Series Preface: The Oldest Conversation

There is a conversation that has been happening, incompletely and often painfully, for two thousand years. It is the conversation between the followers of Jesus of Nazareth and the people from whom He came.

Every other conversation in this series — with the Muslim, with the secular agnostic, with the atheist — is between the Gospel and a framework that stands outside the covenant lineage of Abraham. Volume V is different. It is the conversation between the branch and the root. Between the Gentile church that received the promises and the Jewish people who were carrying those promises before the church existed, who are still carrying them, and who do not yet recognize what they have been carrying.

This is the most important conversation in the history of Christian witness. It is also the most neglected, the most wounded, and — because of what the church has done — the most difficult to begin.

The disciple who picks up this volume must understand something before reading any further: the Jewish people are not simply another group of unbelievers to be evangelized with slightly modified apologetics. They are the people through whom everything came. The scriptures. The prophets. The promises. The covenants. The Messiah. The first disciples. The first church. Every Gentile believer in Jesus Christ is, in Paul's own image, a wild branch grafted into an olive tree whose roots belong to Israel.

That means the Gentile disciple enters this conversation not as someone bringing light to darkness but as someone returning home to acknowledge a debt. The approach must be shaped by gratitude, humility, and the specific kind of love that Paul describes in Romans 9 — the anguish of someone who knows what his people are missing and would give anything for them to see it.

Volume V tries to hold three things simultaneously that have rarely been held together in Jewish-Christian dialogue: the conviction that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel, the humility that acknowledges what the church has done to Jewish people in His name, and the love that refuses to let either the conviction or the humility become an excuse for silence.

The silence is not neutral. The story is not finished. And the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not finished with Israel.

The Thesis

Jesus of Nazareth is not the founder of a new religion that replaced Judaism. He is the fulfillment of the oldest promises in the Jewish scriptures — promises that the Jewish people have been faithfully carrying without yet recognizing what they were carrying — and the conversation between the church and the Jewish people is not finished, because God is not finished with Israel.

This thesis rests on three commitments held simultaneously:

Conviction

Jesus is the Messiah. The Hebrew scriptures describe Him with extraordinary precision across eight centuries. Isaiah 53 describes His suffering, death, and the purpose it accomplishes. Psalm 22 describes the crucifixion in detail a thousand years before it occurred. Daniel 7 provides a timeline for the Messiah's arrival that places Him in the first century. Zechariah 12 describes the piercing of one who is identified as God Himself. The cumulative portrait is not the product of creative Christian interpretation. It is there in the text, available to any honest reader.

Humility

The church has done terrible things to Jewish people in the name of Jesus. The Crusaders killed entire Jewish communities on their way to the Holy Land. The Inquisition tortured and murdered Jews. Martin Luther, in his later years, wrote pamphlets calling for the burning of synagogues that the Nazis reproduced and distributed. The Holocaust was carried out in a historically Christian nation by people who had been baptized, while much of the institutional church remained silent. These facts cannot be minimized, bypassed, or used as theological leverage. They must be named, owned, and mourned — and the disciple who enters this conversation without having reckoned honestly with this history has no business beginning it.

Love

Paul's anguish in Romans 9:1–3 is the emotional register this conversation requires. Not pity. Not strategy. Not the satisfaction of winning an argument. The anguish of someone who knows what his people are missing, who would give anything for them to see it, and who approaches the conversation with the posture of a returning debtor rather than a creditor arriving to collect.