they share headlines that say, Vatican tells Catholics not to convert Jews, in order to make their case.

But these stories refer to a 2015 statement from the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews called The Gifts of God are Irrevocable.

However, that statement says it is, quote, Not a magisterial document or doctrinal teaching of the Catholic Church.

It's instead a guide for Jewish-Catholic dialogue.

Even still, the document correctly says the following: The theory that there may be two different paths to salvation, the Jewish path without Christ and the path with the Christ whom Christians believe is Jesus of Nazareth, would in fact endanger the foundations of Christian faith.

Confessing the universal and therefore also exclusive mediation of salvation through Jesus Christ belongs to the core of Christian faith.And when it comes to evangelizing Jewish people, the statement says that the church does not have a specific institution dedicated to evangelizing Jews, probably due to past injustices committed against Jewish people.

Instead, the document says this: While there is a principled rejection of an institutional Jewish mission, Christians are nonetheless called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews, although they should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God's word, and particularly in view of the great tragedy of the Holocaust or Shoah.

The Catholic Church encourages appropriate evangelization to Jews just as it encourages evangelism to all people.

Pope Leo XIV recently wrote a letter to the American Jewish Committee saying that he, quote, Pledges to continue and strengthen the church's dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council's declaration, Nostra Aetate.

And now back to what I originally recorded.

Ultimately, I think what holds back many Jews from converting are cultural rather than theological issues.

Jews have been very strict about not marrying outside their faith, so this has made Judaism an ethnicity as well as a religion.

Judaism almost always grew through the family rather than through proselytizing, though there were exceptions in the first century.

Jesus said that the Pharisees, quote, Traversed sea and land to make a single proselyte or convert.

But you can become Catholic and not have to give up your Jewish identity, even if you may have, like other converts from other religions, strained relationships with your Jewish family because of this salvific decision.

You can't find salvation in Judaism, but you can recognize your Jewish heritage.

In Galatians, St. Paul says, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.

The categories of being a Jew or being a slave or being a man or woman still existed for people who became Christian, but they were no longer determinative of one's standing before God.

Paul even referred to himself in the present tense after his conversion as a Jew, saying in Philippians 3 that he is a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee.

And at his trial in Acts 23, Paul declared, Brethren, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees.

Brant Pitre, Michael Barber, and Jon Kincaid explore Paul's identity in their work, Paul: A New Covenant Jew?

Rethinking Pauline Theology, and they show how this framework makes sense of things like the role of good works in our ongoing justification.

In the early church, the big controversy was not whether Jews could be Christian, it was whether gentiles could be Christian.

The Judaizer heretics thought that you had to belong to the old covenant before you could belong to the new covenant, so they demanded all converts be circumcised, which was an understandably off-putting burden to adult gentile men who might convert.

However, circumcision is not intrinsically evil because God previously commanded it, and it wasn't evil to obtain even after Christ established the church because Acts 16:3 describes St. Paul having Timothy circumcised to make it easier to evangelize fellow Jews.

Paul wrote in Galatians 5:6, For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.

In Romans 14, Paul speaks of our liberty in Christ and how people should not be judged for what holy days they observe.

Of course, it's wrong to get circumcised or to celebrate something like Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement in order to be saved, or even just to please God, because we're saved by faith in Christ, not the Mosaic Law.

The Council of Florence condemned this error in the 15th century, but it did not condemn participating in some Jewish celebrations for non-salvific reasons, like appreciating one's heritage that is also rooted in salvation history.

In 1988, the U.S.

Conference of Bishops said in the document God's Mercy Endures Forever that, quote, Seders arranged at or in cooperation with local synagogues are encouraged.

So a Jewish Catholic could celebrate a Seder meal during Passover, since he also knows that the Eucharist is the fulfillment of the Passover.

Or he could light a menorah at Hanukkah because John 10:22 describes how Jesus was at the temple for the Feast of Dedication, which is the meaning of the Hebrew word Hanukkah.

It's especially appropriate as a Catholic Jew to celebrate Hanukkah because the origins of this holy day are found in the Catholic Old Testament, specifically the Books of the Maccabees.

So if you are Jewish, I would encourage you to at least see how Catholicism would be the most likely Christian fulfillment of Judaism, with the Mass, for example, having many parallels to Jewish liturgy.

However, I think the biggest obstacles for many Jews to convert is the high social cost of converting.

Like devout Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and other religious sects, Jews tend to live in tight-knit communities, and leaving the Jewish faith can result in losing many of these familial bonds.

That's why it's important for Catholics who want to welcome Jews into the church to create a space that doesn't focus hostility or animus towards Jewish people, but treats them like any other group of non-Christians who stand in need of the Gospel.

Indeed, this was the cost that the first Christians faced who were Jewish and accepted Jesus.

The Bible says Christ's first Jewish followers had to give up family, lands, they would be put out of the synagogues and even be killed.

St. Stephen became the first martyr to endure this fate.

Throughout Christian history, be it ancient Rome, Barbarian Europe, feudal Japan, and modern-day Islamic countries, people gave up family ties and even their own lives out of love for their savior Jesus Christ.

But Catholicism gives abiding hope in the face of the world's evils.

For example, while only about half of Jews believe in heaven, 90% of Catholics believe in heaven.

This is rooted in the church's unassailable teaching that God will right every wrong, including the wrongs many Jews regrettably suffered at the hands of Christians who failed to live up to Christ's example, who himself said in John 4:22, Salvation is from the Jews.

St. Paul likewise says the Jewish people, like all spiritually unregenerate people, have enmity with God if they reject the Gospel.

But unlike other non-Christians, God has a special love for the Jewish people.

Paul says, They are beloved for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.

And Paul expresses confidence that in the future, all Israel will be saved.

So we should not write off Jewish people, or any person for that matter, as being too far removed from the saving grace of God.

And if you are Jewish or you're interested in Jewish conversions to Catholicism, I recommend the anthology Honey from the Rock: Sixteen Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ, and the other book by the author of this anthology, Roy Schoeman, that's called Salvation is from the Jews.

And if you want answers to other Jewish objections to Jesus, I recommend the appropriately titled four-volume series Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus by Michael Brown.

Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.