Chapter Thirty Seven

                THE JEWISH FOLLOWERS OF JESUS TODAY

     "For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that
     circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which
     is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the
     spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of
     God."
                            Romans 2:28-29

     "What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of
     circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were
     committed the oracles of God. For what if some did not believe?
     shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God
     forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar;
                            Romans 3:1-4

    "Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that
     they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal
     of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of
     God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own
     righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness
     of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every
     one that believeth. For Moses describeth the righteousness which is
     of the law, That the man which doeth those things shall live by
     them. But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this
     wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that
     is, to bring Christ down from above:) Or, Who shall descend into
     the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.) But
     what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy
     heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; That if thou
     shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in
     thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be
     saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and
     with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture
     saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there
     is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord
     over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
                          Romans 10:1-13

     "I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also
     am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.
    God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew. Wot ye not what
    the scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God
    against Israel, saying, Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and
    digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my
    life. But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to
    myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image
    of Baal. Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant
    according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then is it no
    more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of
    works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.
    What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but
    the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded (According
    as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes
    that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear;) unto
    this day. And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a
    trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: Let their
    eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back
    alway. I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God
    forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the
    Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. Now if the fall of them
    be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches
    of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness? For I speak to you
    Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify
    mine office: If by any means I may provoke to emulation them which
    are my flesh, and might save some of them. For if the casting away
    of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of
    them be, but life from the dead? For if the firstfruit be holy, the
    lump is also holy: and if the root be holy, so are the branches. And
    if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive
    tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the
    root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches.
    But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.
    Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be
    graffed in. Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou
    standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared
    not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee.
    Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which
    fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his
    goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. And they also, if
    they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is
    able to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive
    tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature
    into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the
    natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree? For I would
    not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye
    should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is
    happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.
    And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come
    out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from
    Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away
    their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your
    sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the
    fathers'sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without
    repentance. For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have
    now obtained mercy through their unbelief: Even so have these also
    now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain
    mercy. For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might
    have mercy upon all. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom
    and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his
    ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or
    who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it
    shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him,
    and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen."
                            Romans 11:1-36

       Paul's Epistle to the Church at Rome is pivotal for our
understanding of how Christianity has defined itself, and how it has
tended to view the Jewish People vis-a-vis its own self-definition.

       We see at the very beginninig (chapter 2) Paul's departure from
the traditionally understood definition of Jewishness. Jewishness is not
external, that is to say, not carnal. It is an inward condition of those
in whom "circumcision is of the heart". The message of Paul's new
theological-historical thinking is that those gentiles who have accepted
Jesus as the messiah of Israel (the Christ) have become spiritually cir-
cumcized, and therefore, they are "spiritually Jewish". Tihs inner
Jewishness makes them the real "Israel of G-d" (Galatians 6:16) as
opposed to the "children of the stock of Abraham" (Acts 13;26) who are
merely the physically circumcized in flesh rather than in the heart.

       Yet, at the same time, Paul realizes that there is an histori-
cal people known as Jews, and it is to them that the "oracles"  of G-d
were made known, and the "promises", that is, the prophecies concerning
the messiah, upon which the religious beliefs of Paul are based. And
logically, if the promises were given to (through) the stock of Abraham,
even though they are presently in a state of unbelief concerning the
Christ, yet G-d must have had a purpose in choosing them as the vessel
of transmission of the messianic traditions.

       Paul states here, in Romans, (and in two other places in his
Epistles) that there is essentially no difference between Jews and
gentiles in the sight of G-d. Only He chose Israel as HIs vessel of
transmission of the knowledge of the messiah, and since Paul shares
Jewishness with the people of Israel, he states his desire to see them
brought into the community of belivers which he calls the true "Israel
of G-d.

       To date, only a "saving remnant of Israel" now is part of the
body of Christ, yet in the fullness of G-d's time, "all Israel shall be
saved." What then is the Divine purpose of having Israel be blind to the
fact of the arrival of him for whom they have waited? Not that they be
forever cast away by G-d, Paul answers, but they are presently "enemies
of the gospel" for the sake of the gentiles' salvation; they reject the
word now so that the word travel out to the nations (would they then
keep salvation to themselves after offering to bring the Torah to the
gentiles?); to wit, their blindness, regarding the gospel, is REDEMPTIVE
to the world. But in the fullness of time, after the nations have been
"grafted in" to G-d's Tree (which is His true Israel), then the gentiles
shall be G-d's instrument of salvation to Israel, that by jealousy, and
by the preaching of the gospel, the Jewish People may be brought back
and be re-grafted in with the rest of the nations.

       Therefore, Paul admonishes his flock, that the gentiles who
have been saved in finding Christ be not haughty and that they do not
boast against the "natural branches" of the Tree of G-d's Israel, nor
show conceit in their salvation, but rather that they show "mercy" to
the Jewish People, thereby drawing them to Christ. For he proclaims that
when the natural branches are finally regrafted, when "the fulness of
the Gentiles be come in" , Christ shall return to reign as king. It
therefore behooves believers to hope for and look forward to the return
of the Jewish prodigal son to the bossom of G-d in Jesus Christ.

       It is therefore not surprising that once the Church achieved
temporal power as the sole religious expression of the Roman Empire,
that it sould see as one of its chief missions the conversion of the
Jews. It was the Church's understaning of that mission that all men need
Christ for salvation yet the Church needs the Jewish People for its
ultimate fullfillment in the Second Coming of its lord. Yet there could
be no separate national Jewish Church once New Testament theology became
the established scriptural tradition for Paul had already said that
"there is neither Jew nor gentile, but all are one in Christ", and in
the eyes of the Roman Church that was tantamount to saying that the
Roman Catholic religion encompassed all nations, making Jewishness, or a
specific Jewish identity within Christ's body, superfluous (of course
they did not say this about Romanness or any other national -ness). And
based upon the verse in Luke that states "And the lord said unto the
servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come
in, that my house may be filled" (Luke 14:23), any and all methods of
bringing in the "lost sheep of Israel", including various modes of
COMPULSION were sanctioned by the Church.

       With the advent of the modern era, the power of the Catholic
Church began to wane, and that church turned away from militant
missionary activity directed toward the Jewish people, replacing that
mission with pasive prayer for the conversion of the "perfidious Jews".
But with the rise of Protestantism, the evangelical urge burst out anew.
It is in this era that a movement was begun within Protestant
Christianity which speaks of the innate Jewishness of those Israelites
who are converts to the relgion of Jesus, and that these converts, even
after their baptism and their acceptance of Jesus Christ as their
personal savior, remain Jews. Before this kind of thinking arose there
was a clear line of demarcation between Jews and Christians. One was
either one or the other. This idea that one could be a Hebrew and a
Christian at the same time arose within the context of Anglo-Saxon
identification with the people of the "Old Testament", and the
historical Christian tradition that the people of the Hebrew Bible that
lived before the birth of Jesus, whom the world has known as Israelites,
were in reality crypto or "embryonic Christians" preceding Christ into
the world.  It therefore was a natural philosophical conclusion that the
Jew who accepted Christ not only remained a Jew but more, he became a
"completed Jew", now a member of the stock of Abraham and of the true
Israel of G-d. This has led to a concept that B.Z. Sobel the rise of the
"Super-Christian", a Jew chosen by nationality and faith. This so-called
Super-Christian is seen by evangelizing Protestantism as a "completed"
Jew, the offensiveness of the term apparently transparent to the
insensitive missionizers that penned and use it. It serves to re-
enforce the historical Christian attitudes toward the Jew and his
history and religion, to wit, that his history represents some inferior
rung on the ladder leading from Eden to the Kingdom of Heaven, that his
religion is an expression of unloving legalism lacking any idea of G-d's
grace which is no more than the "traditions of men", that as a human
being he is an enemy of the gospel, and beloved only as being the
descendants of the patriarchs and recipients of the messianic promises,
not for his own instrinsic human worth as the EIKON of G-d, and that
even in his own identity he is not complete, whereas every other
nationhood and ethnos is complete. His scripture is an Old Testament and
his god is a demiurgos whom the Christ has replaced.

       To be sure, the language of the new Christian missionaries is
polite and respectfull, while his motives are ulteriorally pure. The
Jews must return to the bossom of their true destiny which is the pure
faith of the Bible as interpreted and expressed through a Christological
theology. They must accept Jesus as their messiah (interestingly enough,
Christian missionaries do not present the messianic aspect of Jesus when
preaching to gentile pagans because this aspect would be meaningless to
them; instead they present Jesus in his role as G-d, Son of G-d, Savior,
and Christ) and thereby proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven has already
begun to reign. They must join with the grafted in brethren in the tree
that is the body of Christ in a world view in which there is neither Jew
nor gentile except, in some Orwellian double-speak way, that Christ's
message of salvation is to the Jew first. They must abandon the belief
that the Talmud tradition, which is the Pharisaic-Rabbinic tradition, is
any type of Divine revelation equal to the written "prophetic"
revelation. And certainly, above all, they must accept the commonly
accepted Born Again Fundamentalist Protestant expression of Christ's
relgion as the sole valid and legitimate Bible true version of that
religion.

       There must be no religious expression that is separate from the
religion of Jesus Christ when a Jew enters the community of Christian
fellowship. Anything that is outside of Christ is man's own hubris
attempt to achieve his own salvation, AND if it is Judaism, it is a
dangerous COMPETITOR to the relgion of Jesus Christ simply because it
was the religion of Jesus the Nazarene. To cite Gote Hedenquist who
quotes the noted Protestant theologian, Karl Barth - "The existence of
the Synagogue alongside the Church is a wound, indeed a void in the Body
of Christ which is utterly intolerable", (in Hebrew-Christianity;The
Thirteenth Tribe: B.Z. Sobel).

       Yet, given all the above, and almost surprisingly, an interesting
phenomenon has arisen in this century which has given the Jewish
community an undue amount of grief, an attempted amalgam or syncretism,
known as Hebrew-Christianity, or more recently, Messianic Judaism. It is
the latest development of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant thrust toward
winning the Jews for Christ through Jewishness (actually thorugh a
perceived parody of Jewishness). Unlike prior attempts to bring the
people of Jesus to Christ which had its concomitant pressure to disolve
the unigue ethnic and religous character and characteristics of the Jew
(since there is neither Jew nor gentile in Christ), Hebrew-Christianity
claims that it encourages converted (or completed) Jews to retain their
Jewish identity (since Christ's message of salvation is to the Jew
first). Yet just how they are to do this has, for the most part, been
vague and nebulous. The majority of Jews who have been attracted to
Hebrew-Christianity have been those individuals most alienated from the
organized Jewish community and least Jewishly educated. They are
presented with a Protestantism covered by a thin veneer of Yiddishisms,
smattering of Hebrew expressions in prayer, and much talk of a "Jewish
heart". Yet beneath of of these so-called expressions of Jewishness lies
the pull of actual gentile Christianity.

       At bottom, the missionaries who created and foster Hebrew-
Christianity, bring the Jew to a "Mission". By definition, a Mission is
different from a Church. A Mission is a temporary resting place, a way
station, a Christian halfway-house, eventually leading to a Church. The
proper place for worshippers of Christ is a Christian Church. Missions
are reserved for those gentile pagans (Africans, Asians, American
aboriginees) who must be brought into the community of the Church of
Christ gradually, and to Jews. No one remains in a Mission. Once they
have been thorougly "missionized" they must be integrated into the
mainstream Christian community, at the center of which is the Church.
Yet a Church is definitely a place of gentile worship, a place where
what St. Paul calls "the middle wall of partition" is broken down, where
all beome one in Christ. In the Church there is only room for
Christians; there is absolutely no place for Super-Christians. The "Jew
for Jesus", having attained his "Jewish completion", is now ready to
find complete Chrisianity, without Jewish frills. This is certainly true
of his children and grand-children.

       At heart, Hebrew-Christianity is an anachronism. It is a pathetic
attempt to turn the clock back 2000 years, and it is most of all
DISHONEST converting.

       History has already acted as a new middle wall of partition to
separate Jews from Christians. From the beginning, there have been
bitter recriminations and denunciations between leaders of the two faith
communities, not to mention inestimable pain and bloodshed. To the
Jewish followers of Jesus 2000 years ago, the cross represented the
martyrdom of the Jewish people at the hands of a Roman Empire identified
with the evil usurping brother of Jacob, named Esau. He is seens as the
one who claims to birthright as G-d's Chosen People. Jesus' own death on
the Roman cross was seen as a necessary evil designed by G-d to show the
power of His messaih to overcome and put an end to the ongoing Jewish
martyrdoms at Rome's hands. But shortly thereafter, as the name of Jesus
was expropriated by Paul and his followers and identified with with the
Christ of their new religion, fewer and fewer Jews had anything to do
with belief in that name. When Israel was locked in the life and death
struggle against Rome in 135 CE, the Jewish believers, whom the rabbis
were already calling Children of Hell, chose to stand back from the
struggle while EVERY OTHER JEWISH GROUP actively supported the fight
against the Romans. This set them against their fellow Jews as an
unforgivable act. Over the course of time, their simple belief that
Jesus was the messiah (which originally was the ONLY thing that
differentiated them from other Jews) chnaged and developed into its own
Jewish "Christology". The way of the ancient Jewish followers of Jesus
was a cul-de-sac, and after several centuries had passed, all those who
claimed to Be Jewish AND who claimed that Jesus was messiah ceased to
exist as Jews. Thereafter, any Jew who "converted" to the gentile
religon of Christ, themselves became gentiles, and their children were
lost to the Jewish people forever, while they themselves were ostracized
by the Jewish community and given the uncomplimentary name of MESHMUDIM,
"destroyed ones". In most Jewish cmmunities, their families observed the
rites for the dead for them.

       Hebrew-Christianity beckons the Jew to enter into the covenant of
Christ, wherein "there is neither Jew nor gentile", in order to
"complete his Jewishness."  And what is that completion in light of the
theology of the New Testament? In Romans 7:17, Paul complained that he
could not follow the Torah of Judaism no matter how hard he tried, yet
that is a direct contradiction of what G-d told the Jewish people in
Deuteronomy 30:11-14:

     "For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not
      hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that
      thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it
      unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? Neither is it beyond the
      sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us,
      and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? But the word
      is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou
      mayest do it."

and of what G-d told man in Genesis 4:7 that sin is constantly lying at
the door to man's heart, yet he, by his own initiative, can overcome it.
G-d has even shown the Jew a way to do so, thorugh the Torah. What more
atonement does Israel need than that very atonement that His Father in
Heaven has outlined for him? He cannot finish the Torah's work but he
must participate in it, and G-d's grace will protect him in the life of
the World to Come?

       What is the Jew's "completion" in the covenant of Christ when
the chief prophet of Christ has told us that the very sign of the
eternal Abrahamic Covenant, circumcision, does not profit those who are
in Christ's covenant (Galatians 5:2-4), and that the dietary laws which
symbolize the Jews' separateness to G-d, and the Sabbath which is the
sign of the Mosaic Covenant, are nullified (Colassians 2:16) as part of
the New Covenant in which the Jew shall find his "completion".

       Is not the irony that the blatant antinomianism of Christ's
covenant shall be the sign of the Jews' completeness apparent? For
Christ's covenant is Pauline, no longer Jamsian. That, the various
Churches of Christ's covenant have ensured by this 20th Christian
Century. And Paul is the apostle of the gentiles, not of the Jews. The
Jews no longer have an apostle who speaks in the name of the Nazarene.
Therefore ALL Christian apostleships to the House of Israel are false
apostleships. But even if there were a true Jewish apostle of Jesus to
the Jews, even if he were Peter or James, still he would not be a true
apostle to post-Temple, post-Exile, post-Ghetto, post-Crusade,
post-Inquisition, post-Holocaust Israel. His coming would be too late.
He could never prove that a Redeemer exists in the world because the Jew
knows, perhaps better than any other, that the world is still
unredeemed. He is the arch-witness to that fact. His very continued
exisitence within his own Covenant, outside the covenant of him who was
crucified as a Jewish martyr by Rome, makes him the best witness to an
unredeemed world. That is why, when a Jew seeks to enter the covenant of
Christ's Jewish cmopletion, he tells the ultimate lie, not only to his
own people but to the entire world.

       In essence, the Jewish people has always considered the
conversion of any of its number to Christinaity as an ultimate betrayal,
seen in the image of a soldier who desserts to the enemy camp. It is the
same with a conversion to so-called Hebrew-Christianity, no matter how
"Jewish" they make themsleves out to be. One might say that it is
ESPECIALLY true with Hebrew-Christianity since that movement is seen by
Jews as the ULTIMATE CHRISTIAN MISSION PAR EXCELLENCE!

       The Jew, whether or not he is engaged in any sort of an
on-going Jewish religious expression, exists as a member of the
Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants through which the Jewish Nation came into
existence, and he is such immediately at birth, a member of the Chosen
Tribe, one of the "holy seed" to use the words of Ezra the Scribe. He is
created already "covenanted" to his G-d, his Torah, and his people
(which the Rabbis tell us are all One). Therefore, any non-Jewish
covenant is superfluous to him as a Jew. And what, after all, is the New
Testament faith but a Divine Covenant with the entire human race. Yet
the Jewish people, while part of that human race, is a people "who
dwells alone and is not counted among the nations" (Numbers 23:9).
Therefore its members cannot truly ever enter into any other religious
covenant; no matter how valid it may be for the gentiles, it is invalid
for Jews, especially that covenant whose members proclaim themselves to
be the "true Israel".

       As to Hebrew-Christianity (or Messianic Judaism as its adherents
choose to call it of late), what will its futute be? It is this writer's
opinion that it has no future, and there are several reasons for this.

       The Jewish Messianic movement, if such it can be called, is a
mission, and nothing more. It certainly is neither a sect nor
denomination of Judaism. In order to have qualified as such, it would
have to, at a minimum, meet two crtiteria; have its centers located in
discrete geographic areas where its adherents would live, and the
adherents would onoy be able to marry each other. Obviously those who
style themselves Messianics do not necessarily live in one area where
they cluster around a relgious center, and more importantly, they do not
necessarily marry each other. More often than not they wind up marrying
gentiles, and their children do not identify as Messianic Jews but
rather as mainstream Protestants.

       By and large, the leadership is gentile, or if Jewish, it
consists of individuals who have already given themselves over to the
Fundamentalist Protestant religious expression. The leadership may
initially say that they encourage expression of "Jewishness" but once
the Messianic Jew has completed his indoctrination stage as a
missionized Christian, the leadership encourages him to join a local
church, or a "messianic synagogue" which is no more than a church that
has been Hebraicized.

       There have been certain individuals, or groups of individuals who
have attempted to de-Christologize their Hebrew-Christian faith in
Jesus, or who have attempted to convert their Pauline understanding of
Jesus to a more Jamsian one. But these are Hebrew-Christian religious
maverick expressions which generally judaize so completely that they
wind up as expressions of true Judaism, with the individuals ultimately
gravitating to Rabbinic or Orthodox Judaism, sloughing off the belief in
Jesus in the process.

       Hebrew-Christianity could only hope to gain adherents among Jews
so long as there was a reservoir of cultural secular, religiously
ignorant Jews. As assimilation grows in the diaspora, and the
generations move away from their immigrant ethnic roots, this reservoir
will dry up and there will be virtually no one left to convert since the
remaining Jewish community will be largely Orthodox observant. Perhaps
at that time the only mission field left for Christian missionaries who
seek to bring Jesus "to the Jew first" will be in the State of Israel.
But even in Israel, the Orthodox religious community will grow over the
next 50 to 75 years due to large Orthodox families, religious
immigration, and Jewish proselytizing efforts. And if that were not
sufficient to interfere with any great Hebrew-Christian thrust, the Jews
of Israel may ultimately outlaw non-Jewish misisonizing efforts directed
toward themselves.

       To be sure, there will continue to be small numbers of "honest"
conversions from Judaism to mainline Christianity on the part of certain
Jewish individuals, but in the main, these will continue to be offset by
a steady number of about 2000 conversions from various branches of
Christianity to Judaism per year.

       We are left then with what we began in this essay, the Biblical
people continuing their "Story of Failure" which began with the first
man and woman in Creation, and which will end only when the Son of David
comes and ushers in the Kingdom of Heaven. "Speedily and in our days.
Amen."