Confession 6: The Most Personal Work

On the Jewish people and the operation I am not proud of Every other operation I run is, at its root, a distraction. Keep people from the truth by giving them something compelling to look at instead. Islam: here is a system that genuinely honors God, genuinely honors the prophets, genuinely honors Jesus — and removes the cross. Secular materialism: here is a framework that genuinely honors reason, values science, produces real goods — and removes the question. In each case, the operation succeeds by offering something real in exchange for the one thing I need taken off the table. The Jewish operation is different in kind. I am not trying to distract this people. I am trying to suppress them. Let me explain why, because the reason is the most honest thing I will say in this book. The Jewish people are the people through whom everything comes. Every word of the Old Testament was written by Jewish hands, preserved by Jewish communities, copied by Jewish scribes, carried through exile and dispersion and persecution across millennia without the loss of a single letter. The Messiah was born of a Jewish mother, raised in a Jewish home, formed in a Jewish tradition, embedded in Jewish scripture with a precision that still produces discomfort when I examine it carefully. The first proclamation of the Gospel was delivered by Jewish men, in a Jewish city, to a Jewish audience, at a Jewish festival. The apostles were Jewish. The first church was Jewish. And Romans 11 describes what I cannot allow. If the natural branches are grafted back into their own olive tree — if Israel comes home, if the fullness Paul describes in Romans 11:12 arrives — the story reaches its final chapter. And the final chapter is not one I am prepared to discuss. So this operation has never been about theology. I have not needed a theological system to run it. I have only needed time. Keep the name of Jesus so thoroughly associated with the footsteps of the Inquisitor, the sword of the Crusader, the edict of expulsion, the yellow star, the sound of glass breaking on the night of broken glass — keep those associations so deep and so immediate that no Jewish person can hear the name without hearing also the history — and the investigation will not happen. The emotional association prevents it before it can begin. I used the church as my instrument. I am not proud of this. Not for moral reasons — I have no moral objections to anything I do. I am not proud of it because it was brutish. It lacked the precision of the Islamic operation. It was clumsy in a way that has produced consequences I did not fully anticipate. What I anticipated: that making the name of Jesus synonymous with the name of the persecutor would close the investigation permanently. I have been largely right. For most Jewish people in most generations, the emotional weight of two thousand years of Christian persecution makes the investigation feel impossible before it begins. What I did not anticipate: that a small number would investigate anyway. That they would read Isaiah 53 in their own language, in their own tradition, with no Christian present to frame the reading — and arrive at a conclusion their tradition had been carefully trained not to reach. That they would then become some of the most effective witnesses to the Messianic claims in the history of the conversation, precisely because their Jewishness is undeniable and their scholarship is meticulous. Michael Brown. Moishe Rosen. Stan Telchin. Alfred Edersheim. Arnold Fruchtenbaum. I have not been able to dismiss them. I have tried to marginalize them. I have not fully succeeded. The Vulnerability I Cannot Close Isaiah 53. A specific text. Written approximately seven hundred years before the events it describes, by a Jewish prophet in Jerusalem, preserved by Jewish scribes, confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls to predate the Christian era by at least a hundred and fifty years. For several centuries after the Christian era began, Jewish interpretation consistently read it as Messianic — the Talmud, Midrash Rabbah, and early targums all contain Messianic readings. I eventually managed to shift the dominant interpretation to a corporate reading, in which the suffering servant is Israel rather than an individual — a shift that occurred primarily in response to Christian use of the passage, not from the text itself. The problem is the text. Read without the corporate interpretation pre-installed, it describes an individual who suffers vicariously for the sins of others, who dies and is buried, who sees light after his death, whose suffering produces righteousness for many. I cannot remove it. It has been there for 2,700 years. I can only try to keep Jewish people from reading it as it is written. This is harder than it sounds. THE DISCIPLE'S RESPONSE ⚔ Armor: Shield of Faith — held against the accusation that the church’s history forfeits the Gospel’s claim 📖 Scripture: Romans 9:1-3 / Romans 11:11-12, 17-18 / Isaiah 53:4-6 / Luke 19:41-44 ✓ Response: Approach Jewish neighbors with the grief of Romans 9, the humility of Romans 11, and the Jewish scriptures in your hand. Acknowledge the history honestly and without deflection. The church that wounded is called to be the church that repairs. Carry the Messiah back to His own people in the posture of one who knows the debt owed — and offer Isaiah 53 as a Jewish text, read on its own terms, before any Christian interpretation is applied.