Anyone who has read the New Testament, even if they have just read a Gospel
or two, can see that Jesus is the one promised by God and foretold by the Jewish
prophets down the ages. From Moses to Malachi all the great leaders of the Jews
gave hints of the one who was to come. Moses gave them the law, and the model of
leadership which was to underpin their whole society in this world and the next.
King David received the promise of God that his descendants would rule over
Israel for ever. Micah talked about a king born in Bethlehem. Isaiah talked about
one born of a virgin. The author of Psalm 22, traditionally King David himself,
held up the image of one who was despised and rejected, whose clothes were
distributed amongst his tormentors, and who cried out “My God, My God, why have
you abandoned me”?

In the book of Isaiah there are a series of prophecies which tell of a
suffering servant, one who by his obedience and humility brings about the Lord’s
day of salvation. Daniel spoke of the great leader who would usher in the
tumultuous end- times. Jonah spend three days in the belly of the whale. There
are so many hints about Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures that you would have to be
a fool to miss them.

Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus was the Christ. Jesus was the one the Jewish
people had been waiting for for centuries. Jesus was the son of God. He died, he
rose again, and there were many witnesses to his resurrection.

But most of the Jews couldn’t care less.

It is one of the great mysteries of Christian life that the mission of Jesus,
and the mission of the Church which gathered after his resurrection, was an
almost total failure amongst the people it should have been for in the first
place. Jesus was the fulfilment of the Hebrew Scriptures. He was the one they had
been waiting for. But the Jews just didn’t want to know.

They argued with Jesus, they drove him out of their synagogues, they plotted
together against him, asking him difficult questions to try and trap him, to get
him in trouble with the crowds or with the Romans, and eventually, they demanded
that the Romans put him to death. All of which seems a pretty strange response to
the one they were supposed to be waiting for; the Messiah, the great leader sent
from God.

I imagine some people feel more than a little uncomfortable with the New
Testament attitude to the Jews being stated so boldly. Such ideas might seem more
at home in a Nazi rally of the 1930’s, or a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. One of
the things that we have to deal with as Christians, one of our shared skeletons
in the closet, is that from the New Testament down to the present day, there has
been a very strong tradition in Christianity of criticising, blaming, and hating
the Jews. The outward reason for this is that we can blame them for the death of
Jesus. But I suspect that the real reason is something far simpler.

Surely, it is just that we don’t understand how they can continue in their
Jewish religion when there is so much evidence that the Jewish religion has been
fulfilled and replaced in the person and work of Jesus, and in the teaching and
life of his Church.

What is the point of being a Jew living under the law and waiting for the
Messiah, when the law has been fulfilled, and the Messiah has come? It would be
wonderful if life were so simple. If the Christians were the good guys, and the
Jews were the bad guys, then life would be quite easy to cope with, and we
Christians could feel pretty good about ourseleves. But sadly, it is not so.

Jesus did commit the crime for which he was executed. He did speak of
himself, and was regarded by his disciples, as Lord in both the religious and
political sense. If he really did say and do what the Gospels say he said and
did, then _from a Roman and Jewish point of view_ he was guilty of treason
against the state and blasphemy against the Jewish religion. He was setting up
himself, or at least his teaching, as an alternative regime to both.

When we look that the Hebrew Scriptures, things are not nearly as simple as
the New Testament authors make them out to be. It is well known that Isaiah’s
prophecy “Behold a virgin shall concieve and bear a son, and she shall call him
Immanuel etc” does not say “Virgin” in the original Hebrew. The nearest English
equivalent to the word Isaiah uses would be “girl”. Furthermore, modern Jewish
and Christian scholars alike are almost unanimous in understanding that this
prophecy refers to the birth of a child during the lifetime of the prophet and
the King. Each of them had a son during this period – Hezekiah was born to Ahaz
and his young wife, and Isaiah had a son with the extraordinary name
Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Even a cursory look at the book of Isaiah will show that
the prophecy of chapter 7 verse 14 makes much more sense if it is applied to
either of these sons, rather than to a Messiah born six or seven centuries later.

Modern christians should also be aware that the New Testament accounts of the
birth and death of Jesus were written long after the events they described, by
people who were very familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures. The authors believed
that Jesus was the Messiah foretold in the prophecies, and so they wrote their
accounts of his life using the same images and language as those prophecies. This
does not make them dishonest, or wrong, but we should be very careful how we use
what they have written, in the light of what we know.

Now for thinking Christians in the modern world, this creates a huge problem.
On the face of it, our Scriptures, particularly the Gospels, show the Jews as
stupid and dishonest people who ignored overwhelmingly obvious evidence that
Jesus was the messiah. Not only did they conspire to kill Jesus himself, but they
persecuted the Church as well. And yet, if we are honest, we must confess that
the New Testament authors were guilty of exactly what the Jews accused them of.
They twisted the Hebrew Scriptures and wrote their own new Scriptures in order
the justify their claim that Jesus was the Messiah.

They did this with the best possible motives. They believed that Jesus was
the Christ, and they wanted to share that knowledge. But the side effect of what
they did was to show the Jews in a very bad light, and to provide the foundation
of the antisemitism which characterised medieval Christianity, which broke out
again earlier in this century, and which has never been far below the surface of
Christian triumphalism, and right wing politics, especially when those things go
together.

So what are we to do? Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Believing
this, we worship him as our Lord and our God. The understanding that the New
Testament was written deliberately to demonstrate the early Church’s belief that
Jesus was the fulfillment of the Hebrew Prophets does not detract at all from
that claim.

But it should make us more compassionate, more understanding, more accepting
of that majority of the Jewish people who did not see in Jesus the Messiah they
were looking for. It should also make us acknowledge and repent of the sin of
antisemitism which has grown and been nurtured in the Church since the close of
the New Testament period. Repentance is much more than saying “sorry”. It is
turning away from sin, ensuring in our own lives, and with vigilance over the
life of our communities, that it will never raise its ugly head again.

++++++++

Nigel B. Mitchell
Precentor, Anglican Cathedral, Perth, Western Australia.