Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business
NUMBERS 31:1- 34

Two or three years ago, out of the blue, I received a phone call from a Jewish lawyer in Los Angeles. He had self-published a book called Twenty-six Reasons Why Jews Don’t Believe in Jesus, and he wanted me to make sure that his statements about Jesus and about Christian faith were accurate. I was interested to read the book and had little critique of his facts; the difference between us concerned their interpretation. His book is a twenty-first-century example of a genre almost as old as Christian faith. People who believe in Jesus have always wanted to persuade Jews to believe (often the persuaders have themselves been Jews); Jews who do not believe in Jesus have always wanted to persuade fellow Jews to stay loyal to their traditional faith. Over the past fifty years there has been considerable growth in a movement of Jews coming to believe in Jesus, and to them this means becoming “fulfilled Jews,” but other Jews are convinced that they have betrayed their Jewishness and that their movement imperils the existence of Judaism. The increasing secularizing of Jews also imperils Judaism, as does the prevalence of Jews intermarrying with gentiles...