The following from Steve Hays is well worth reading. Particularly for those familiar with the Hebraic Roots and/or Messianic Jewish movement.
5. Judaism
The relationship between Christianity and Judaism is, of course, key to their mutual identity and integrity. For a Messianic Jew, the Old Covenant is essentially continuous with the New insofar as it is fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus. Excepting Luke, who may well have been a God-fearer, all of the NT authors are Messianic Jews.
For a rabbinical Jew, the OT is essentially discontinuous with the New Covenant inasmuch as he regards Jesus as a messianic pretender and the Christian faith to be a Jewish heresy.
Historically, Judeo-Christian dialogue has suffered from stereotyping on both sides. On the Christian side, it is common to hear it said that the Jews rejected Jesus because he didn’t fit their preconception of a political Messiah. This is a half-truth. But it fails to distinguish between the religious establishment and the rank-and-file. The “laity” did have their sights set on a political Messiah who would oust the Romans and restore Jewish sovereignty (e.g., Jn 6:15; Acts 1:6). And when their expectations were disappointed, they turned against Jesus.
However, the concern of the religious establishment was just the opposite. They felt threatened by Jesus because they did view him as a political Messiah, and they were rather attached to the status quo because it kept them in power.
A lot of Christians also equate modern Jews with OT Jews. But many modern Jews do not identity with the OT. And even observant Jews tend to filter the OT through the Talmud.
Moreover, God cut a covenant with Abraham and his seed. But God never made a covenant with the Ashkenazi, for the Ashkenazi are of European descent. They are not ethnic Jews, and many are not even religious Jews.[14]
Furthermore, this comparison is deeply misleading; it fosters the image that Judaism is a continuum whereas Christianity is an offshoot. But it is crucial to realize that both rabbinic Judaism and Messianic Judaism (=Christianity) lay claim to be the legitimate heirs of OT faith and expectation. The relation of Christianity to Judaism is not of branch to trunk, but of branch to branch in relation to a common trunk. And the question is which is truly continuous with the OT.
For their part, many Jews entertain influential stereotypes of Christianity. One source of misunderstanding is the difference between rabbinical righteousness and Evangelical holiness. In rabbinical ethics, it is possible for a man to be a righteous man by keeping the law.[15] In this definition, a righteous man is a good man, a man of high virtue. And this, in turn, creates an expectation of what it means or ought to mean for a Christian to be a good or bad Christian. Unless a Christian attains a certain standard of personal virtue, he is a hypocrite. And if enough Christians fall short, then the Christian faith must be deeply hypocritical.
But from the standpoint of Christian ethics, a Christian is not a good man, but a holy man. Holiness is both better and worse than mere goodness. A saint is not a man of outstanding morals. He is, first and foremost, a man who has been called and consecrated, set apart and sanctified by God’s grace and God’s righteousness. It isn’t inborn or acquired. No one is born a Christian the way one is born a Jew or Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist. No one converts to Christianity the way one converts to Islam or Judaism. It isn’t a personal attainment. It isn’t the cause or consequence of a high moral character. Rather, it comes, if it comes at all, from without rather than within. It is a true vocation or calling.
This is by no means to deny that a Christian is set apart, in part, to be a man of godly character. But godliness and holy living are like the anchor beyond the veil (Heb 6:19). We are drawn to God because we are drawn by God. It is a deeper and stronger thing then mere goodness because we are drawn Godward by the bands of an everlasting and almighty love (Isa 54:7-8; Jer 31:3; Hos 11:4). A Christian has a heart for God because God has given him a heart a to love and serve him. But he still suffers from heart disease, from a divided heart. It falls so short because it aims so high—higher than the heavens. And only in heaven will the distance be bridged.
Another major impediment is the notion of a Divine Messiah. This they regard as a blasphemous violation of OT monotheism (e.g. Exod 20:3; Deut 6:4; Isa 44:6).[16] And they attribute the Deity of Christ to the tincture of Hellenistic philosophy.
That, however, doesn’t fully explain their demurral. To begin with, this is an artificial reading of the NT. John’s Logos-theology has its background in OT logos-theology, mediated by the Septuagint. And if you read the debates between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, not only in John, but also the Synoptics, on the nature of his divine Sonship, this is a controversy over the nature of the OT Messianic expectation and the terms of its fulfillment.
But even on its own grounds, the charge is not self-explanatory. Philo was far more Hellenistic than anything you find in the NT, yet Jews don’t regard Philo as an infidel. Cabalism is a form of Neoplatonic theosophy, dressed up in Hebrew word-play, yet Cabalism isn’t dismissed as an apostate philosophy. It is, in fact, striking how many of Paul’s opponent’s were not Palestinian Jews, but Hellenistic Jews (Acts 13:45,50; 14:2,19; 17:5,13; 18:12; 20:3). Paul himself was trained in Palestinian Judaism of the purest water.
Even on the question of Jesus’ Messianic claims, the Jews didn’t excommunicate the disciples of Bar Kochba just because they backed the wrong horse.[17] The Talmud accuses Jesus of witchcraft,[18] yet the practice of exorcism holds an honored place in Jewish tradition.[19]
Another charge is that Jesus tempted Jews to defy the Mosaic law. But even if that were true, it doesn’t entirely account for the reaction. To begin with, many Jews disregard the kosher laws and other suchlike. In addition, the notion of a New Covenant is famously on display in OT Messianic expectation (Jer 31:31-34), so there is no a priori reason why Jews would necessarily take offense at a Messianic claimant just because he presented himself as inaugurating this promise. The true Messiah would have to assume that role. For that matter, Jews don’t question the Jewish credentials of the Essenes, even though this sect severed its ties with the religious establishment and formal cultus. Josephus was a collaborator, yet he is freely cited as an authentic spokesman for first century Judaism.
So the reaction must cut deeper than the standard objections. I would suggest that it has two elements: anti-Semitism and the Jewish identity crisis. Regarding the first, many Jews blame the Church for the brunt of anti-Semitism, starting with the NT, and running through the Inquisitions, Crusades, pogroms and Holocaust.
Now, this is a complicated allegation. To begin with, the NT was written by Jews, so the charge of anti-Semitism seems oxymoronic. This is an intramural debate between fellow Jews.
Now, some Jews would counter that the NT reflects the phenomenon of the self-hating Jew. One problem with this charge is that it is usually applied to Jews who are torn between their heritage and the forces of assimilation. But the NT writers are not mainstreaming with Greco-Roman culture for purposes of social advancement. Indeed, they retain the OT denunciations of idolatry. Another problem is that the supposedly anti-Semitic verses in the NT are tame compared with the denunciations of stiff-necked Israel in the OT. So if the NT is anti-Semitic, so is the OT.
A further problem with this accusation is that it commits a cultural anachronism. Freedom of dissent is a modern notion. The reason that the Roman Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution is that it came of age during the era of autocratic government, and Roman Catholic polity is a mirror-image of Roman polity. Instead of the Roman Emperor and aristocracy, you have the Roman Pontiff and episcopate. The Roman Church made a fatal move when it turned a culture-bound polity into a divine and irreformable institution. But the immediate point is that the Roman Church was an equal-opportunity avenger. For she persecuted all forms of dissent, whether heretics, humanists, schismatics, infidels, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, lapsed Catholics, &c.
As I say, the modern idea of civil tolerance for religious dissent is just that, a modern idea. You don’t find it in Luther, for that matter, you don’t find it in Machiavelli or Suleyman.[20] I’m not a Lutheran, and I don’t condone Luther’s invective, but Luther was just as nasty things about the papists, Anabaptists, &c. Indeed, he said very nasty things about himself! This was a polemical age in which many writers on every side descended to vitriolic attack and counterattack.
And remember that religious offenses were capital offenses under the Mosaic Covenant as well. The Jews stoned Sabbath-breakers and blasphemers, and waged holy war against the heathen. And it was, indeed, the Jews who originally persecuted Christ and the Christians. And Messianic Jews are persecuted in modern Israel.
It should also go without saying that anti-Semitism antedates the rift between the church and the synagogue. The anti-Semitism of Pharaoh (Exod 6) and Haman (Esther) were hardly inflamed by the charge of Deicide. I would add that much of the persecution of the Jews owes as much or more to nationalism and national character than religion. For example, German Nazis were far harsher than Italian Fascists, and the Fascist measures largely owned to Nazi pressure.[21]
My immediate aim is not to sort out the right from the wrong in all of this, but just to remind the reader that he is guilty of selective morality if he singles out the Church for special blame in the history of religious persecution. This is not distinctive to the Church.
The other reason that so many Jews are so hostile to the Gospel is that it poses a threat to their already insecurity sense of identity. Many Jews define their Judaism in anti-Christian terms. I realize this is a provocative proposal, but what are we to think when a secular Jew is still a Jew, but a Messianic Jew is a traitor to his people?
The Jewish identity crisis is as old as Judaism itself. For Judaism was born in exile. The legend of the wandering Jew has its exemplar in Abraham, whom God called out of Ur. Heavenly-minded Messianic Jews like Abraham, Simeon and Stephen (cf. Acts 7; Heb 11) have never suffered from an identity crisis. But it has been a pervasive problem for many of the Jewish people throughout their long history. When they had the land, they identified with the land. But when they lost the land through exile or deportation, they no longer had this point of reference. Even when they had the land, there was a temptation to assimilate with the cultural climate of the surrounding nations, and thus lose their distinct identity as a covenant community. When they had the Temple, they identified with the Temple, But when the lost the Temple, twice over, they no longer had this point of reference.
When the Romans occupied the land, the challenge was again to maintain their identity as a holy people, set apart by God, despite the constant and defiling contact with their heathen overlords. The Essenes, Pharisees and Zealots each represent different distancing strategies to retain identity under Roman rule. The Pharisees resorted to a multiplication of purificatory rites to insulate themselves from daily defilement with Greek slaves and Roman masters. The Essenes took this strategy a step further, and more literally. Instead of a ritual buffer zone, they put physical space between themselves and the heathen by living apart from the contaminating presence of the pagan. And the Zealots too this strategy a final step, and, in a sense, inverted the Essene policy by trying to externalize the heathen. When the Zealot party won the argument, but lost the war, Palestinian Jews joined the Diaspora, and exported the Pharisaic strategy.
During the Middle ages, the ghetto imposed Jewish identity by a physical barrier. But when the fence fell, the temptation to assimilate with the dominant culture reasserted itself. And, indeed, some Jews were better Germans than the Germans. But their very success was held against them. For the Holocaust deassimilated the Jews. The bitter irony of Nazism was to confer a Jewish identity on many Jews who had lost their own sense of Jewishness, or done their best to put it behind them.
After the mortifying shock of this final “outing,” many Jews turned to Zionism to supply their identity. But decades of war with intractable Arabs and suicide bombers have soured this utopian vision.
Other Jews turned to Marxism, which is a secular Messianism.[22] Yet Russian Jews suffered under the Stalinist pogrom. So a Jewish-inspired ideology became just one more Jew-killing machine. And this painful irony embittered yet another utopian vision.
Some Jews have tried dodging the issue by proposing a dual covenant. And this compromise has recently received the endorsement of the Vatican.
The problem, however, is that the NT was Jewish before it was Christian. And the New Covenant is a covenant for Jews as well as Christians. There is no other way of reading the mission to the Jews in the Gospels and Acts, much less the redemptive-historical plot-lines in Romans or 2 Corinthians or Ephesians or Hebrews.
The Jews have suffered from a lingering and malingering identity crisis because they go out of their way to avoid the one anchor of Jewish identity. In the past, Christian apologetics has suffered from invoking a few isolated messianic proof texts. But messianic prophecy needs to be seen as a more organic and holistic whole. A Christian apologist should identify the key messianic motifs, and trace out their steady thematic progression.[23]
