Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel: A Message for Christians

Top Highlights

“It has been pointed out to me that there are Christians who experience this book as promoting the Judaizing heresy which Sha’ul condemns in the book of Galatians. But ‘Judaizing’ does not mean encouraging New Testament believers to investigate the Jewishness of their faith. Rather, it means one or a combination of the following three things: (1) insisting that Gentiles cannot be saved by faith in Yeshua the Messiah unless they convert to Judaism, (2) requiring saved Gentiles to follow Jewish cultural practices, and/or (3) legalism, i.e., requiring Gentiles to obey a perverted version of the Torah in which God’s Law is seen as a set of rules unrelated to faith.” (Page 3)

“When people become Christians they need give up only their sin, not their culture, except the specific elements of it that violate Scriptural norms.” (Page 7)

“Nevertheless, there is something strange, even wrong, in talking about contextualizing the Gospel for Jews; because the Gospel was completely Jewish in the first place! If Christianity’s roots are Jewish, if the Gospel itself is Jewish in its very essence, why should it need to be contextualized for Jews?” (Page 11)

“When the Church proclaims a Gospel without its Jewishness restored, she is at best failing to proclaim ‘the whole counsel of God’ (Acts 20:27). At worst she may be communicating what Sha’ul [Paul] called ‘another Gospel’ (Galatians 1:6–9). Moreover, not only Jews suffer from this off-target preaching—Gentiles suffer too.” (Page 1)

“My view is that we ought to start by making every effort to understand the text of the New Testament as its first century hearers would have understood it and applied it to their situation in life.” (Page 15)