Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History - Hardcover

Klinghoffer, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385510217 ISBN 13: 9780385510219

Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

Synopsis

Why did the Jews reject Jesus? Was he really the son of God? Were the Jews culpable in his death? These ancient questions have been debated for almost two thousand years, most recently with the release of Mel Gibson’s explosive The Passion of the Christ. The controversy was never merely academic. The legal status and security of Jews—often their very lives—depended on the answer.

In WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS, David Klinghoffer reveals that the Jews since ancient times accepted not only the historical existence of Jesus but the role of certain Jews in bringing about his crucifixion and death. But he also argues that they had every reason to be skeptical of claims for his divinity.

For one thing, Palestine under Roman occupation had numerous charismatic would-be messiahs, so Jesus would not have been unique, nor was his following the largest of its kind. For another, the biblical prophecies about the coming of the Messiah were never fulfilled by Jesus, including an ingathering of exiles, the rise of a Davidic king who would defeat Israel’s enemies, the building of a new Temple, and recognition of God by the gentiles. Above all, the Jews understood their biblically commanded way of life, from which Jesus’s followers sought to “free” them, as precious, immutable, and eternal.

Jews have long been blamed for Jesus’s death and stigmatized for rejecting him. But Jesus lived and died a relatively obscure figure at the margins of Jewish society. Indeed, it is difficult to argue that “the Jews” of his day rejected Jesus at all, since most Jews had never heard of him. The figure they really rejected, often violently, was Paul, who convinced the Jerusalem church led by Jesus’s brother to jettison the observance of Jewish law. Paul thus founded a new religion. If not for him, Christianity would likely have remained a Jewish movement, and the course of history itself would have been changed. Had the Jews accepted Jesus, Klinghoffer speculates, Christianity would not have conquered Europe, and there would be no Western civilization as we know it.

WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS tells the story of this long, acrimonious, and occasionally deadly debate between Christians and Jews. It is thoroughly engaging, lucidly written, and in many ways highly original. Though written from a Jewish point of view, it is also profoundly respectful of Christian sensibilities. Coming at a time when Christians and Jews are in some ways moving closer than ever before, this thoughtful and provocative book represents a genuine effort to heal the ancient rift between these two great faith traditions.

About this title

About the Author

David Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward, is the author of in The Lord Will Gather Me In and The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism. He lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and children.

From the Inside Flap

The age-old debate about Jewish culpability in the death of Christ was seemingly put to rest. The recent furor surrounding Mel Gibson s The Passion of the Christ, however, has reopened the wound, and many fear that it will undermine a century of Jewish-Christian dialogue. David Klinghoffer brings a fresh perspective to the claims and counterclaims in this authoritative reexamination of the origin of the controversy and its impact on history.

Far from denying the role Jews played in the crucifixion, Klinghoffer provides ample evidence that Jewish sages accepted full responsibility for it. Exposed to many would-be messiahs, the Jews of Palestine regarded Jesus with a sense of curiosity tempered by understandable skepticism. Opposition to him arose not in response to his rebellious activities but to his individualistic, often unorthodox, interpretations of the law. According to Biblical prophesies, the coming of the Messiah would be marked by a series of specific events, including the gathering of exiles, the return of a Davidic king, and the reconstruction of the Temple. Because none of these events occurred during Jesus lifetime, Klinghoffer argues, the judgment against Jesus by Jewish elders was natural and inevitable. In condemning Jesus, they were upholding a basic tenet of their religion: the belief that no man could interpret the Torah on his own authority.

The Jerusalem Church established by Jesus followers remained a wholly Jewish movement. In a persuasive, groundbreaking conclusion, Klinghoffer shows that the schism between Judaism and Christianity was a result not of the Jewish rejection of Jesus but of the rejection of Paul. Claiming that Christ transcended the written Torah, Paul s preachings clearly represented a new religion one that would spread throughout Europe and change the course of history.

Reviews

The provocative title of this unfocused book implies that it contains an answer to the question of why the Jews rejected Jesus. Indeed, Klinghoffer, whose memoir The Lord Will Gather Me In was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, buries several answers in this study's dense verbiage, but the reader has to struggle to locate them. After numerous citations, many from obscure sources, demonstrating erudite research, Klinghoffer reveals that the Jewish rejection of Jesus was "the founding act of Western civilization." It facilitated the development of Christianity and Islam as mass religions. Thus, according to Klinghoffer, the rejection of Christ was a "civilization-creating act." He arrives at this determination by examining "God's perspective," "God's intention," "God's purposes" and "God's plan." This remarkable display of chutzpah leads Klinghoffer to assert that the Jews are the "priesthood" and the Christians and Muslims are the "laity." Before making his pronouncement, Klinghoffer reviews Jewish history from the year A.D. 27 to modern times. At times, he criticizes Jewish liberals and secularists, and raises hard questions about the directions modern Judaism has taken. Some readers may find that the effort required to read this book is rewarded by its piquant conclusion: that the trajectory of Western history would have been entirely altered if the Jews had accepted Jesus. (Mar. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Klinghoffer (a conservative writer and practicing Jew) frames his thesis by explaining what the Jews of Jesus' time would have expected from the Messiah whom they were awaiting. He bluntly notes that Jesus did not fulfill these expectations (the defeat of Israel's enemies and the establishment of universal peace), and he carefully debunks the biblical texts, such as Isaiah, that Christians claim prove otherwise. Using Talmudic sources that are little known or barely acknowledged, he paints a more complete picture of what the Jewish community has thought about Jesus through the ages. Writing clearly and cogently, Klinghoffer offers detailed analyses of the prisms through which Jews and Christians view each other. Moreover, the book concludes that Jewish rejection was the best thing that could have happened to nascent Christianity. Even incorporating the teachings of Jesus, Judaism with its many commandments (including circumcision) never would have been accepted by the European masses, and the course of Western civilization would have been forever different. Provocative reading for those on both sides of the Jewish-Christian divide. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

chapter one


Before Christ
Judaism in the Year 27


One of the curious things about Mel Gibson's Jesus movie, The Passion of the Christ, is the part the Jewish priestly establishment, headquartered in the Jerusalem Temple, plays in arresting Jesus and turning him over to the Romans. As viewers, we are supposed to be moved by this to personal repentance, recognizing our own sinfulness in the act of betrayal and violence. But the villainy of Gibson's Jews is hard to recognize because it makes no obvious sense. We are intended to believe the Temple priests are after Jesus because of a big dangerous following that's going to crown him Messiah, but nowhere in the film do these massively numbered followers ever make an appearance. From all the evidence of The Passion, you would think Jesus had about ten disciples, twenty maximum. So why were certain Jews so intent on seeing him dead? Gibson leaves us with no clear idea.

Much the same difficulty is posed by the Gospels themselves. From a straightforward contemplation of the text, it is not immediately clear what gets the Jews who object to Jesus so worked up. If we try to read the Gospels together, imagining them as forming a single integrated story (to the extent possible, since they are marked by disagreements as to narrative detail), we find the Jews mounting an emotional staircase leading from initial warmth, to puzzlement and perplexity, to distress, to self-righteous annoyance, and finally to a murderous rage.

When Jesus begins his ministry around the year 28, teaching in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth, the congregation at first "spoke well of him, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded from out of his mouth."(1) Then, on hearing more of his preaching, "all in the synagogue were filled with wrath."(2) Other Jews, however, were moved to follow him, and on one occasion his disciples and others stood about as he sat on a mountain—the Sermon on the Mount—at which "the crowds were astonished . . . for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes."(3) The Pharisees, a Jewish faction whom we'll meet shortly, get wind of the interest and controversy Jesus is stirring up. They "murmur against his disciples," who are judged to be morally unsuitable.(4) When these self-righteous Jews find him overseeing the disciples, who are plucking grain in seeming violation of the Sabbath, "the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him."(5) When Jesus heals a man on a Sabbath, the same Jews again "went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him."(6) When Jesus seeks to justify himself, citing the authority of God, his "Father," then "the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God."(7)

We need to step back from our assumptions about the Gospel text. Through familiarity with the general story line—we all know Jesus had detractors among his fellow Jews—we tend to assume it was only natural that small-minded bigots would take offense at this spiritually uplifted, transcendent being. But if you try to imagine reading about the Jewish reaction to Jesus without bringing to bear the cultural background of Christianity, you'll see that, as one might say of characters in a novel, the outrage of Jesus's fellow Jews seems distinctly undermotivated. They want to kill him because he healed a man by faith on the Sabbath—something in itself that Jewish law does not forbid? Or because he called God his "Father"—when God is called "Father" of the Jewish people and of their kings many times in scripture and liturgy? What's the big deal?

In the next chapter, we'll see what reasons the Jews would really have had for turning away from, or against, Jesus. In the chapter after that, we'll address the question of whether or not they can be justly accused of having him killed. For now, we need to understand who those Jews actually were. Pharisees? Herodians? What do these names denote? When "the Jews" finally succeed in having Jesus arrested and brought to trial, his persecutors are described as priests and elders. It's impossible to understand how, at this initial stage, the Jews would actually have perceived Jesus without first having a sense of their context--historical and religious. We need to clarify how, historically, the Jewish people got to where they were in the year 27, the year before Jesus started his preaching career. And we need to know what their religion taught them to believe on four key points of special relevance to Jesus and his teachings.


The overall reception of Jesus among those who knew of him—doubt turning to outright hostility—was only in keeping with a general Jewish tendency evident in the nation's past. The Jews are an acidic people, inclined to debate and question. Their inherent, inherited skepticism may account for the fact that among ancient peoples they were the first to successfully critique and forever pull away from the dominant polytheism of their world. Jewish literature, preeminently the Bible, scorns the inadequate beliefs and customs of other peoples, though not limiting its thoroughgoing critique to non-Jews. On the contrary, in Hebrew scripture, the Jews themselves come in for the roughest treatment—their moral and other intellectual failings are held up for withering scrutiny. In short, as Jesus discovered if he didn't already know it, any claim you place before the Jews will be savagely critiqued. Of all the insults that their enemies through the millennia have leveled at the Jews, one thing they have never been accused of being is credulous.

Yet at the same time, they were not nihilists or cynics. With them, certain beliefs remained constants. It has been suggested that an indication of Judaism's plausibility as an account of God and man is this fact: that a skeptical people have nevertheless retained an unbroken tradition of faith in central doctrines. Strikingly, their belief system relied on an account of mass revelation. Jewish history begins at Mount Sinai, by traditional calculation in the year 1312 BCE. At Sinai, says the Bible, God spoke to some two million Jews. There is no record of dissent among the Jews, in any generation until very recently, on this basic point. The Jewish contemporaries of Jesus agreed that Torah—a word designating the first five books of the Bible but also a vast explanatory tradition—was received at Sinai by the children of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was this same "teaching" (which is what Torah literally means) that the Jews carried with them through history. They still possessed it in the year 27.

Let us, then, briefly review Jewish history from this perspective--as a narrative of the polarity between creed and critique, skepticism and secure knowledge.

Who were the people who gathered at Sinai to become the first Jews? Before the event of Sinai, there were no Jews per se. For it is the acceptance of the Torah that defines the Jewish people, in much the same way the publishing of the Declaration of Independence defines the American nation—so that before 1776, there were no Americans. Centuries before Sinai, God had made a covenant with Abraham, who by tradition was born in 1812 BCE. The patriarchal family under his grandson Jacob lived in the land of Canaan but went down to Pharaoh's kingdom initially to escape a famine and ended up dwelling there as slaves. After leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah at Sinai as free men, they resettled in Canaan.

There, Jacob's descendants finally established their own kingdom, that of King David and his son Solomon. The latter built God's Temple in the capital city, Jerusalem. But very quickly the kingdom split—around 900 BCE—into rival states: Israel in the north and Judah in the south, centered on Jerusalem. It was, right at the beginning of Jewish statecraft, one of the most painful instances of the people's factionalism, with both kingdoms arguing that they were the rightful inheritors of biblical tradition.

Hardly two centuries later, the northern kingdom was conquered and taken away to captivity in Assyria. These were the fabled ten lost tribes. Two centuries later, Judah was overthrown by Babylon, the Temple destroyed. The Judahites were themselves led off to captivity on the banks of the Euphrates River. Seventy years later, after Babylon was conquered by Persia under the Jewish-friendly king Cyrus, the Jews returned and built a second Temple.

In this period, from shortly before the exile of the ten tribes until shortly before the fall of the First Temple, from the eighth to the sixth century BCE, there arose the classical tradition of Hebrew prophecy. We may instinctively conceive of the prophets as men who foretold the future, but this is not really what prophecy is about. The prophets did limn future events, but they were much more concerned with self-critique: rooting out falsehood, demanding an adherence to religious truth. A modern writer, Norman Podhoretz, points out that Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the rest had as their overriding goal to free the Jewish people from a tendency to revert to the paganism of their ancestors or of the peoples around them. While this may make them seem bound by time and place—certainly today no one worships Ashera trees or idols to the god Baal—Podhoretz makes clear that idolatry manifests itself in every age, in one form or another. The essence of idolatry is setting up spiritual authorities in competition with, or to the negation of, God. Today, we might identify it with a strain of secularism, which has all the elements of a religion but one, a deity. The other pagan hallmarks are there: relativism, nature worship, sexual corruption, and a willingness to sacrifice children to the cause.

Jews have been fighting ido...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385510217
• ISBN 13: 9780385510219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256