Figuring Out Jewish Identity When Attacking Jews for Jesus

The Canonist is a Jewish blog which has a very interesting take on the Jewishness of Jewish believers. Bold highlights are mine.

The general argument is about religious deception, the idea being that these missionaries are spreading a fundamentally false notion that Judaism can cohere with a belief in Jesus, and that therefore these proselytizing efforts are more flawed than others. And that’s a very interesting thing, because, as readers here will find time and time again, the thing you can find the most Jews to agree on is that they don’t like Christianity.

Take, for instance, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which is responding to the effort with its own advertising and its own proselytizers. It is representing 60 member groups that can’t agree on whether the Bible was written by God (and they don’t even all agree whether God exists) at Sinai or compiled by various powerful Jews over a 500-year span, whether homosexuality is to be embraced with marriage or condemned with death, whether the State of Israel is the beginning of the messianic period or the death knell for the Jewish people. And so on. But the faith question they feel equipped to answer is whether Jews can believe in Jesus. This creates a lot of interesting conflicts.

Most simply, a great many of those missionizing are considered Jews in virtually every respect that is traditionally known: they were born and raised Jewish, and the only element of Judaism they can be known to have violated is belief in Jesus as the messiah. Does the Jewish community now see these Jews as outcasts who are no longer Jewish? If it’s impossible for a Jew to believe in Jesus, it’d seem that the organized Jewish community in its entirety is willing to abandon these Jews to their fates, whatever they may be. That’s pretty fascinating. Perhaps one reason for this specific exclusion of these Jews is the understanding that sooner or later, they’ll be stepping up to the communal till.

Belief in Jesus as the messiah was never the main divider between Jews and non-Jewish Christians and wasn’t considered good enough reason to expel Jews in classical times [1, 2], so the choice of belief in Jesus as the messiah as the premier dividing line seems not only arbitrary, but false.

And on its most basic level, what’s driving the anti-missionary effort is the hope of keeping around Jews who just don’t believe in their nominal religion as stated. If they did, missionaries wouldn’t be successful with them. What’s the point in keeping people in something they don’t believe, and away from something they do?

While I might quibble with some minor points, this is exactly correct when it comes to the historical criteria for Jewish identity.

It comes down to: What is your authority? Are you consistent? Is your criteria arbitrary?

If God set apart the Jewish people, He gets to define who is and is not Jewish.