Jews for Jesus & Jews for Judaism

Jews for J

In the mid-1950’s, a former Jew, Martin Rosen, converted to Christianity and became a Baptist minister. His denomination assigned him the duty of converting Jews to the Baptist faith. This he carried out with zeal by founding a movement called Jews for Jesus. Using a variety of marketing techniques, this group goes after the vast number of Jews who are ignorant of the Jewish religion and tells them that a real Jew must become a Christian.

This is of course impossible for several reasons. First and foremost is the Jewish view that G’d is not human and that humans are not G’d. Christianity, like its Greco-Egyptian predecessors, holds that a human being was G’d and died and was resurrected. This belief is an ancient one, preceding Christianity by thousands of years.

Sir James G. Frazier, the author of that great work The Golden Bough, shows that in ancient Egypt the god whose death and resurrection was celebrated annually was Osiris. At the birth of Osiris a voice from heaven announced this great event at the temple in Thebes.  Osiris then reigned as king. Yet, Osiris had enemies who killed him by flinging him into the Nile. However, Osiris was revived after several years and reigned as king again. It is noteworthy that the mother of the god Osiris, Isis, was also worshipped by the Egyptians and held the same place in their liturgy as the Virgin Mary in Catholicism. If you wish you can read the details in Frazier’s book. There can be little doubt that the death and resurrection of the Egyptian god refers to the death and resurrection of nature in winter and in spring.

Likewise, the Greek god Dionysus died and was resurrected. Frazier tells us that shortly after his burial Dionysus rose from the dead, an event annually celebrated at Delphi and other Greek oracles. Here again, the cycle of nature has much to do with this ancient belief.

Jews reject this. While we cannot and will not define the nature of G’d, we know that Maimonides held that we know that G’d is not human. Anyone who believes that G’d was or is human is not a Jew.

The second reason why no Jew can be a believer in Jesus is that the Christian religion is responsible for the mass murder of millions of Jews over 2,000 years. Not only was the Holocaust the direct result of the Christ killer legend, as Mel Gibson has shown, but all the murders and persecutions of our people from ancient times to the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Hitlerian horrors were the product of Christian teachings. How can anyone be a Jew and participate in a religion which has caused us so much suffering and so much death? A Jew for Jesus becomes a party to the persecution of the Jewish people.

A third reason why a Jew for Jesus is a misnomer is that the segment of Christianity which is in fact of Jewish origin, such as the partial acceptance of the Torah, is a faint reflection of the real thing. For example, we read in Leviticus 19:18 “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This phrase is repeated in the Christian bible (from the port of Byblos where Papyrus or paper was shipped to Greece).

Surely it is not necessary for a Jew to learn the teachings of the Torah second hand.  Furthermore, the “New Testament” is so full of anti-Jewish sentiment that no self-respecting Jew can join a religion which denounced him ipso facto.

Jews for Jesus claims that those who join them are now more the Jew than they were before this conversion. Yet, this claim is as ridiculous as asking a Christian to become a Moslem on the grounds that Jesus is in fact mentioned in the Koran as a prophet. Would a Christian be willing to accept the view that he should become a follower of Mohammed and thereby become an even better Christian? Such a proposal would be utterly rejected and held as an insult to both religions.

In response to the machinations of the Jews for Jesus cult, we have developed an organization called Jews for Judaism. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Jews for Judaism seek to educate Jews about our heritage and our history and our religion and our ethics so that Jews who know nothing about their own people will not be fooled if they meet someone seeking to convert them to a destructive cult powered by the animosity so visible in The Passion of the Christ and other anti-Jewish propaganda. The truth is that Jews for Jesus are the enemies of the Jewish people.

Indeed, we Jews are faced with many enemies. The Euro-Arab alliance who want to destroy Israel. The professional Jew baiters like Al Sharpton and the American Nazis. All of these seek our destruction. This is also true of the Jews for Jesus. If they should succeed, which is unthinkable, we would disappear. Judaism would be no more. The Jewish people would come to an end. That will of course never happen because we are an eternal people despite all obstacles, despite all our detractors, despite all secularists and despite all “Jews for this or that”.

Shalom u’vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Man's Ascent to Reason (2003) & the forthcoming Football & American Identity.

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