Cultish: Answering Anti Semitism & Counter Missionaries

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And this is part of what's called a rabbinic Bible. And this is

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Chumash Mikraot Kadolot, the five books of Moses, a big script. Mikraot Kadolot literally means big scripture.

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So we're gonna open it up for you, okay? And this is how a traditional

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Jew reads scripture. The scripture verses are over here. That's in big print. Next to it,

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Aramaic, Targum, but everything else here on each page, commentaries. So the bulk of each page is made up of commentaries.

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That's how a traditional Jew studies the Bible. You don't have to study it independently. You read it in light of the commentaries because these were the great learned men of the previous generations that stood much closer to the revelation.

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And when I was talking to a ultra Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn in my early years in the faith, he said, look,

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I learned it from my father who learned it from his father, who learned it from his father, going all the way back to Moses.

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So you're telling me someone lied. You're telling me someone along the way lied and I should believe you, now a

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Christian in a church. Right. So that's a lot of the perspective and that's a lot of what has to be overcome.

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Wow, it's kind of like when we have the, and I hate to make this comparison, but we have like the

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Jehovah's Witnesses and they're reading their Bible, but they're also reading the New World Translation, but on top of that, the

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Watchtower Track Society, which is an additional commentary that tells them how to think about the

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Bible. So like - Or Wake Magazine. Yeah, yeah. It's like, so when we as Christians hear the story about Abraham and Isaac, we can see the beauty of the typology,

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I'm probably using the wrong word, about the sacrifice of Christ coming in the future says that he will provide the sacrifice.

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You know, we have Isaac walking up the same, very same mountain where Christ is gonna be sacrificed, carrying wood upon his back, where Christ carried wood, you know, his cross.

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It's like, we can see those beautiful things, but for some reason, it seems like there's that tradition in there that is blinding people from seeing a really beautiful way of Christ in the

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Old Testament, because as Christians, we see that Jesus Christ is all throughout the Old Testament, even Jesus condemns the

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Pharisees. He says, if you really truly knew who Moses was, you would know me, Moses spoke about me.

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So how does that happen? How are these people growing up in these traditions coming to know

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Jesus as someone just presenting the gospel to them one day, and God is working on their hearts and regenerating them?

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Like, what's happening? It comes in several different ways. There are some here and there that as they're growing up, they begin to question the system.

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Why should I believe? They just, it doesn't sit. You know, they get the same answer as the kid sitting next to them in the class, but it doesn't sit well with them.

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And they just, something doesn't seem to line up, which makes them begin to ask questions, and those questions ultimately lead far enough for them to reconsider even bigger issues, like who is this

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Jesus? Because the more religious you are, the less you know who he is. If you're ultra, ultra religious, then all you know of him is he was a sorcerer and idol worshiper that led

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Israel astray, a false miracle worker. And he was rightly put to death by the Sanhedrin. That's all you know about him.

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So you have no clue about, and that his teaching leads straight to the Holocaust. That's basically what you know.

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That's why you can't say his name. You spit on the floor if you say his name, or you say it in a derogatory way, because that's what you know of him.

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So for some, they start asking questions. Others reading scripture, which is read, but it is not essential.

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You're mainly studying the traditions, the legal traditions and the legal commentary and all of that.

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But here and there, it's just been reading scripture directly. Sometime it's by getting to know a

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Christian. And I know one fellow when he was a teenager, was in the hospital, and all he knew about the

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Christians was stay away from them, they're bad, and sharing a room with a Christian kid and the mom, and they were just nice and gracious.

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And he saw something in them. For others, the religious, they leave tradition first.

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There's a small percentage that leaves every year, and they're called off the derrach, off the path.

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And sometimes they get away from things, and then are more open to hear the rest of the story.

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And then here and there, it's sovereign. There's something, they see a track somewhere.

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They stumble across a video, but the most Orthodox live in such a closed world that they don't have smartphones.

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They just have traditional flip phones, and then they know certain area codes are kosher. If it's a call from outside of that, you don't take it.

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You don't have a TV in your home, you don't use internet. So reaching into those communities, the ultra, ultra Orthodox is even more challenging.

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But it happens in numerous ways. You plant seeds, you get messages out. You do a debate, people come, a seed gets planted in them.

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Wow, well, it's just interesting, because I'm thinking just the parallel. You're talking about certain people who within Judaism, they kind of question their traditions or what they've grown up with.

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So you've done discussions on In the Line of Fire about people who are deconstructing or ex -evangelicals within Christianity.

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It almost sounds like that's happening many a times within Judaism, the different branches, but that's actually a catalyst for them to look at alternatives, and that's where a place like your ministry is effective for giving them answers to their questions then.

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Yeah, exactly. And for the religious Jew, the very, very religious

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Jew, it can be even more traumatic than, say, for ex -evangelical, because they've lived in a certain community which is totally communal.

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You pray together, you study together. You're in the synagogue studying late at night together.

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You are living your lives together. You have basic vocation for function, but your main goal is

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Torah study, by which I mean all of rabbinic literature and prayer. That's your greatest goal. So now you come out of that, you're not used to normal social life.

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You may not know how to do certain jobs and things. So the normal saying is you either end up on drugs, dead or back in a community, because they're often aimless because of the depths to which they've lived together in a communal setting and practice their faith in that way.

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But because the world is getting smaller, because it's harder to be shut off, because people do get internet access and they are curious, so that's just opened the door.

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I'm sure you see it in all traditional religions that people are getting exposed to things and falling away.

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I have a book coming out in March called Why So Many Christians Have Left the Faith, where I look at deconstructionism and then talk about how we respond.

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But what's happened is a lot of stuff that we in apologetics have dealt with for decades is now getting exposed in mass to the larger

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Christian world that hasn't been exposed and suddenly they're getting hit with all this stuff they've never been hit with before.

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And that's why we've really got to up what we're doing in apologetics to help more and more people. Yeah, we've been really reactionary in a sense, instead of proactive.

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That brings us to this kind of question, like in terms of counter missionaries or objections against Jesus being the

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Messiah, we have some written down, but I'm actually curious, what do you think are like the four best, let's say objections that come in?

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What are the biblical responses, the Christian response to the objections that are given by Jewish people or Judaism?

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All right, so you want the, make sure I have the right order here. Yeah. Do you want the strongest

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Jewish objection and the best Christian response? Absolutely. Yeah, just a good plethora sampling of just some of the top objections that come up in this whole conversation.

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Yeah, so bear in mind, what I'm going to do now is a mega condensation of 1500 plus pages, thousands of hours of dialogue and debate and writing study.

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Okay, I'm going to break them into categories, six categories. General, historical, theological,

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Messianic prophecy, New Testament, traditional Jewish. Those are the six parts of the five volumes.

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So, I may have left one out, I'll make sure I cover it now. General, those are the most basic.

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I'm born a Jew, I'm going to die a Jew, right? It just, it's Jewish identity. This is who I am.

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And the simple thing is, yes, that's true. The question is, who is the Messiah? And will you die a

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Jew in right relationship with God or what? That's the most simple. When you dig further, historical objections are of two kinds.

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One, as we said, if there's any religion on the planet that could not be God's religion, it's Christianity because of anti -Semitism.

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And two, when the Messiah comes, there'll be peace on earth. Look at the Messianic prophecies,

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Isaiah 11, Isaiah two other passages. When the, excuse me. When the Messiah comes, there'll be peace on earth.

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And he'll ruin rain, that hasn't happened. Obviously, the Messiah never came. The answers to those are, number one, the

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New Testament reaffirms God's promises to Israel and the Jewish people. Jesus comes as Jewish Messiah.

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He's returning to Jerusalem. And Paul explicitly warned about Gentile arrogance that would think that the church replaced

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Israel. It's only to the extent that Christians got away from the New Testament that they became anti -Semitic.

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And the reason that evangelical Jews are the best friends of Christians are because of their love for the word of God and taking the scripture seriously.

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And through history, there have been philosemites. There have been Christians, be it a

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Charles Spurgeon, be it a Robert Murray McShane, be it the Puritans, be it others through history that love

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Jesus and love the Jewish people. And there, a Gentile Christian says, hey, I apologize for what's been done in Jesus' name.

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Let me show you who a real Christian is. As far as the history issue of the Messiah, obviously hasn't come.

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We have to make our argument scripturally that there are two aspects to the Messiah's work. First priestly, then royal.

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First, he comes as the priestly king to deal with sin. And then from there to be a light to the world, then he will return to establish his kingdom on the earth.

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So there are two acts, the first act and the second act. The second act can only take place after the first.

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The Messiah must first do this before coming to establish peace on earth. When it comes to theological objections, those are more weighty still.

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Jews worship one God, not three. God is not a man. Making a man into a God or God into a man is the worst form of idolatry.

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And not only so, Jews don't need blood for atonement, that if we're obedient to Torah and repent, that God will forgive our sins.

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And then there are many of the smaller theological objections. So our answer is that we must emphasize strongly we believe in one

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God and one God only, but that we see revealed in the Hebrew scriptures that this one

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God is complex in his unity, that he is seen and unseen, that he is transcendent and yet imminent, that no one can see his face and yet he reveals himself face to face.

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How do we explain it? We explain it in terms of his complex unity, that the father who creates all things is hidden in his glory.

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John one, no one's seen God at any time. First Timothy six, no one has seen God or can see him. So he dwells in unapproachable glory, but Yeshua says, if you've seen me, you've seen the father.

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It's the son who makes him known and the Ruach, the spirit who works invisibly on earth.

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And we can show all that from the Hebrew Bible. And we are not making a man into a

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God or God into a man. We're saying that the eternal almighty God who sits enthroned in heaven can simultaneously reveal himself on earth.

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That points to what we would refer to as the different persons of the Godhead. And again, would argue that based on Hebrew Bible.

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When it comes to atonement, we would agree in emphasizing the importance of repentance, but go through the scriptures to indicate the centrality of blood atonement.

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And with the temple destroyed, there's either no national atonement or God's provided a better way. Messianic prophecy, the main objections are that the

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Messiah, that Jesus fulfilled none of the provable Messianic prophecies, that the

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New Testament authors either misinterpreted or misquoted or even invented prophecies out of whole cloth.

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Again, a massive subject. Our answer is, although we can't prove he was born of a virgin, we can't prove that he rose from the dead or we can make a strong argument for it.

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We can't prove he was born in Bethlehem. We can prove that this tiny little sect based on a man who was crucified and died the worst deaths imaginable of the day, that he has become a light to the nations, that hundreds of millions of Gentiles have come to worship the

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God of Israel through him, which is pretty provable Messianic prophecy among others. And then we look at the prophecies and we understand how they are

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Messianic. Many times Christians read in a very atomistic way to just pull a verse out. Don't look at the context, don't look at the background, don't look at Jewish interpretive methods to the first century.

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So we have to go through each one. Why does Matthew 1 ,23 quote

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Isaiah 7 ,14? You know, and one by one go through them and show the validity of them.

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Some are typological, some are primary. And then New Testament objections would be specific

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Jewish ones that the New Testament authors regularly mishandle the Old Testament and that the

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New Testament teaches that Jesus abolishes the law. And the one thing a Jew knows is that they are called to observe the

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Torah. And what we point out, and then of course, arguments with genealogies and Jesus can't be the

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Messiah based on that. But what we do is we show the interpretive methods of New Testament authors. We show the different textual traditions that existed in the day that they could be drawn from.

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We show how the Jewish followers of Jesus continued to live as Jews, understanding they weren't justified by the works of the law, but that as Jews, they continue to live as Jews that Paul said, if you're circumcised, when you're saved, don't become uncircumcised.

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So we rebut that and that Yeshua came to fulfill, not abolish. And then traditional

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Jewish objections that basically says we have an unbroken chain of tradition going back to Moses on Mount Sinai.

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That when God gave Moses the written law, he also gave him an oral law and only with the oral law can we rightly understand the written and we've had an unbroken chain of tradition for now 3 ,500 years.

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And what we argue is that the covenant was based on the written word, the written word alone. And as beautiful as many of the traditions are that ultimately the idea of an unbroken oral tradition going back to Moses is a myth.

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And we refute that with respect. And of course, the idea of Judaism saying, hey, look, we made it this far.

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We made it through all the horrors of our history. We made it scattered around the world. We made it through the Holocaust. We're still here. We have a fine relationship with God.

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We don't need your Jesus. We would say with all respect, we've been under judgment through much of that time.

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Something has been wrong. The temple is still not rebuilt. Could it be that in the midst of God preserving us, there's something very important that we've missed?

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And what about you? What about your own relationship with God and press the gospel like we would with anyone else?

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So that's a super short summary. We need to look at 1 ,000 more questions which we're not time for, but maybe another time to dig in deeper on those.

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No, that's a great, super short summary. Could you just tell anyone who wants to look into this further? You mentioned the website earlier.

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Where can people go to to find out more about this? Of what we're talking about. Yeah, the easiest place to get tons of free material is realmessiah .com.

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Okay. They can buy any of the books, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus. Those are all available.

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The course, Countering the Counter -Missionary is 22 hours with a study guide. But right there, they will get these six categories and 100 or so of the most common objections with either a written or a video or both explanation, answer, right?

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So everything I just covered in depth. Or they can watch quite a few debates I've had with rabbis.

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They're for free. They can watch outreach videos. They can watch the

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Refuting the Counter -Missionary. So all there for free on realmessiah .com.

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Okay, excellent. And again, I wanna appreciate you so much, Dr. Brown, for taking the time to chat with us today.

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I know this is gonna be a huge blessing for our audience. I do have one last question. Andrew and I were actually wondering this too.

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So you have decades of ministry focused here. And this is your background. You had an amazing encounter with God.

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And you've spent all this time ministering to the Jewish people. Do you have a story that you've never shared with anyone that you could maybe just share with our audience?

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Just, it can be anything. Just something that's unique, an encounter with someone, a conversation that took place, perhaps maybe there's some interesting humor, just something that we'd appreciate, maybe just connected to what we've been talking about as we wrap up here.

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All right. I mean, I'd have to dig to figure out one that I've never shared. Or just one off the get -go.

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But I'll tell why I haven't shared in a while. Okay, fair enough. I was going to grad school, living on Long Island, right near a traditional

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Jewish community. I wasn't over there much, but there was a very religious community that lived not far from me.

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And I was doing my studies at New York University. So I was doing my master's and PhD.

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I forget which point of time that was. But I'm about to get on a train to go into New York City, finish my work for the day.

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And my job now was going in for my class late afternoon, early evening. And I see an

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Orthodox Jew there. So immediately I want to go talk to him. So I go over to him and he says,

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Shalom Aleichem, the traditional way of greeting. You're supposed to say, Aleichem Shalom. You know, that's how you greet back. And anyway, we begin talking.

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And when he finds out I'm a Jewish believer, he is absolutely furious.

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Again, I know how he sees me. I understand I'm not in his shoes, but I understand how

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I look to him, how guilty I am to him. So we're talking, I've got my Hebrew Bible with me. And he is so upset.

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And we're on a train on Long Island Railroad. The two of us talking and he's very passionate. And at one point he takes the

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Hebrew Bible and throws it. Now that was a sacrilegious thing for him to do, but he was so upset with the way

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I was using it. And the conductor is walking through the train to get train tickets. Could you please hand me that Bible that this man gives it to me?

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Well, we're talking. And at one point he spits in my face. And the moment he did that,

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I got overwhelmed with a sense of love for him. And I said, you did that because you love me as a

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Jew, because you are so upset seeing me as a Jew. And now as an increasingly learned

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Jew, not a traditional Jew, right? I've never tried to make that my background or present myself as that, but I'm learning more and more.

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I can interact with the sources more and more. So all the more guilty, dangerous in a sight. So I said to him,

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I said, you really care about, I said, I want you to know I love you too.

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But of course, got him angrier. So finally, right at the end, he looked at me before he got off the train.

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He said, if I ever see you talking to another Jewish person about this, I'm gonna strangle you with my own hands. And he got off the train.

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What struck me though, was he really cared for me. He was that upset that here

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I am, a young Jewish man, and I've not just gone so far as straying his eyes, but I'm actively proselytizing.

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What could be worse than that? And he spat in my face out of love.

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Obviously there was anger. And obviously he was seeking to provoke me because it was a calculated thing, but I knew what was behind it.

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I knew why he was so upset. And I respect that. It only gives me a greater love for my people.

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Remember Romans 10, Paul said of his people, have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

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And your average Christian who gets exposed to an ultra -Orthodox

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Jewish family or sees the lifestyle of an ultra -Orthodox Jew, once they get past the foreignness of things and the foreignness of the traditions, they will be put to shame in terms of devotion.

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They will be, your average ultra -Orthodox Jew would look at the home of a Christian and say, you are so worldly. You have

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TVs, you watch these movies, you're into sports and all these secular stuff. We follow God and Torah.

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That's our center. That's our life. That's our compass. So it's all the more heartbreaking to me when

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I'm in Israel and go to the wall to pray on a trip.

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I always try to pray side by side with traditional Jews, just to kind of feel the passion, feel the hunger, feel from my perspective, the lostness and intercede that God would open their eyes.

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Awesome. Well, thank you again, Dr. Brown. We appreciate it. And we will talk to you all soon on Cultish.

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And thank you all for listening in. And we'll talk to you all next time on Cultish where we enter into the kingdom of the cults.