Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus : Volume 1 , livre ebook

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149 pages

English

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An honest, fair, and thorough discussion of the issues raised in Jewish Christian apologetics, covering thirty-five objections on general and historical themes.

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Jewish studies

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 février 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781585580873
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0691€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A NSWERING
J EWISH
O BJECTIONS
to
J ESUS
Also by Michael L. Brown
Go and Sin No More: A Call to Holiness
Let No One Deceive You: Confronting the Critics of Revival
From Holy Laughter to Holy Fire: America on the Edge of Revival
Israel’s Divine Healer
It’s Time to Rock the Boat: A Call to God’s People to Rise Up and Preach a Confrontational Gospel
Our Hands Are Stained with Blood: The Tragic Story of the “Church” and the Jewish People
Whatever Happened to the Power of God: Is the Charismatic Church Slain in the Spirit or Down for the Count?
How Saved Are We?
The End of the American Gospel Enterprise
Compassionate Father or Consuming Fire: Who Is the God of the Old Testament?
Michael L. Brown is a Jewish believer in Jesus and has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University. He is the president of the Brownsville Revival School of Ministry in Pensacola, Florida, and has served as a visiting professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Fuller Theological Seminary. He has written over ten books and is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of Jewish Religion.
A NSWERING
J EWISH
O BJECTIONS
to
J ESUS
General and Historical Objections
M ICHAEL L. B ROWN
© 2000 by Michael L. Brown
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-5855-8087-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The material from Basilea Schlink, Israel, My Chosen People is © 1988 by Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary and is used by permission of Baker Book House and Evangelische Marienschwesternschaft.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. Emphasis in Scripture quotations is the author’s.
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations identified NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations identified NJPSV are from the New Jewish Publication Society Version. © 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society.
In memory of my beloved father, Abram Brown (1914–1977)
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part 1 General Objections
Part 2 Historical Objections
Notes
Glossary
Preface
In November of 1971, as a rebellious, proud, heroin-shooting, rock-drumming, Jewish sixteen-year-old, I discovered something I was not looking for, and the course of my life was completely altered. I found out that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah! I learned that he was the one spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, that he was God’s way of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike, and that through faith in him my life could be transformed—even though I didn’t want it to be transformed. I loved my sinful ways! But God’s goodness overcame my badness, and in a matter of weeks, I was a brand-new man.
My parents were thrilled—and relieved—to see the tremendous change in my life. I had fallen so far, so quickly, since my bar mitzvah at age thirteen, and my parents had been deeply concerned. But the positive transformation was more radical and dramatic than was the fall. The only problem for my parents—especially for my father—was that in their opinion I had joined a foreign religion. So my father, thrilled with the change in my life but very much wanting me to come back to our traditions, brought me to the local Conservative rabbi in early 1972 (I was still not yet seventeen). But rather than attacking my beliefs, this twenty-six-year-old rabbi befriended me. He told me that in his opinion he was not as spiritual a person as I was, although his beliefs were right and mine were wrong. In his view, Judaism, meaning traditional, Orthodox, observant Judaism, was the only true faith for our people, and he felt that the key for me would be to meet some very religious—and zealous—traditional Jews. And so the journey began!
In the summer of 1973, the rabbi brought me to Brooklyn to spend an afternoon with some ultra-Orthodox rabbis. It was a real eye-opener for me! I was impressed with the devotion and kindly demeanor of these men, and I was challenged by their scholarship. How could I, just eighteen years old and barely able to read the Hebrew alphabet, tell them what our sacred Hebrew texts meant? They had been studying the Scriptures all their lives; I had been a believer less than two years, although by then I had read the Bible cover to cover roughly five times and memorized more than four thousand verses. But they had memorized the original; I was dependent on English translations. What business did I have telling them that Jesus was actually the fulfillment of the prophecies of our Hebrew Bible?
This was my predicament: I was sure my faith was sound and that Jesus really was our Messiah, but I could find almost no literature (and almost no people) to help me. When I did find solid academic works by Christians dealing with Messianic prophecy and related subjects, they tended to be insensitive to the traditional Jewish objections I was hearing. On the other hand, the few books (really, booklets) I found specifically addressing Jewish objections tended to be popular, short, and nonscholarly in their approach. I was in a quandary!
How could I effectively answer the questions of the rabbis and refute their objections? And what about my own conscience? Could I really be at peace with myself without being able to provide intellectually solid responses to my own people, especially when the rabbis told me that if I could read the original texts, I would never believe in Jesus? So it was that I began to study Hebrew in college, ultimately making it my major and continuing with graduate studies until I earned a doctorate in Semitic languages. And all through my college and graduate years, I was constantly dialoging with rabbis and religious Jews, sometimes in public debates, other times one on one. I wanted to understand exactly why my own people rejected Jesus—Yeshua—as Messiah, and I wanted to answer them with truth as well as with love.
In the providence of God, I became somewhat of a specialist in Jewish debate and dialog, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my Messianic Jewish friends and colleagues began to ask me, “When are you going to put all this in writing?” In fact, one friend in particular, Sid Roth, lovingly badgered me for years, asking me almost every time we talked, “So Mike, when are you going to write the book”—implying that everything else I was writing was of secondary importance! Finally, in 1996 I felt the release to begin the work in earnest, and as word started to get out, I was amazed at the level of interest expressed by many of my Christian friends: “I want to read your book and then give it to one of my Jewish friends who doesn’t believe in Jesus! When is it coming out?” At last I can answer, “Now,” with only one caveat. It’s no longer a book; it’s a series of three books. There was simply too much material to cover, and after all this time—especially given the fact that no comparable work exists—I felt that it was better to be too thorough than not thorough enough.
Following this volume, two more volumes should come out in six-to-nine-month intervals, meaning that, God willing, by the end of 2000 or the beginning of 2001, all three volumes should be in print. If there is sufficient reader interest, these three volumes will then be combined into a one-volume reference edition, with some special studies and further notes added. It is with great joy that I release this first volume to you. May you be blessed, edified, strengthened, and stretched as you read, study, think, and pray. Perhaps this will be the beginning of an important spiritual and intellectual journey for you too!
I would encourage you to read through the introduction, after which you can go through the objections in any order you choose. They are complete in themselves and extensively cross-referenced. If you choose, however, to read through the material from cover to cover, you will find that the objections often follow a logical order, so you will notice that one answer tends to build on the previous responses. You will also notice that the endnotes tend to be more extensive when dealing with especially controversial material. Of course, the notes could have been expanded almost without limit, and I was sorely tempted to provide extensive documentation for almost every statement I made throughout the book. But this was clearly unnecessary, and all interested readers will find more than ample documentation and references for further research. I trust that even the most staunch critic will agree that I have done my homework.
It is my prayer that the publication of this series, representing the fruit of more than a quarter of a century of dialog with my own Jewish people, will provide encouragement first and foremost to every Jewish believer in Jesus around the world. My dear brothers and sisters in the Messiah, this is for you!
To every Jewish reader who does not yet believe that Jesus (Yeshua) is the Messiah, it brings me great joy to know that you have this book in your hands. Read it with an open heart and an inquisitive mind! I pray that our God would reveal his truth to you in the pages that follow, whic