Defender of the faith

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History, by David Klinghoffer (Doubleday, 247 pp., $24.95)

A JEW today will frequently encounter the well-meaning Christian who is, frankly, puzzled: Why do Jews remain Jews? Hasn't the old issue been settled by mere numbers, by the Christian preponderance in both population and cultural influence? Why don't the Jews just be good sports, and go along with the rest of us who are fortunate enough to be in the majority of Americans, i.e., those who accept Jesus as the Messiah? The easy answer is the one Thomas More gave in A Man for All Seasons. Norfolk was hectoring him: "Dammit, Thomas! . . . Why can't you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship!" To which More responded: "And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?"

Here I stand, ich kann nicht anders. It can be a brave answer, but it remains an intellectually easy one: Who can argue with an assertion of conscience? David Klinghoffer will not settle for the easy answer: He demands a solid intellectual underpinning for the Jewish faith, one that shows it to be reasonable--because the Jewish conscience is based not on an act of willfulness but on a rigorously formed tradition of faith and intellect.

Klinghoffer's excellent new book takes religious truth claims seriously. This is not, he writes, something that can be taken for granted: "The leadership of the American Jewish community is not committed to the belief that their ancestral religion is even true and can be defended on rational grounds." This "strong relativistic tendency" risks reducing Judaism to a social artifact, curated for reasons of sentimentality and tribal nostalgia. Klinghoffer is a very amiable fellow (he was one of my predecessors as NR's literary editor, and we have met on a number of occasions), but he is clearly not afraid to rattle the family china cabinet.

Why, then, did--do--Jews reject Jesus? To answer this question, Klinghoffer takes us into the thought-world of the Hebrew Scriptures, and of 1st-century A.D. Judaism. Let's consider, as a particularly important example, the religious leaders' attitude toward the commandments. They had been warned in Deuteronomy that "you must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God" (4:2), and that you shall observe these commandments "always" (11:1). Now comes Jesus, presenting his listeners with innovative loopholes--didn't David break the Sabbath (Matt. 12:3)?--and appearing to put Himself above the commandments: "The Son of man [Jesus Himself] is lord of the Sabbath" (Matt. 12:8). In asserting that the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath (Mk. 2:27), Jesus indicates that He is in a position of judgment above both man and Sabbath. In the Sermon on the Mount, he espouses an attitude of contrast between the hitherto authoritative teaching of the religious leaders ("You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times . . .") and his own definitive new teaching ("But I say to you . . .").

To the traditional believers of His time, this must have sounded shocking: Surely the Messiah they were awaiting would not overturn their most cherished religious beliefs? In this context, when Jesus admonished them, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets" (Matt. 5:17), it might have been heard as less than sincere.

But what about the Old Testament prophecies that are quoted to prove that Jesus is the Messiah? While Klinghoffer is skeptical of the "proof-texting" approach, he is no slouch at it himself, as he shows in his picking apart of various passages. He asks, however, that readers look further, past ambiguous O.T. phrases that may or may not find echoes in the story of Jesus, to the overall picture of the Messiah adumbrated by the prophets. If one is to be accepted as the Messiah, writes Klinghoffer, "let him do what the 'son of man,' the promised Messiah, had been advertised as being destined to do from Daniel back through Ezekiel and Isaiah and the rest . . . Let him rule as a monarch, his kingship extending over 'all peoples, nations, and languages.' Let him return the exiles and rebuild the Temple and defeat the oppressors and establish universal peace, as the prophets also said." In this, one can hear a reverberation of the most emotionally powerful argument against the Christian faith: The world sure doesn't look redeemed.

Klinghoffer thus makes good on his title, offering a cogent intellectual explanation of why Jews reject Jesus. Less successful is his attempt to posit this rejection as "the turning point in Western history." "Had the Jews embraced Jesus," he contends, "the Jesus movement might have remained a Jewish sect [that] would in all likelihood have perished along with all the other heterodox Jewish sects that disappeared after the destruction of Jerusalem." About this contention, two things need to be said: First, it presupposes what the book sets out to prove, i.e., that Jesus was not the Messiah. If Jesus was in fact the Messiah, his movement would have spread throughout the world even if it had been accepted by all of the Jews. Second, the precise element of Judaism that made it unlikely to become a mass religion was its "scandal of particularity," the fact that it asserted a God Who acted in a particular Chosen People. Christianity adopted the very same scandal of particularity, proclaiming that the One Triune God was not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the God of Israel.