Why Jews Don’t Accept Jesus as Messiah: A Ten-Point Reel and the Deeper Question
Fellowship Discussion Essay | June 8, 2026
Occasion. A short reel circulating on social media channels under the title Why Jews Don’t Accept Jesus as the Messiah presents ten theological reasons for the Jewish rejection of Jesus’s messianic claim. The reel is pop-format and compressed, under two minutes of dense theological argument. The format compresses arguments that have been developed at great length across nearly two thousand years of Jewish-Christian theological dialogue. Maimonides made several of these arguments in his Letter to Yemen (c. 1172). The Barcelona Disputation between Nahmanides and the Dominican Pablo Christiani in 1263 addressed the suffering-servant question at length, with the rabbinic side essentially arguing what reel’s points 7 and 8 still argue today. Contemporary Jewish scholars — David Berger of Yeshiva University, Michael Wyschogrod, and the late Jon Levenson of Harvard — continue to develop these positions with rigor. The reel is compressed, but the underlying objections are not weak. They deserve serious engagement.
This essay engages each of the reel’s ten points fairly. I will state what the reel claims, acknowledge what is right in each claim, and present the Christian response with textual grounding from the Hebrew Bible itself wherever possible. I will not be polemical. I will not pretend the Jewish position is unsophisticated. I will also not pretend the Christian position is weak. At the end, I will address what I take to be the deeper question the reel’s listicle format cannot reach — the question that, if answered, settles every one of the ten points at once.
The essay closes on Paul’s reflection in Romans 11 about Israel’s enduring place in God’s economy, because the fellowship’s posture toward Jewish friends and neighbors has to be located there if it is to be located anywhere.
I. The deepest issue: divine unity, incorporeality, and the question of whether the One God of Israel could have become incarnate
The reel’s first point is the deepest. Judaism insists on God’s absolute, indivisible unity and incorporeality. Worshiping a human, per Numbers 23:19, violates monotheism. This is the issue that divides Jews and Christians at the foundation, and every other disagreement runs through it. If the One God of Israel could not have entered creation as a human being, then Jesus’s claim to be God incarnate is blasphemy regardless of anything else he said or did, and Jewish rejection is the only faithful response. If the One God of Israel could and did become incarnate, then everything Jesus claimed about himself becomes available for serious consideration.
What the reel gets right is that the Hebrew Bible’s insistence on divine unity is uncompromising. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD (Deuteronomy 6:4) — the Shema — is the foundational Jewish confession, recited twice daily by observant Jews to this day. Idolatry, the worship of anything alongside or instead of YHWH, is the central sin in the Hebrew Bible. The first two commandments of the Decalogue address it directly. The exilic prophets, especially Isaiah 40 through 66, hammer at it. Christianity has always had to give an account of how its claim about Christ does not violate this principle.
The Christian response runs along several lines.
First, the Hebrew word for “one” in the Shema is echad, which can denote compound unity as well as bare numerical singleness. The same word appears in Genesis 2:24 — and they shall be one (echad) flesh — describing the union of husband and wife. It appears in Exodus 24:3 — And all the people answered with one (echad) voice — describing the unified response of many individuals. It appears in Ezekiel 37:17, in the prophecy of the two sticks joined together: that they may become one (echad) in thine hand. Echad does not exclude internal distinction. It denotes unity, whether the unity of a single undifferentiated entity or of multiple distinct entities joined as one. The Shema does not by itself settle whether the unity of God is the unity of a single undifferentiated Person or the unity of multiple Persons within one divine being.
Second, the Hebrew Bible itself contains several passages that gesture toward plurality within the divine being, and Christian readers have always pointed to them. The phrase ” Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26) uses plural pronouns in God’s deliberation about creating humanity. The visit of YHWH to Abraham at Mamre in Genesis 18 is a complex passage in which three men appear, one of whom is identified as YHWH, and the conversation shifts between singular and plural references. The Angel of YHWH passages — Genesis 16, Exodus 3, Judges 6, Judges 13, Zechariah 1-6 — present a figure who is simultaneously distinguished from YHWH and identified with YHWH, who receives worship that elsewhere is reserved for YHWH alone. The Word of YHWH that comes to the prophets is sometimes treated as itself a personal agent (Jeremiah 1:4 — Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying). The Wisdom of Proverbs 8 speaks as a personal agent who was with YHWH before creation (The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old). The Son of Man of Daniel 7:13-14 is given dominion and glory by the Ancient of Days and receives the worship of all peoples — worship of a non-divine being would be idolatry, so the Son of Man must somehow share the divine prerogative of receiving worship.
These passages do not prove the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is a New Testament development, articulated finally at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), drawing on the full revelation of Christ. But the passages show that the Hebrew Bible is not as flat in its description of divine unity as a simple unitarian reading would require. There is room within the text for the One God of Israel to be internally complex in his being. Christianity has occupied that room and developed it.
Third, on incorporeality and Numbers 23:19: the verse reads in full, God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? The context is Balaam’s prophecy about Israel. Balak king of Moab has hired Balaam to curse Israel; Balaam, constrained by YHWH, has blessed Israel instead. Numbers 23:19 is Balaam’s explanation: God does not change his blessing the way a human might change a promise. The verse is a statement about God’s truthfulness and faithfulness — that he does not lie or repent of his commitments. It is not a metaphysical prohibition on incarnation.
The Hebrew Bible does affirm that God is not corporeal in his essence — he is not made of matter, he does not have spatial extent in the way creatures do, his being is not limited by physical embodiment. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation does not contradict this. The Incarnation says that the eternal Logos, who is and remains God in the fullness of his divine essence, took on human nature without ceasing to be God. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The Word does not stop being the Word. The eternal Son does not stop being the eternal Son. He adds to himself a complete human nature — body, soul, mind, will — and lives the life of a man, while remaining the eternal God. This is the hypostatic union, defined at Chalcedon in 451: one Person, two natures, neither confused nor separated.
The Jewish objection to this remains real and serious. The objection is that the boundary of God’s nature, as the Hebrew Bible draws it, excludes incarnation by definition. God is transcendent, utterly other than creation, the I AM who cannot be reduced to or contained within any created form. The Christian response is that the same God who is transcendent has also chosen to enter creation as a human — that transcendence and immanence are not opposed but coordinated, and that the same God who creates by his Word is the God who became flesh through that Word. The disagreement at this level cannot be resolved by exegesis alone. It is a disagreement about what God is permitted, by his own nature, to do.
The fellowship’s posture on this question: we hold the Trinitarian and incarnational reading of the Hebrew Bible to be the deeper reading, supported by the texts I have named and many others, and brought to its fullness in the revelation of Christ. We also acknowledge that the Jewish objection is serious, ancient, and held in good faith by Jews who love the same God of Israel that we love. The disagreement is real. It is not a disagreement that can be resolved by reels.
II. The Messianic checklist and the two-stage pattern
The reel’s second and third points belong together: Judaism judges the Messiah by results, not promises, because the temple was destroyed after Jesus died and Judaism rejects a second coming. The Hebrew Bible presents one arrival, completing everything.
What is right in this is that the Hebrew Bible contains Messianic prophecies that look geopolitical and earthly. Isaiah 11 — the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid… they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain. Micah 4 — every man under his vine and under his fig tree. Ezekiel 37 through 48 — the reunified kingdom, the rebuilt temple, the river flowing from the sanctuary. These prophecies have not been fulfilled in their literal sense at any point in history. The rabbinic tradition consolidated, especially after the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70, around a single conquering political Messiah who would fulfill these prophecies in their full literal scope. Jesus did not do this. The Temple was destroyed forty years after his death rather than rebuilt by him. Israel was scattered rather than gathered. Universal peace did not come. By the rabbinic checklist, Jesus failed.
The Christian response runs along three lines.
First, Jewish messianic expectations in the second-temple period — that is, during Jesus’s actual lifetime and the decades immediately following — were not as uniform as the post-70 rabbinic consolidation suggests. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 and providing direct evidence of Jewish thought in the century before and after Jesus, show that the Qumran community expected two Messiahs — a priestly Messiah descended from Aaron and a royal Messiah descended from David. Some traditions expected a suffering Messiah (sometimes called Messiah ben Joseph) who would die in battle before a conquering Messiah (Messiah ben David) appeared. The expectation of a single conquering political Messiah was one strand among several, not the unified Jewish position the reel’s framing implies. The post-70 consolidation around the conquering-political-Messiah reading was a development that happened after the Jewish-Christian split and partly in reaction to it.
Second, the two-stage pattern — a Messiah who first suffers and dies and then later returns to fulfill the political prophecies — is not invented after the fact by Christians. It is present in the Hebrew Bible itself, in passages that the rabbinic tradition has always struggled to integrate.
Daniel 9:24-27 contains a prophecy that explicitly predicts both an anointed one being cut off (which is the standard Hebrew idiom for being killed) and the destruction of the city and the sanctuary. Verse 26: And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. The chronology of the seventy weeks (490 years from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem under Artaxerxes in 458 BC) lands directly on the time of Jesus. The text predicts the Messiah’s death followed by the destruction of the city and sanctuary — both of which happened in AD 30 (Jesus’s crucifixion) and AD 70 (Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple). The Messiah’s death is in the text. The Christians did not put it there.
Isaiah 52:13 through 53:12 presents a servant who is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; who is wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities; on whom the LORD hath laid the iniquity of us all; who is cut off out of the land of the living; whose grave is appointed with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; and who, after this, shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. This is a Messianic figure who dies and then prolongs his days — that is, lives again. The passage is in the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the corporate-Israel reading of the passage may offer, the death-and-then-prolonging-of-days pattern is in the text itself.
Zechariah 9:9 has the king coming to Jerusalem lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. Zechariah 12:10 has the people of Jerusalem look upon me whom they have pierced and mourn for him. Zechariah 14:3-4 has the LORD coming on the day of his return to fight against those nations and his feet standing upon the mount of Olives. The same prophetic book contains a humble Messiah coming on a donkey, a pierced figure mourned by his own people, and a conquering LORD arriving on the Mount of Olives. The two-stage pattern is in Zechariah.
Third, the Christian claim is that Jesus’s first coming inaugurated the Messianic age through his death, resurrection, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, while the eschatological consummation is still ahead. The evidence for the inaugurated phase: the spread of the knowledge of the God of Israel to the nations of the world, fulfilling Isaiah 49:6 — I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth. The establishment of the New Covenant promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34, in which the law is written on hearts rather than tablets of stone. The gift of the Holy Spirit to all believers, fulfilling Joel 2:28-29 — I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. The gathering of a people from every tribe and tongue, fulfilling the universal scope of the Abrahamic promise (Genesis 12:3 — in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed).
The Christian claim is not that Jesus failed by the rabbinic checklist and Christians invented an excuse. The Christian claim is that Jesus accomplished the deepest meaning of the messianic prophecies in his first coming, that the geopolitical fulfillment awaits his return, and that the two-stage pattern was always in the texts for those willing to read them whole. The disagreement here is genuine. It is also not as one-sided as the reel suggests.
III. Atonement, the eternity of Torah, and the false-prophet test
The reel’s fourth and fifth points belong together: Judaism rejects vicarious atonement. Moral guilt isn’t transferable and Torah is eternal covenantal joy, not a curse. Deuteronomy 13 gives us a litmus test for false prophets. A true messiah strengthens observance.
On vicarious atonement: the reel cites Deuteronomy 24:16 — The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. The verse is real and binding. It establishes individual responsibility for criminal punishment. It does not, however, establish that voluntary substitutionary atonement is impossible — it addresses imposed punishment of one party for another’s crime, not the voluntary offering of one in the place of another.
The Hebrew Bible itself contains an entire institutional system of substitutionary atonement: the Levitical sacrificial system. The sin offering, the trespass offering, the burnt offering, the Day of Atonement ritual with the two goats (one killed, one driven into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people) — these are not minor features of the Hebrew Bible. They are the central institutional structure of the religion God gave Israel through Moses. The Temple was the physical center of Jewish religious life precisely because it was where this substitutionary atonement was carried out. Until AD 70, when the Temple was destroyed, the sacrificial system was the operative mechanism of forgiveness in Judaism.
When the Temple was destroyed, the sacrificial system ended. Judaism had to develop alternative mechanisms — prayer, the study of Torah, charity, teshuvah. These are real and have their own integrity. But the Hebrew Bible itself does not propose teshuvah as a complete replacement for substitutionary sacrifice. Leviticus 17:11 makes the principle explicit: For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul. The Hebrew Bible’s own theology of atonement is built around substitutionary death.
The clearest Hebrew Bible witness to vicarious atonement by a person rather than an animal is Isaiah 53. The same passage the reel addresses in its seventh point reads, in its central verses: Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows… He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities… and with his stripes we are healed… and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all… yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days… For he shall bear their iniquities… and he bare the sin of many. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the sacrificial system applied to a person. The servant is offered for sin; he bears the iniquities of others; his suffering produces healing for those for whom he suffers. This is vicarious atonement of the most explicit kind, and it is in the Hebrew Bible.
Moses himself in Exodus 32:31-32 offers vicarious substitution when he says to God, regarding the people who had worshipped the golden calf: Oh, this people have sinned a great sin… Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written. Moses offers his own blotting-out as the substitute for the people’s forgiveness. God does not accept Moses’s offer in that specific case, but the principle of voluntary substitutionary intercession is presented as something a faithful Israelite might do for his people.
The Christian claim is that Jesus’s death is the final and complete substitutionary atonement that the Levitical system foreshadowed and that obviates the need for the destroyed Temple. The book of Hebrews develops this argument at length: Jesus is both the high priest and the offering, his sacrifice is once for all, and the believer’s sins are atoned for by his blood. This is not a violation of Jewish theology of atonement — it is the deepest fulfillment of it.
On Torah as eternal and Deuteronomy 13: the reel cites Deuteronomy 13 as the test for false prophets — a prophet who performs signs but says let us go after other gods must be rejected and put to death. The reel’s claim is that Jesus violated this test because he allegedly weakened Torah observance.
The Deuteronomy 13 test, read carefully, addresses a specific kind of false prophet: one who advocates the worship of other gods. Verse 2: Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them. This is the test Jesus would have to fail to qualify as a Deuteronomy 13 false prophet. He did not fail it. He did not advocate the worship of other gods. He claimed that he himself was God in the flesh — that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), that no one comes to the Father but by him (John 14:6). The question is therefore not whether Jesus advocated other gods (he did not) but whether his claim to be the God of Israel is true. That is a different question than Deuteronomy 13 addresses.
On strengthening observance: Jesus’s relationship to the Mosaic law is more careful than either Jewish critics or careless Christians sometimes suggest. He said in Matthew 5:17-18: Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Jesus’s claim is that he came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. The Christian tradition has held the distinction between the moral law (the Decalogue, the love commands) which is eternally binding, and the ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary laws, the temple rituals) which was preparatory and fulfilled in Christ. This is the standard Reformed and broadly evangelical reading, going back to Augustine and developed by Aquinas in the Summa (I-II.99-104) and by the Reformers.
The fellowship’s posture: we hold the eternity of the moral law, the fulfillment of the ceremonial law in Christ, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ’s death as the deepest fulfillment of the Levitical system rather than its rejection. The Jewish objection that vicarious atonement violates Deuteronomy 24:16 is a serious one, but it reads that verse against a Hebrew Bible context that affirms vicarious atonement throughout.
IV. The Jeconiah curse and the suffering servant
The reel’s sixth and seventh points are textual: Messiah requires patrilineal descent from David through Solomon. A virgin birth bypasses tribal status, while Jeconiah’s curse disqualifies Joseph’s lineage and Judaism reads Isaiah 53 suffering servant as the nation Israel, contextually named earlier. Alma means young woman, not necessarily a virgin.
On the Jeconiah curse: Jeremiah 22:30 declares of Jeconiah (also called Coniah and Jehoiachin), the next-to-last king of Judah before the Babylonian exile: Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah. The reel’s claim is that since Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:11-12) includes Jeconiah, and since the curse forbids any of Jeconiah’s descendants from ruling on David’s throne, Jesus is disqualified.
The Christian response runs along three lines.
First, the curse was reversed within the prophetic tradition itself. Haggai 2:23, addressing Zerubbabel (Jeconiah’s grandson), says: In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, will I take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel, saith the LORD, and will make thee as a signet: for I have chosen thee, saith the LORD of hosts. The language of “signet” directly reverses Jeremiah 22:24, where YHWH had said of Jeconiah, though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence. Haggai’s prophecy explicitly puts back what Jeremiah had taken off. The curse, in the prophetic tradition’s own internal development, was lifted on Zerubbabel’s line.
Second, Luke’s genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:23-38) traces a different line than Matthew’s, and the standard Christian reading is that Matthew gives Joseph’s legal line (through Solomon) while Luke gives Mary’s biological line (through David’s son Nathan, avoiding Solomon and Jeconiah entirely). On this reading, Jesus has the legal Davidic claim through his legal father Joseph and the biological Davidic claim through his biological mother Mary, without the Jeconiah issue affecting the biological line.
Third, the virgin birth does not “bypass tribal status” as the reel suggests. Mary is Davidic (Luke’s genealogy strongly implies this; the traditional reading has always taken it as such). The biological Davidic descent of Jesus runs through Mary. The legal Davidic descent runs through Joseph by Joseph’s adoption of Jesus as his legal son. Both lines meet in Jesus. The Jeconiah curse, if it applied, would touch only the legal line through Joseph, and Haggai 2:23 has already addressed even that. The reel’s framing of the genealogy issue presents a simpler problem than the actual Christian position addresses.
On the suffering servant of Isaiah 53: the reel’s claim is that the servant is the nation Israel, contextually named earlier in the surrounding chapters. This is a real reading and it has rabbinic support. Israel is called the servant of YHWH at Isaiah 41:8, 44:1-2, and 49:3, and these references precede chapter 53. The corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 has substantial pedigree.
The Christian response runs along three lines.
First, the text of Isaiah 53 uses singular pronouns throughout — he, his, him, the singular noun servant. The corporate-Israel reading must take all these singulars as collective, which is grammatically possible but textually strained in such a sustained passage.
Second, Isaiah 49:5-6 explicitly distinguishes the servant from Israel: And now, saith the LORD that formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob again to him… I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles. The servant is sent to Jacob/Israel. The servant is therefore distinguished from Jacob/Israel in this passage. If the servant in chapter 49 is distinguished from Israel, the servant in chapter 53 — three chapters later — may also be distinguished from Israel.
Third, Isaiah 53:8 makes this distinction explicit within chapter 53 itself: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. The servant is stricken for the transgression of “my people.” The servant cannot be “my people” if the servant is stricken for their transgression. The servant is distinguished from the people for whose transgression he suffers.
Fourth, the rabbinic tradition itself has long contained a strong Messianic reading of Isaiah 53. The Targum Jonathan (the authoritative Aramaic translation/paraphrase of the Prophets, used in synagogue worship for centuries) explicitly identifies the servant as the Messiah, though it then redirects the suffering language away from him and onto Israel. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) discusses the suffering Messiah and references Isaiah 53. The midrash Pesikta Rabbati contains explicit Messianic readings of the passage. The consolidated corporate-Israel reading came later and was developed partly in response to Christian use of the passage. The pre-medieval Jewish tradition is more complex than the reel’s framing acknowledges.
On almah: the reel claims that almah in Isaiah 7:14 means “young woman” rather than “virgin.” This is partially right — almah does not strictly mean “virgin” in the way that the Hebrew word betulah does. But the Hebrew word almah in every one of its uses in the Hebrew Bible refers to an unmarried young woman of marriageable age (Genesis 24:43 — Rebekah; Exodus 2:8 — Miriam; Psalm 68:25 — young women playing timbrels; Proverbs 30:19; Song of Solomon 1:3 and 6:8). In the ancient Near Eastern cultural context, the presumption for an unmarried young woman of marriageable age was virginity — the virgin reading was not a stretch; it was the default cultural assumption.
The Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced by Jewish scholars in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC, well before any Christian controversy — translated almah in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos, which unambiguously means “virgin.” The virgin reading of Isaiah 7:14 was therefore the reading held by Jewish scholars centuries before Jesus. Matthew 1:23 quotes the Septuagint; he did not invent the virgin reading, he inherited it from the Jewish translation tradition.
The Jewish objection here has more force on chapter 53’s identification than on chapter 7’s almah. Both are real exegetical questions. Neither yields easily to either side. The Christian reading has substantial textual grounding; so does the rabbinic alternative. These are not questions the listicle format can resolve.
V. National redemption, historical trauma, and the Bar Kokhba precedent
The reel’s eighth, ninth, and tenth points address the broader question of how the messianic question has played out in actual history.
Judaism emphasizes communal geulah and tangible peace in this world. Christianity’s individual salvation and non-worldly kingdom reflect divergent aims. This is the eighth point.
What is right in this is that there is a real difference of emphasis between Jewish and Christian tradition on the corporate-vs-individual and this-worldly-vs-otherworldly axes. Jewish tradition is robustly this-worldly and communal — the messianic age is a renewed world, gathered Israel, universal peace among the nations. Christian piety, especially in its evangelical and Protestant forms, has often been more individual and otherworldly — personal salvation, escape from the world to heaven.
But the dichotomy is overstated as an absolute. The Christian tradition contains strong this-worldly and corporate dimensions:
The Kingdom of God preached by Jesus is a thoroughly Hebraic concept of God’s reign breaking into the world. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10) — the Lord’s Prayer asks for the kingdom to come on earth, not for the saints to escape from earth. The New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:2 descends from God out of heaven to a renewed earth — the ultimate Christian hope is the renewal of creation, not the abandonment of it. The resurrection in the Christian tradition is bodily, not spiritual-only — Christ’s risen body is the firstfruits of a general resurrection in which all the dead will be raised in their bodies. Romans 8:19-23 describes the redemption of the entire created order: the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. The Christian eschaton is the renewed heavens and earth, not the spiritualization of believers into a disembodied paradise.
The Christian tradition has also, periodically, recovered its this-worldly and corporate dimensions when they have been forgotten. The post-Holocaust theological reckoning, the resurgence of robust eschatology in writers like N.T. Wright (especially Surprised by Hope), the recovery of Hebraic-Pauline readings of the kingdom of God in the last fifty years — these represent the Christian tradition’s own internal correction when it has drifted too far toward individual and otherworldly emphases.
The disagreement here is real but less binary than the reel suggests. The Jewish emphasis on corporate and this-worldly redemption is right; the Christian tradition has these dimensions in its own resources but has not always lived them. The fellowship can affirm both — the personal salvation that comes through Christ and the cosmic renewal that the same Christ will complete.
Centuries of persecution under the cross forged trauma, making conversion feel like betraying ancestors. History compounds theological disagreements. This is the ninth point, and it deserves the most honest engagement.
What the reel describes is true, and Christians must not minimize it. The Crusades of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries unleashed violence against Jewish communities across the Rhineland and beyond, often by Christian armies on their way to fight Muslims in the Holy Land. The medieval period saw the blood libel — the false accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes — used as justification for pogroms across Europe. The Inquisition, beginning in Spain in 1478, expelled or forcibly converted Jews on pain of death and continued to persecute conversos for generations afterward. The expulsions — England 1290, France 1394, Spain 1492, Portugal 1497, and many smaller events — uprooted Jewish communities that had lived in those places for centuries. The pogroms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Eastern Europe killed thousands and destroyed countless communities. And the Holocaust — six million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime, with the broad cooperation or silent acquiescence of much of European Christendom — was the catastrophic culmination of a thousand-year pattern.
Much of this was done by people who called themselves Christians, often invoking the cross, often justifying their violence with theological language drawn from a misreading of the Gospel. This is the historical reality the reel names. The fellowship cannot dismiss it. The Christian response must include several things:
Honest acknowledgment of the historical evil, without minimization or excuse. The Crusades were evil. The Inquisition was evil. The pogroms were evil. The Holocaust was the worst evil in human history, and Christian failure was a major contributing factor.
Repentance. The Christian church has, in pockets, begun to engage in serious repentance — the Confession of Stuttgart (1945) by the German Evangelical Church, Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate (1965), the various Protestant denominational statements over the last sixty years. This work is incomplete. It must continue.
Recognition that this is not what Christ taught. Jesus was Jewish. His mother was Jewish. His apostles were Jewish. The earliest church was Jewish. The God of Israel is the God of the Christians. Christian anti-Judaism has always been a betrayal of Christianity from within. Salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22). The fellowship holds this without qualification.
The Pauline reading of Israel’s place. Romans 9 through 11 is Paul’s extended reflection on the question of Israel’s relationship to the gospel. Paul, himself a Jew, weeps for his unbelieving fellow Jews — I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh (Romans 9:3). He insists that the Jewish people remain beloved for the fathers’ sakes (Romans 11:28), that God has not cast away his people (Romans 11:1-2), that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29), and that ultimately all Israel shall be saved (Romans 11:26). The Pauline reading does not give Christianity permission to despise Israel. It commands the opposite.
The historical trauma is not, in itself, an argument that Jesus is not the Messiah. The reel’s framing here is honest — history compounds theological disagreement. The historical trauma compounds the disagreement; it does not constitute the disagreement. But the trauma is real, and Christian engagement with Jewish friends and neighbors has to account for it.
Past claimants like Bar Kokhba, endorsed by Rabbi Akiva, died before succeeding. Rabbis conceded failure rather than inventing sequels. This is the tenth point.
Simon ben Kosiba, called Bar Kokhba (son of the star — a messianic title), led the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome from 132 to 135 AD. Rabbi Akiva, the leading sage of his generation, endorsed him as the Messiah. The revolt was crushed; Bar Kokhba was killed; Akiva was tortured to death by the Romans; the Jewish population of Judea was decimated. The rabbinic tradition subsequently acknowledged that Akiva had been wrong about Bar Kokhba, that Bar Kokhba was not the Messiah, and that the messianic expectation had to continue. The rabbis did not invent a second coming for Bar Kokhba. They acknowledged failure.
The reel’s point is the obvious comparison: Jesus is to Bar Kokhba as Akiva’s mistake is to the Christian mistake. Both were messianic claimants who died before succeeding. Both attracted followers. Both should be rejected on the same grounds.
The Christian response is that the cases are not parallel.
Bar Kokhba was a military leader who attempted a political-military revolution against Rome and failed. Jesus was not a military leader; he explicitly declined military-political revolution (John 18:36 — my kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight). He went deliberately to the cross.
Bar Kokhba died and stayed dead. There were no claims of resurrection. The movement collapsed with his death.
Jesus’s followers claimed that he rose from the dead, and the movement built around this claim has lasted two thousand years across every continent, with two billion adherents today. Whatever else can be said about it, the trajectory of the Jesus movement is not the trajectory of the Bar Kokhba movement.
The Bar Kokhba precedent actually highlights what is unique about the Jesus case rather than discrediting it. If Jesus’s case were parallel to Bar Kokhba’s — military leader, defeated revolt, dead and stayed dead — the reel’s argument would be conclusive. But Jesus’s case is not parallel. The single empirical difference between the two cases is the resurrection. And that difference is everything.
VI. The hinge the reel cannot reach: the Resurrection
The reel makes ten points. Each point has substance. Some have considerable substance — the Jeconiah curse, the corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53, the historical trauma. Some have less. But every one of them operates at a level that is answered from above by a single historical question: did Jesus rise from the dead?
If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then he was a failed messianic claimant of the Bar Kokhba type, and Jewish rejection of him is reasonable on essentially all of the reel’s ten points. The corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 wins by default. The Jeconiah curse stands. The messianic checklist is unfulfilled. The “second coming” is indeed a retroactive fix. The historical trauma is uncompensated. Akiva was wrong about Bar Kokhba, and Peter and Paul were wrong about Jesus, and the matter is closed.
If Jesus did rise from the dead, then everything has to be re-read. The corporate-Israel reading of Isaiah 53 loses to the singular-Messiah reading that the early rabbinic tradition itself contained. The Jeconiah curse is reversed (which the prophetic tradition itself attests in Haggai). The messianic age has inaugurated, with the consummation still to come. The two-stage pattern was always in the texts. The historical trauma is real and to be repented of, but it does not change who Jesus is. Akiva was wrong about Bar Kokhba; Peter and Paul were right about Jesus.
Everything turns on this one question. And the reel cannot reach it, because the reel operates at the level of theological argument, and the question is at the level of historical evidence.
The Christian case for the resurrection rests on several lines of evidence that the fellowship has engaged at length in other essays and that I will only summarize here:
The empty tomb, attested by multiple independent sources, including the testimony of women (whose testimony was not legally valid in first-century Jewish or Roman courts, which makes their inclusion in the gospel accounts a counter-productive choice unless the events actually happened that way).
The post-resurrection appearances, attested across multiple independent sources to individuals, to small groups, to large groups (1 Corinthians 15:6 reports an appearance to above five hundred brethren at once), to skeptics like Thomas, and to the hostile Saul of Tarsus who became Paul.
The transformation of the disciples. The same men who fled at Jesus’s arrest, who denied knowing him at his trial, who locked themselves in an upper room after his crucifixion, became within weeks the founders of a movement willing to be flogged, imprisoned, and killed for what they claimed to have witnessed. This is not the trajectory of men who knew their leader had merely been executed. It is the trajectory of men who believed they had seen him alive again.
The conversion of Paul. Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee educated under Gamaliel, hostile to the Christian movement, on his way to Damascus to arrest more Christians, became the most influential Christian missionary in history after an encounter on the Damascus road. His own letters, written within twenty-five years of the crucifixion, contain creedal fragments (Philippians 2:6-11, 1 Corinthians 15:3-7) that show very early belief in the resurrection and the divinity of Christ — early enough to make later legendary development implausible.
The rapid spread of the movement in the face of intense persecution. The Jesus movement spread across the Roman Empire within decades, in conditions where being a Christian could result in execution. The motivation for this spread requires explanation. The traditional explanation — that the witnesses were so persuaded of what they had seen that they were willing to die for it — has the merit of fitting the evidence.
This is not a deductive proof. The resurrection is not provable in the way that a mathematical theorem is provable. It is an inductive case. But the inductive case is substantial, and it has persuaded billions of people across two thousand years, including many Jews — from the first generation of the apostles to Saul of Tarsus to the Messianic Jewish movement of the contemporary period. The reel does not engage this evidence. The listicle format cannot.
The fellowship’s claim is not that the ten points of the reel are weak. The claim is that ten reasonable theological points, considered individually, cannot stand against the historical evidence of the resurrection, considered as a whole. The hinge is at the historical level, and the historical level is where the case is finally made.
VII. The fellowship’s posture toward Jewish friends
What does all this mean for how the fellowship actually engages Jewish friends and neighbors?
Several things, drawn together from the engagement above and from the broader corpus the fellowship has been building this week.
First, with respect for the depth of Jewish theological reflection. The arguments compressed in the reel have pedigree — Maimonides, Nahmanides, the medieval disputations, the contemporary scholars. The fellowship engages them as the substantive arguments they are, not as straw men.
Second, with honest acknowledgment of Christian historical failure toward the Jewish people. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust — these are not items to be argued away or minimized. They are evils that Christian repentance must continue to address. The Cherry-Picked Centuries essay earlier this week addressed Rawan Osman’s careful treatment of Christian-Jewish historical relations, and the fellowship’s posture there applies here also.
Third, with confidence in the truth of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, but without crude apologetic triumphalism. The Christian conviction is not that we are clever and the Jews are slow. The Christian conviction is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob sent his Son into the world for the salvation of Israel and of the nations, that the Son was crucified and rose from the dead, and that the messianic age has inaugurated and will be consummated at his return. This conviction is held with the seriousness that two thousand years of careful Christian theological reflection has given it, but it is held in conversation with the equally serious Jewish reflection that has run alongside it.
Fourth, with patience. Most Jewish people who come to faith in Christ do so slowly, over years, through relationships rather than through arguments. The argumentative engagement is necessary — the questions are real and deserve real answers — but the argumentative engagement alone rarely persuades. What persuades is the lived witness of Christian lives that look like Christ. The fellowship’s commitment to holiness in the dirt of life, articulated through the corpus this week, is not a small thing in this context. The most powerful Christian witness to Jewish friends is not the bumper sticker. It is the marriage that holds, the children raised in faith, the work done with integrity, the suffering borne with grace, the love that does not fail.
Fifth, with the conviction held by Paul in Romans 11 that the Jewish people remain in a unique relationship to God’s redemptive plan. I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid (Romans 11:1). They are not all Israel, which are of Israel (Romans 9:6) — Paul holds the line that ethnic Israel and the church of Christ are not simply identical, but neither are they simply separate. The wild branches (the Gentile believers) are grafted into the olive tree of Israel (Romans 11:17). The natural branches (the Jewish people) that have been broken off are not permanently lost — they can be grafted in again (Romans 11:23). And in the end, all Israel shall be saved (Romans 11:26). What this means in specific eschatological detail is debated within Christian theology. What it means for the fellowship’s practical posture is clear: love Jewish friends and neighbors, witness to Christ honestly when invited or appropriate, never coerce, never disrespect, never minimize the historical trauma, and trust that the God who promised will fulfill.
VIII. Closing
I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew… For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?… For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.
— Romans 11:1-2, 15, 25-26
The reel makes ten points. The fellowship engages each of them as the serious theological arguments they are. The disagreement at the foundation is real — the disagreement about whether the One God of Israel could and did become incarnate, the disagreement about whether the Messiah comes in two stages or one, the disagreement about whether Isaiah 53 speaks of a corporate or singular figure. The fellowship holds the Christian reading of these questions for reasons grounded in the text of the Hebrew Bible itself, in the historical evidence of the resurrection, and in two thousand years of careful Christian theological reflection. The fellowship also holds, with Paul, that the Jewish people remain beloved by God, that the historical trauma is real and to be repented of, and that the God who promised to gather all Israel will do so in his own time.
The reel cannot resolve the question because the question is not at the level the reel operates on. The question is at the level of whether a particular man who walked the roads of Galilee two thousand years ago rose from the dead three days after his execution. If he did not, the reel is right. If he did, every one of its ten points has an answer.
The fellowship believes, on inductive grounds substantial enough to bet our lives on, that he did. We hold this conviction with respect for those who do not share it, with honest acknowledgment of Christian failures, and with the patience that comes from trusting that the same God who began this work will complete it.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
One heart to make Christ King.