40. Real Conversations — Documented Testimonies

The Source

The following accounts are drawn from three documented testimonies: Stan Telchin's Betrayed! (Chosen Books, 1981), Moishe Rosen's documented accounts from Jews for Jesus archives, and the published testimony of Michael L. Brown, who holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and is one of the most extensively credentialed Messianic Jewish scholars in the world.

SOURCE: Stan Telchin, Betrayed! (Chosen Books, 1981). Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volumes 1–5 (Baker Books, 2000–2010). Moishe Rosen, documented accounts at jewsforjesus.org.

Stan Telchin — The Businessman Who Investigated to Disprove

Stan Telchin was a successful Jewish businessman in New York when his daughter called to say she had become a believer in Jesus. His reaction was fury. He describes his response as the determination of a father to rescue his daughter from a cult. He began investigating the claims of the New Testament with the specific intention of finding the evidence that would prove them false.

Stan Telchin (documented testimony): I bought a Bible. I started reading it the way I would read a legal brief — looking for the flaws, the contradictions, the manipulations. And instead I found Isaiah 53. I found Psalm 22. I found Daniel 9. I found a portrait that I could not explain away. I am a businessman. I know how to evaluate evidence. The evidence was not what I expected to find.

Telchin's investigation lasted several months. He read the New Testament, he read apologetics materials, he met with rabbis and with believers. He describes his conversion as reluctant and intellectually driven — not an emotional experience but a conclusion reached against his will by following the evidence. He writes: "I had not wanted to find what I found. But I am a man who has been trained to follow the evidence. And the evidence led me here."

Michael Brown — The Drug Addict Who Became a Scholar

Michael Brown came to faith in Jesus as a seventeen-year-old heroin addict in 1971. He was Jewish and describes his conversion as occurring before he understood any of the theological implications. The apologetic work came later, as he earned a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and spent decades engaging Jewish objections to Jesus with academic rigor.

Brown's five-volume series Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus is the most comprehensive academic treatment of Jewish-Christian apologetics in print. His method is consistently to engage the Jewish sources — Talmud, Midrash, medieval commentators, modern Jewish scholarship — rather than Christian sources, demonstrating that the Messianic reading of the Hebrew Bible is defensible from within the Jewish tradition itself.

Michael Brown (documented interview): Every objection I hear, I have heard a thousand times. And I have studied every one of them in the primary sources. I am not asking Jewish people to accept a Christian reading of their scriptures. I am asking them to read their own scriptures and ask the honest question: who fits this portrait? The Talmud knew the answer. Rashi knew the answer. The medieval commentators changed the answer. But the text has not changed.