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Dear Friend,
I'm sorry that I don't
have an opportunity to meet you in person. I think it takes courage on
your part to read this. Some come to this site because they are curious,
some are seekers, but I'm delighted for any reason you may have chose to
read this message.
Perhaps you are
uncomfortable with the idea that Jews can be Christians. I think this
unease stems from many things, but perhaps most of all, as Jews you are
taught that Jews must always remain a Jew. Then you are indoctrinated that being
Jewish and believing in Jesus are mutually exclusive. From this we
conclude, "I can never believe in Jesus if I am to remain Jewish"
People wrongly assume
that being Jewish is inimical to believing in Jesus. If you think it
through, being Jewish is more than following the Jewish religion. Many
Jews, are not involved in the Jewish religion. Yet, most of them are very
Jewish. Jewishness has to do with culture, with community and with the
way, you relate to each other. When I talk about this I'm talking about
something that is different from the religion of the Rabbis, as you know,
I do not follow the Jewish religion.
You might be surprised
that the Jewish Bible, the T'nach, does not mention rabbis. According to
Scripture, the priesthood was to be in charge. What is now considered
"traditional Judaism" began at the Council of Yavneh, when a group of
rabbis met and made certain decisions in light of the destruction of the
Temple and the growth of Christianity. What decisions they made, we can
only surmise. But after Yavneh, rabbis were in control of the religion.
The rabbis had no
scriptural warrant to change the religion. They claimed authority, saying
that what they were presenting had been taught as an oral law to Moses by
God, and they were just conveying the oral law. But the oral law was often
in contradiction to the Scriptures.
Jesus lived and taught
and died (and I believe rose from the dead) prior to the Council of Yavneh.
He was a threat to rabbinical authority, even at that time. The truth is,
as His followers we are dissenters to the conventional Jewish religion. We
see the source of authority not as the rabbis, but like original Judaism
the authority is in the Scriptures. If the rabbis are right when they make
Messianic Jews outcasts, even denying that they are Jews, if they are
justified in proclaiming this than so be it, but what if they are wrong?
If Jesus was the One, the
promised Messiah who fulfilled these prophecies, then isn't it right for
Jews to believe in Him? Who else should have believed in Him, Norwegians?
If what the New Testament teaches is true, Jesus is the only one who ever
chose where, when, and how to be born. He chose to be a Jew, to come to
Israel,
not Oslo.
In its origins,
Christianity is Jewish! At first in order to be a Christian, you had to be
a Jew. And one of the big surprises was that Gentiles were to be admitted
to this new revelation of the Jewish religion called Christianity. If it's
right for a Jew to believe in Jesus, then there is no such thing as a
Jewish Christian. If it's not right, it's pretentious of us to say there
is such a thing. The problem is that Jewishness has been affected and in
terms of the denials (what we don't believe) rather than by the
affirmations of what we do believe.
I am reminded of the
story of a friend who was trying to answer a boy he met when he was about
nine years old. He was asked about the difference between Jews and
Christians. Even though he had been attending Hebrew school, the only
answer he could give was, "Jews don’t believe in Jesus". It's a matter of
being owned by what you don’t believe rather than what you do. Maybe what
he wanted to say was that we love and serve the real God-- except he
couldn't say that because he didn't know anything about Jesus.
My friend Moishe wasn't
looking for a different religion when he came to believe in Jesus. He
didn’t' believe that Christianity was nicer than Judaism, or that somehow,
Christians were better people than his family. He was struggling to
understand what is true. I can understand his discomfort because truth is
not always comfortable. In fact, sometimes truth hurts!
In closing this letter to
you, I again thank you for looking into this idea, this truth if you will.
Please, my dear friend, don't forget the question that I raised earlier,
"If Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. Then isn't believing in Him the most
normal thing a Jew can do?
Shalom
Rev. Joe Hildebrandt Sr.
Special thanks to my dear
friend Moishe
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