Moderated by Sid Roth: Who Is Jesus? (Debate) — Michael L. Brown

Stay tuned for Sid Roth and Time is Running Short. To talk to Sid, dial 1 -800 -345-WMCA. That's 1 -800 -345 -9622.

Hello, New York. This is Sid Roth and Time is Running Short. I have two very special guests, special friends, and we are going to do something that has been 2 ,000 years in the coming. We are going to dialogue between Jews that believe Yeshua, that's Jesus, is the Jewish Messiah, and Jews that believe Yeshua, Jesus, is not the Jewish Messiah.

To my right, I have Rabbi Tovia Singer, an Orthodox rabbi. He's a graduate of St. Louis Rabbinical College, New Jersey director of Jews for Judaism. He has spent over one-third of his life trying to persuade Jews to reject Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and return to Orthodox rabbinical Judaism.

And to his right is Dr. Michael Brown, a Messianic Jew. He holds a Ph .D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University. He's dean and director of Messiah Biblical Institute and Graduate School of Theology.

And what I'd like is for the audience to get to know both of you a little and find out how much you have in common, because I believe an Orthodox Jew has a great deal in common with a Messianic Jew. Tovia, we'll start with you.

What is your belief of Tanakh, or Jewish scriptures? In other words, do you believe that it came from God? What is your personal view? And what's the Orthodox view, which is even more important?

Okay, we'll call it classical Judaism. Every word, and this is important, every word, every letter of the Torah, every letter comes directly from God. Literally, God put us in a world, and he said, make something for yourself.

The way you do that is through Torah. Torah is the instruction booklet for life, and our sages have looked through the Torah, and throughout all our generations, we have looked through that Torah, and through it, that's how we reach a personal relationship with God, and that's so important, to have God in your life.

Literally, make God your friend. Come to love him, because he loves you more than you can ever know.

Dr. Michael Brown, what is your view?

Well, I appreciate what Tovia said. Certainly, the Hebrew scriptures are God's inspired word to me. I believe that it is the word that God has given us from heaven, and that if we follow the counsel of that word, we'll wind up following the truth absolutely, and come to know God and walk with him directly.

And I see the Hebrew scriptures as the foundation of everything else that God has revealed to us as his Jewish people.

Rabbi Singer, are you a biblical Zionist? By that, I mean someone that believes the physical Jew is entitled to the physical land of Israel unconditionally forever.

Well, if what I said earlier is correct, then, of course, the Torah has told us, the Torah has made a promise to Abraham all the way back in the book of Genesis, saying that this land will be for you, not just Tel Aviv, but also areas such as Hebron.

I don't want to get political, but, of course, the land of Israel was put there for the Jewish people, and what other nation, after being in exile for 2 ,000 years, has returned to that land to proclaim it their own?

Dr. Brown?

I agree wholeheartedly. Psalm 105 makes it categorically clear, reinforcing everything that's come earlier, that God has given the land to the Jewish people as a promised inheritance, and not only that, God has shown his favor and the chosenness of the Jewish people by protecting us and preserving us all these centuries, miraculously restoring us, just as he said that he would.

So we see this as fulfillment of Scripture without a question.

Now let's find a little bit of our divergent thinking. Rabbi Singer, what is your personal belief of the New Testament?

Well, my belief of the New Testament really is no different at all than my belief of the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita or any of the canonized documents by many, many faiths. The New Testament has brought the Jewish people away from Torah, has brought the Jewish people away from a personal relationship with God, although they thought that they were worshiping God through the New Testament.

Certainly the New Testament is a false document, although there are, of course, some elements within it which are just recording things that were true in history. Nothing that's false has nothing that's true in it.

There's always some element that's true, but the New Testament is a false document which describes a supposed life of Jesus which never existed.

Rabbi, which never existed, what do you mean by that?

Which never existed means that in terms of Jesus returning, resurrecting on Sunday morning, which is the foundation of the Christian faith. Without it, there's nothing to Christianity. Without it, as Paul himself said, if there is no resurrection, then of course we are all in our sins.

Essentially, the element of the crucifixion and the resurrection is something that never took place, and therefore the Jewish people have rejected it. And those Jews who did reject it are those Jews who have maintained the covenant of God gave to Abraham.

Throughout the centuries, there have been many Jews who have become Catholics and Christians of different sorts, and I understand, and I'm sensitive to the fact that born-again Christians reject the idea that Catholics are real Christians, but regardless, all those Jews are not part of the covenant anymore.

Isn't that interesting? God promised Abraham that there would be an eternal covenant, there would be an eternal nation, yet all those Jews who have embraced the New Testament over the centuries, they're not here anymore identifying as Jews.

As a matter of fact, I would venture to say that you, Sid Roth, and my friend Dr. Mike Brown, I would venture to say that both of you are here identifying as Jews only because your great-grandparents rejected Christianity.

Actually, your whole identity of Judaism is literally founded in a rejection of Christianity.

Rabbi Singer, what about the words of Yeshua, Jesus? What do you personally think about those words?

Well, because Jesus... First of all, we don't know that Jesus ever said those words. All we know is that a half a century later, people recorded them as Jesus had said them. There are some of the words that were literally plagiarized from a Torah.

We can find the same thing in the Koran.

But forget whether they're authentic or not authentic.

Do you like the words? Well, there are some words that I love and there are some words that I hate. The words that I love are those words which are literally a repetition from Torah. It's not as important as what goes into your mouth as what goes out of your mouth.

God only knows that's so true.

Okay, Dr. Michael Brown, what is your view of the New Covenant?

Well, obviously I see the New Covenant Scriptures as the fulfillment of everything that God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures. I see that that's what they were pointing towards, that in incontrovertible ways they point to Jesus as the Messiah.

And I'll tell you something that's interesting. Aside from the alleged nonexistence of the resurrection and the crucifixion and the life of Jesus, if you will study ancient historical documents, you'll find that the New Testament stands out as the best-attested ancient book ever written.

It's interesting that if you look at the Hebrew Scriptures, the oldest complete copy that we have of the Hebrew Bible, I'm talking about from beginning to end, the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible we have is from the 10th century of this era.

In other words, about 1 ,300 or 1 ,400 years after it was completed. And while Tovia has no problem questioning the words of Jesus because he says they were written 50 years later, and there are differences about that also, I don't want to get into it, he has no problem believing every single word that's written in the Torah.

Why? Because he believes in that. But there's no ancient evidence supporting it. It's simply a matter of faith on his part.

What I'd say also is that... Excuse me, Tovia wants to interject something there.

No, what I think here is very important is that Mike is partially right. Although the complete Scriptures were not found in its entirety from a time previous to Jesus, we do have Masoretic texts that actually go back hundreds of years before Jesus ever walked the face of the earth.

That's something that's really very, very central. In terms of the New Testament manuscripts, we have thousands and thousands. If you read Josh McDowell's book on faith that demands... What is it? Faith that Demands an Evidence?

Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Something like that. Evidence that Demands a Verdict. You'll find in there that he says that there are actually thousands of different versions of the New Testament writings.

In actuality, when you talk about the Masoretic texts, there are actually only nine. And one of them actually takes in about 90 of all the Torahs we have today.

Just in response to that, to make a couple of corrections on the statement, the Dead Sea Scrolls, as they're commonly called, that Tovia was referring to, dated the earliest from a couple of hundred years BCE.

BCE is before the Common Era, and that's the Jewish way of saying BC. They date from a couple of hundred years at the earliest before Jesus. What's interesting is that there are many, many variants. In other words, when he said that every single letter is inspired, that was a statement of faith because of the fact that there are many, many variants in the writing.

When we get down to the New Testament text and the thousands and thousands of texts that we have, the fact is that if there are, quote, divergences, they are absolutely slight and minute. The other thing I wanted to say to clarify this, especially for the Christian audience, Rabbinic Judaism does not follow the literal word of the Torah.

It's often been said that you cannot have Christianity without a Christ, or you cannot have Messianic Judaism without a Messiah. That's true, just like you can't have marriage if you just have a husband.

You need a husband and wife. The fact is that you cannot have Rabbinic or traditional Judaism without rabbis and tradition. As an Orthodox Jewish lawyer, Chaim Schimmel says in the beginning of his book, The Oral Law, he says the Jews have never followed the literal word of the Hebrew Bible.

The Jews have followed the traditions of the rabbis, believing that God also gave another Torah, another divine word to Moses on Mount Sinai, and it's only through that oral Torah, which was passed on allegedly through every generation, that supposedly you can understand the Hebrew Scriptures.

So the fact of the matter is what I'm looking for is the literal truth of the Hebrew Bible. And I say that only points us in one direction, and that is towards Yeshua as the Messiah, and not in the path of traditional Judaism.

Rabbi Singer, what is your view of The Oral Law, the Talmud?

Okay. First of all, I just wanted to touch on one thing that Mike had said. You know, Mike talked about the New Testament being this early, unique document talking about the resurrection and crucifixion of Jesus.

It's important to state here that there was nothing else. That means no one else wrote about him contemporarily. And let's take a look at the people who might have written about him. Philo of Alexandria, a person who wrote extensively, didn't write a word about Jesus.

Isn't that interesting? If he really made such a mark on his generation, not a word was said about it. You look at the book of Josephus, which was written a little bit later than Jesus, but very, very short time, and we find there that Josephus said almost nothing about Jesus' life, and the few sentences that were said about him, most scholars, or many scholars, if I'm going to be corrected on that, believe that those were added in later on.

That's first of all.

By the way, just a point of interest. Josephus speaks very highly of James, or Jacob, as a tremendously godly man, and this is Jacob, the brother of Yeshua, who was recognized for his godliness throughout Jerusalem, according to Josephus.

Not only that, it's interesting that if you'll study ancient Egyptian accounts, at the time of the Exodus, you will not find a single word about the Exodus of the Jewish people, the Israelites, from Egypt.

Not a single sentence. In fact, Egyptian scholars, who are not believers in the Scriptures, say it never happened. The whole thing is a myth. But we know, by faith and by other evidence in the Scriptures, that it did happen.

There's far more evidence for the reliability of the New Testament writings, and there's an interesting book by F .F. Bruce called Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, that will give all the attestation that was there.

It's amply attested. The Talmud itself attests it to Jesus, although it can't figure out quite where to date him. Sometimes it dates him 200 years before Jesus, and sometimes 150 years after Jesus, but it does make reference to him.

It even makes reference to followers of Jesus, and no one can argue that within a matter of decades, that the good news of Jesus the Messiah had begun to spread throughout the nations. So we do have these as actual facts, but there's far more factual historical evidence back in the New Testament writings than the Old Testament, although I believe them both.

And one last point of interest. There was a man named Sir William Ramsey, who was a scholar in the skeptical school. Tübingen was a great center of learning in Germany, and they were very skeptical. There was a great scholar named F .C. Bauer, who didn't believe in the Scriptures at all.

And Sir William Ramsey went on a mission, basically, to disprove the accuracy of the Book of Acts, and ended up becoming an Orthodox believer in Jesus, and wrote many books demonstrating the historical accuracy of the New Testament.

Dr. Brown, and then I'll let Rabbi Singer pick up on it,. What, in your opinion, is the Talmud, the Oral Law?

The Talmud is an amazing compilation. It's not a book in a normal sense. It's divided into 63 tractates or books, and has about two and a half million words. It's an incredible compilation of Jewish folklore, Jewish wisdom, Jewish custom, Jewish tradition, and Jewish interpretation of Scripture.

It has some low sides to it, but overall it's a lofty achievement of man. However, it does not reveal truth. It does not give an accurate interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures and of the Torah, the first five books in particular.

And it certainly misunderstands the Messiah. And in fact, Christians need to understand this, that the Talmud in many places does not give you final dogmatic statements, but rather records debate, discussion.

So it has many, many, many different opinions about the Messiah within the Talmud, but it does not come to a conclusive view of the Messiah at all, and certainly does not lead Jewish people in a path straight to God.

Rabbi Singer, comment. I would say, obviously, if you think that the Talmud is giving us different understandings of the Messiah, you should read the commentaries on the Talmud. You would have a much better understanding of what the Talmud is saying.

It's giving us a different understanding, a different way of viewing the exact same thing. But what's most important is understanding...

Excuse me, where did the Talmud come from?

Well, the Talmud is actually a commentary. The Talmud is a commentary on something called the Mishnah. Now what happened was, when the Jewish people went into exile after the second temple was destroyed, it was a very, very different kind of an exile.

In the first temple, when the first temple was destroyed, the Jewish people went almost as a whole, most of them went to Babylon, and there that's where they lived for 70 years, until very few of them went back to Israel.

When the second temple was destroyed, it was something horrific. The Jewish people were spread out throughout the Roman Empire, and it was something where the Jewish people literally lost their autonomy in any way.

During that time, there was a great person, his name is Rabbi Yehuda the Prince, it was actually a little bit later, and he realized that if the Jewish people were going to different corners of the world, unlike the first exile, it was essential that these things, which were transmitted orally, could be now written down.

That was very important. Later on, the Talmud, the students of the students of the students, had to then write down a commentary to what these great, they were called Tanoim, wrote down, so that it can better be understood what they were saying.

And they were passing on a tradition, by the way, that even archaeology can point out.

Now did the oral law supposedly come from Moses, who got it from God? Is that your belief? That's correct. Oh yes. Now what portion of the Talmud came in that portion?

Actually, not only was the Talmud from the oral Torah, there are many, it's all part of what we call the Messorah.

But if its portions of it are just commentary, then that could not have come from God.

Let me give you an example, because I think a lot of people in the listening audience are having a little difficulty with what we're trying to say. For instance, the Jewish person, when it comes to Shabbos, the Shabbos will be coming in a few hours, there are many things that he's not permitted to do.

It's a statement that God created the world and we don't come from monkeys. And that's very important. Well, under certain circumstances, we're permitted to violate the Shabbos. Specifically, when there's any question where there is a jeopardy to human life.

Now, a Tano could have written, for instance, in the Tractate of Shabbos, that you are permitted, for instance, to light a kindle of fire on Shabbos. For the people who lived in his generation, they understood exactly what he meant.

What he meant was that in case there was somebody who was sick and needed to warm themselves, you were allowed to, not only allowed to, but had to light a fire. The Talmud, those students had to write that, because in later generations, these people may not understand the full clarity of what these Tanoim were writing down.

This tradition that came from God directly to Moses and passed on to Joshua and throughout the generations through all the stages that we've had.

Dr. Brown, you want to comment on that? Sure. One thing, just for the benefit of our listening audience, remembering that Toby is a rabbi and grew up with this, they may not even know what Shabbos is, which is Sabbath.

That's the Jewish pronunciation of Sabbath, just to clarify that for listeners. But I would say that anyone reading through the Hebrew Scriptures honestly will see that God made the covenant based on a written book, period.

There is not a stitch of supportable evidence throughout the entire Hebrew Bible that God gave an authoritative oral tradition to Moses at any point. It's based on the book. In fact, when you go, and there are many, many proofs within the Scriptures for this, and we may not have time to get into it, but when you get to Joshua 1, verse 8, God says to him, This book of the Torah of teaching, this book of the law, will not depart from your mouth, and then he goes on and tells him to meditate on it day and night, et cetera.

Why, the covenant was made on the written book, and there's not a single instance that gives any definite evidence of any kind to the existence of an oral tradition that God gave to Moses. In fact, there are numerous instances where the oral tradition violates the actual plain sense of the Hebrew Scriptures.

That's why I said that Jews, religious Jews, and I admire rabbis for their sincerity, and we can have a friendly dialogue and differ and disagree, but I do want to point out that traditional Jews do not follow the literal interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Rather, they follow the rabbinic interpretation, and there's a world of difference in many, many cases, and it's important that we recognize who is following Scripture alone and who is not, because it's a major issue.

Well, I would say, Mike, you're wrong over here. Any thought that the Talmud in any way contradicts any holy word that you'll find in the written Scriptures is just a lack of understanding. If you had read the Marsha in the area that I think you're talking about, you would find that everything is cleared up over there.

But I want to just mention one other thing. You know, throughout history, there have been many deviant groups that have filtered away from the Jewish people, and some of them have said, you know something?

We reject the Oral Torah. We reject this Holy Messorah. Guess where they are now? They don't exist anymore. Look at the New Testament, for instance. The New Testament has a group called the Sadducees who rejected the Oral Torah.

Does anybody here know, maybe on your block, maybe a few houses down, there's some Sadducees living there? The Karaites, another glorious group. Where are they today? There are perhaps a few families left in Israel.

They're really not here anymore in any real way. Isn't it odd that every group that has ever deviated from Judaism has lost the covenant of Abraham? As a matter of fact, I will submit to you that the only people that have maintained the covenant of Abraham are those people that have kept the written Torah as well as the Oral Torah.

Those who have attempted in any way to deviate have lost out. I mean, it's important to just look back in history. You go to the time of Jesus, just take that period, the Roman Empire had 44 million people, of which 4 million were Jewish.

That's 9 of the Roman Empire were living in 1991, and the Jewish people only reflect 1 5th of 1 of the world's population. Whatever happened to all those percent? We should have been a half a billion people if we would consider that same 9%.

They've all been lost away, and they've all accepted the teachings of things that resemble what Mike Brown is saying and what other people are saying, that Judaism, as it's been transmitted, is, God forbid, incorrect.

Dr. Brown, do you want to respond to that? Sure, I'd love to.

Number one, numbers are not the entire issue. For example, after the tragedies of the Holocaust, when it almost looked like Eastern Europe's entire Orthodox community was wiped out, people could have said, well, that's it.

You see, that's the end of Orthodoxy. But then Orthodoxy had a revival in our day. The fact is, if you want to go back to New Testament times, so you pick on the Sadducees. The Sadducees did not believe in the prophets or the rest of the scriptures.

They only believed in the first five books. Therefore, they were not following the prophetic tradition. In fact, for centuries, there existed Jewish followers of Jesus who continued to live as Jews, so much so that those in the church world, which were becoming more and more Gentile and more and more insensitive to the Jewish roots of the faith, said they don't differ from the Jews in any way.

In fact, they were suspect because they were so Jewish. And yet these people, for example, called the Nazarenes, categorically rejected rabbinic tradition and yet held to being Jews and following the scriptures as Jews.

They existed for centuries, and there's evidence that they continue to exist, and lo and behold, here we are again today in the 20th century. The fact is, Israel has always been a dying and resurrected nation in many ways, and we're seeing the evidence of it.

One other point I just wanted to make, though, is this, that there are places, for example, in the five books of Moses where law is given, and then later on, later on in the Hebrew Bible, that law is repeated, and we see exactly what it meant and exactly how it was carried out, and yet it is interpreted totally differently in the Talmud.

That's why I was saying that the traditions of the rabbis, as I said, there are many wonderful things in them, but they do not bring us to the truth of the scriptures.

That's the key difference that we really have. Let's go direct to the $64 million question, Rabbi Tovia Singer. Who is Jesus of Nazareth?

Well, who Jesus of Nazareth is is somebody who really is no different, and the more important question really is who Jesus of Nazareth was not, and that is he was not the Messiah. If he was the Messiah, then we would have, we would be able to look out of our windows.

We'd be able to read the New York Times. The evidence would be on the front page of the New York Times, because instead of war being on the New York Times, we'd find peace on the front page of the New York Times.

You know, Mike and I can sit here, and we like each other and everything. We can sort of spar a little bit over here back and forth, but I don't want to point you to this radio for the source of the truth.

I want you to look out your window, because that's what I can point to. I'm not going to be a Houdini with you. There's one miracle, and that one miracle is the evidence of the truth, and that's the miracle of the covenant.

That was what God told Abraham, and God said, as long as your people will keep to this Torah, even when they go into exile, then they will remain the eternal nation, and yes, in Deuteronomy 7 -7, God said that you will be few in number.

Yes, you could have been great numbers, but only a few of us have kept the Torah in its proper way. Isn't it an interesting coincidence that the Jewish people, and I'm going to take a shot over here. I know nothing about Sid's parents or grandparents or great-grandparents, and the same thing goes for Mike.

Yet, I would venture to say that if I go back 100 years with either of you, that your great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents were Orthodox Jews. If I'm wrong, jump in. No, you're correct. Oh, I'm correct.

What an interesting guess. How did I know that? I knew that, praise God. I knew that through God's holy word, because if those people, if those people in your background were not living according to Torah, and when I say Torah, I mean the written and the oral, you wouldn't be here identifying as a Jew.

You'd be on some Christian radio station, perhaps.

Dr. Michael Brown, do you want to respond to the fact that Jesus is not the Messiah because there is not peace on earth? Right.

Let me just respond to the last thing that Toby said first, because he's made the point a couple of times. God has preserved the Jewish people, and if we read the Scriptures, we will see that he has preserved us in spite of our stubbornness and in spite of our unbelief.

I could point to the Muslims and say, well, the Muslims must have truth because they're persevering through the generations. So, that doesn't prove that it's the truth. I would also say, if not for the traditional Jewish community repelling and rejecting and pushing out Jews who believed in Jesus, along with the Church's insensitivity to the Jewish roots of the faith, the story would go very, very differently than what Toby is saying.

The fact is, Rabbinic Jews have in no way helped us as Messianic Jews to stay Jews. They've fought it, they've resisted it, they've argued, they've called us Mishumadin, destroyed ones, etc. So, there have been a force in many ways to push us away from Jewish roots.

And I've had Rabbis say, well, you're not Jewish anymore. With that type of influence, it's by the grace of God that we maintain our Jewishness. But regarding the Messiahship of Jesus, number one, there's nowhere where Tovia can point in the Bible where it says, when the Messiah comes, this will happen.

When the Messiah comes, that will happen. We both have to agree that we have to look at the Scriptures and interpret what is and what is not Messianic. The second thing is, if it was so crystal-cut and clear, you would not have so many traditions within Judaism over the years discussing who the Messiah is and what will happen when he comes.

You have the greatest philosopher in Medieval Judaism, Rav Sa 'ad Ja 'on, living in around the 9th century. In his famous book of Beliefs and Opinions, he devotes a section to what will happen when the Messiah comes, and he was doing it to educate the people.

Several generations after that, they were still asking questions because they weren't clear on it. The fact is, Jesus and Jesus alone is the only possible candidate for being the Jewish Messiah. The fact of the matter is, the Messiah had to come before the Second Temple was destroyed.

The fact of the matter is that he alone has brought the Gentile world into the knowledge of God, into praying for the God, to the God of Israel. And the fact of the matter is that there are certain things that had to be fulfilled, had to happen, that if he was not the Messiah, there can't be a Messiah because there are no longer any potential candidates for it.

And I would stake my life and eternity on the fact that he and he alone.

Is the Jewish Messiah. Rabbi Singer, is there a unified view in Orthodox Judaism about the Messiah? Absolutely.

And what we know about the Messiah is so clear in the Scriptures. Never one says in the Scriptures that when the Messiah comes, when all these things are going to happen, whether it's peace on earth, nations shall not lift up sword against nations, a child will play in a cobra's den.

None of them say he will come and then he will come again when these things will happen. It merely says, it doesn't say he will return and come again. Yeah, I know people can pull out Scriptures where it says he will come twice, but it never says that it's referring to the Messiah.

What's critical, and I want to get back to what Mike said a little earlier, you know, go back 2 ,000 years, you know, in the time of Jesus, maybe the year 30. You know, God had many choices before him.

He had many groups of Jews who believed different things. You had the Jerusalem church headed by Peter and James. They, to the best of my knowledge, were probably Orthodox Jews, in a sense meaning they kept Torah.

Yet, because they did not believe in the true Messiah and they followed a false Messiah, there's nothing left of them. The Jerusalem church was destroyed. Wouldn't it have been much more glorious that if the Jerusalem church would have continued and the Pharisees would have been destroyed?

But God chose the Pharisees. And regardless of what light the New Testament puts the Pharisees under, these are people that live for God every second. They love God with all their heart and with all their might.

And it's their progeny that went on and indeed continue until today. Dr. Brown, do you want to comment? Sure, I'd say there are about three different points that Tovya made.

That I'd like to respond to. The one is he keeps saying that it has only been Pharisaical or later Rabbinic traditional Jews who have preserved the Jewish people. Now again, I say that it's God alone who has preserved the Jewish people.

The fact is, as I mentioned, we've been a dying and resurrected nation. We were scattered out of the land for all those generations. And now God has brought us back. Who has he brought back primarily?

Israel to this day is primarily a secular nation. That's the hand of God. Does that prove? Does that prove because the Zionists were secular that therefore, since we owe to them a great deal for the reestablishment of the modern state of Israel, that secular Zionism is God's?

Well, of course not. God can work through whoever he wants to. People do need to understand that historically the roots of the church, of followers of Jesus, were in fact Jewish. And when he's mentioning the Pharisees and the preservation of Judaism through them, I just say, hey, wait a second.

Look at how this message has gone throughout the earth. Right now, the gospel, the good news of Jesus the Messiah, is being declared in over 3 ,000 different languages. There are hundreds of millions of peoples whose lives have been radically changed and, as I said, come to love the God of Israel through the good news of Jesus the Messiah.

You could say, so what? Numbers don't count. Well, I'm saying numbers are not the major issue, but there's so many answers to his point. I just wanted to give a few. In reference to the Messiahship of Jesus, as I said before, there are many different views in traditional Judaism concerning the Messiah.

There are traditions that say that there's a Messiah son of Joseph as well as a Messiah son of David. Yeah, but Rabbi Singer said there was one view of Messiah. Right, what he means, and so I don't want to be contentious with him, what he means, and I'll agree with this, is that there's an overall view that the Messiah son of David will come and regather the lost of Israel and bring all of Israel into knowledge of the Torah and establish peace on earth.

And in that sense, there is one unified view that he's speaking of. But even the Talmud asks the question, will he come in the clouds of heaven or will he come riding on a donkey? And the answer is, and it's just one opinion given in the Talmud, well, if we're righteous, he'll come with the clouds of heaven, and if we're wicked, he'll come riding on a donkey.

I say no. First he came riding on a donkey, one person, and then he will come in the clouds of heaven. Why? Because every word of the Hebrew Bible is going to be fulfilled, not either or. Also, it says in the end of Isaiah 52, a passage I'm sure we'll get into at great length in a little while, it gives us a clear picture of the servant of the Lord who many rabbis have recognized as a messianic passage.

And it says that the very same one who will be highly exalted, the Hebrew says, hinei yaskil avdi, yarum v 'nisa, v 'gavah ma 'od, behold, my servant will do wisely. He will be exalted and lifted up and very high.

That very one who will be highly exalted will first be marred and beaten and rejected and die before he rises into his exaltation. So there are many indications that we do have about the two phases of Messiah's ministry.

As I said, rabbinic traditions have developed some thought about two different Messiahs. We say, no, there's not a Messiah son of Joseph and a Messiah son of David, but rather one Messiah, Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth.

I'd also just make the point that if we will be honest about one Jewish view of the Messiah, we'll see that it is somewhat of an overstatement if we'll look at the Hebrew scriptures.