Highlight: Answering Jewish Objections to Christianity

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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 of, let's say, objections that come in?

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What are the the biblical responses, the Christian response to the objections that are 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. 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 gonna do now is a mega condensation of 1 ,500 plus pages, thousands of hours of dialogue and debate and writing study.

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Okay, yeah, I'm gonna break them into categories, six categories. General, historical, theological, messianic, prophecy,

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New Testament, traditional Jewish. Those are the six parts of the five volumes. So, I may have left one out,

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I'll make sure I cover it now. General, those are the most basic. I'm born a Jew, I'm gonna die a

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Jew, right? It's Jewish identity. This is who I am. And the simple thing is, yes, that's true.

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The question is, who is the Messiah? And will you die a Jew in right relationship with God? That's the most simple.

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When you dig further, historical objections are of two kinds. One, as we said, if there's any religion on the planet that could not be

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God's religion, it's Christianity because of anti -Semitism. And two, when the Messiah comes, there'll be peace on earth.

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Look at the messianic prophecies, Isaiah 11, Isaiah 2, other passages. Excuse me, when the

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Messiah comes, there'll be peace on earth. And he'll ruin reign. That hasn't happened.

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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

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Word of God and taking the Scripture seriously. And through history, there have been philo -Semites.

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There have been Christians, be it a Charles Spurgeon, be it a Robert Murray McShane, be it the

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Puritans, be it others through history that loved Jesus and loved the Jewish people. And there, a

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Gentile Christian says, hey, I apologize for what's been done in Jesus' name. Let me show you who a real Christian is. As far as the history issue of the

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Messiah obviously hasn't come, we have to make our argument scripturally that there are two aspects to the Messiah's work.

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First priestly, then royal. First, he comes as the priestly king to deal with sin.

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And then from there to be a light to the world, then he will return to establish his kingdom on the earth. So there are two acts, the first act and the second act.

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The second act can only take place after the first. The Messiah must first do this before coming to establish peace on earth.

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When it comes to theological objections, those are more weighty still. Jews worship one

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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 other 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 1, no one's seen God at any time. First Timothy 6, no one has seen God or can see him. So he dwells in unapproachable glory.

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But Yeshua says, if you've seen me, you've seen the father. It's the son who makes him known. And the

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Ruach, the spirit who works invisibly on earth. And we can show all that from the Hebrew Bible.

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And we are not making a man into a God or God into a man. We're saying that the eternal almighty

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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 and emphasizing the importance of of blood 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 event 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 on a man who was crucified and died the worst death 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 messianic.

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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.

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Don't look at Jewish interpretive methods to the first century. So we go, we have to go through each one.

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Why does Matthew 1, 23 quote Isaiah 7, 14?

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Why? 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 they, the

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New Testament teaches that Jesus abolishes the law. And the one thing a Jew knows is that they're 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.

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And we've had an unbroken chain of tradition for now 3 ,500 years. And what we argue is that the covenant was based on the written word, the written word alone.

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And as beautiful as many of the traditions are, that ultimately the oral, 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, 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.

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We have a fine relationship with God. 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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Wow. So that's, that's a super short summary. We need to look at a thousand 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? Yeah, the easiest place to get tons of free material is realmessiah .com.

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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 a hundred 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

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I've had with rabbis. They're for free. They can watch outreach videos.

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They can watch the Repeating the Counter -Missionary. So all there for free on realmessiah .com.