A matter of when

Here is the remarkable Old Testament promise I mentioned in a previous blog post:

"Seventy weeks are determined
For your people and for your holy city,
To finish the transgression,
To make an end of sins,
To make reconciliation for iniquity,
To bring in everlasting righteousness,
To seal up vision and prophecy,
And to anoint the Most Holy.

"Know therefore and understand,
That from the going forth of the command
To restore and build Jerusalem
Until Messiah the Prince,
There shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks;
The street shall be built again, and the wall,
Even in troublesome times.

"And after the sixty-two weeks
Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself;
And the people of the prince who is to come
Shall destroy the city and the sanctuary,
The end of it shall be with a flood,
And till the end of the war desolations are determined."
Daniel 9:24 - 26.

There are three things particularly to notice.

First, both rabbinic and Christian sources are agreed that the "weeks" are sevens - sevens of years. The Scripture speaks of seven weeks, 62 weeks and one week - equivalent then to 49 years, 434 years and seven years.  

There are said to be seven weeks and 62 weeks - a total of 483 years - from the commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Messiah. Then Messiah will be cut off and the city and sanctuary destroyed, and then there will be war until the one-week period arrives.

According to the book of Nehemiah chapter 2 verse 1, the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem was made in the month of Nisan in the 20th year of King Artaxerxes, which was about 444 BC. Sir Robert Anderson, in his book The Coming Prince, says the commandment was made on the first of Nisan, 445 BC, or March 14. 

A year in Jewish calculations at the time of Daniel was 360 days, so 483 years becomes 173,880 days. Assuming that Jesus began his ministry in the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, as the Scripture records, and continued for three years, and as Passover is always observed on 14 Nisan, then Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was on April 6, AD 32.

Allowing for differences in the Jewish and Roman calendars, March 14, 445 BC to April 6, AD 32 is - 173, 880 days. However critical you may be of the exactness of Anderson's calculations, the period is right.

Second, notice that Messiah was to come before the destruction of the Temple. The Temple was destroyed in AD 70. (The Messiah, as the Scripture prophesies in Jeremiah chapter 23 verse 5, was to be of the House of David. I understand the genealogies were kept in the Temple, and the genealogies were destroyed when the Temple was destroyed. After they were lost, it would have been impossible for the Messiah to have proved his lineage. Notice, incidentally, that the Messiah's mission was "to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy.")

Third, Jesus was cut off - by Roman executioners, using one of the most barbaric forms of execution known at the time. But not for Himself. Many imagine that all they have to do is to do their best to get to heaven. It isn't so. We are all sinners. God's standard is perfection, and we have all fallen short. He died to pay the price, that we might be forgiven.
              

Is Jesus the Jewish Messiah?

Is Jesus the Jewish Messiah?

The first promise of the Messiah is in Genesis chapter 3, shortly after Adam and Eve's fall. God told the serpent:

"I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise his heel." 
Genesis 3:15

It is remarkable that God called the Messiah the Seed of the woman, and not the Seed of the man. (An indication of the virgin birth?)

In following chapters God makes a covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob resulting in the formation of the nation of Israel, and promising them the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. Cutting a covenant sounds strange to Western ears, but would have been perfectly understandable to Abraham at the time and in the place in which he lived.

It was a solemn agreement between two parties. Animals would be killed as a sacrifice, cut in half and placed in two lines. The parties would walk between the lines, covenanting that neither would ever break the conditions of their agreement. In this case, it appears only God walked between the lines. It was an unconditional covenant. God was choosing a nation of His own, through whom He could manifest Himself to the world. One chapter says three times that it was an everlasting covenant.

In the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, God promises that the nation of Israel will still be there at the end of time:

Thus says the Lord,
Who gives the sun for a light by day,
And the ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by night,
Who disturbs the sea,
And its waves roar
(The Lord of hosts is his name):

"If those ordinances depart
From before me," says the Lord,
"Then the seed of Israel shall also cease    
From being a nation before me for ever."
Jeremiah 31:35, 36

Nations come and go. But Israel will last as long as the sun and the moon. That promise has been given to no other nation. Not America. Not Britain. Not Russia. Only Israel. (A number of people have tried to destroy the Jews. It's a pity they didn't read the Bible. It would have saved them a lot of trouble.)

 After God gave Canaan to the nation of Israel, He scattered them from the land because of their sin. But in the Old Testament book of Amos, He promised that He would restore them to the land He had given them. to be plucked up no more:

"They shall plant vineyards and drink wine from them;
They shall also make gardens and eat fruit from them.
I will plant them in their land,
And no longer shall they be pulled up
From the land I have given them,"
Says the Lord your God.
Amos 9:14, 15

A precious promise.

Well, I still haven't proved that Jesus is, or is not, the Jewish Messiah. But there is a remarkable prophecy in the Old Testament book of Daniel chapter 9 verses 24 to 26.
        

The beginning of Christian antisemitism

Jesus was born to a Jewish mother from a town in Galilee. He was circumcised on the eighth day. He grew up obedient to the Hebrew Scriptures. He observed the Jewish feasts. He became a Jewish rabbi, with His own talmidim (disciples, that is.) He claimed to be the Messiah – literally, “the anointed one” - who was to come. He lived and died a Jew.

Many Jews believed on Him. They saw the provision of a Messiah as a continuation of the things that God had already done for the Jewish people. As well as believing in Jesus as Messiah, they continued to live as Jews. For some time, they were considered a sect within Judaism.

In AD 66, the Jews revolted against Roman rule. It is said that Jews who believed in Jesus moved to Pella at this time in obedience to Jesus’ instruction in Luke chapter 21 verses 20 to 24. There was war until AD 70, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem. They ravaged Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.

In AD 132, the Jews again revolted. Jews who believed in Jesus are said to have fought alongside their fellow Jews until Rabbi Akiva, a revered Jewish leader, made the mistake of declaring Simon ben Kosiba, the general leading the fighting, to be the Messiah. They then felt unable to fight under a false messiah: ben Kosiba is said to have ordered “cruel punishments” for them. In AD 135, the Romans put down the revolt. Some 580,000 Jews are said to have died in battle, and countless thousands more through starvation and disease. The Jews blamed not Rabbi Akiva, and not ben Kosiba, but the Jews who believed in Jesus, for the failure of the insurrection.

After the revolt had been put down, the Romans banned Jews by law from Jerusalem, which became a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina, with pagan temples and theatres. The Jerusalem church became of necessity a Gentile church, led by a Gentile bishop.

Outside Israel, many thousands of Gentiles had been converted as Jesus’ disciples had been faithful to His command to preach the gospel to every creature. New Christian centres sprang up in Rome, in Antioch and in Alexandria, with Gentile leaders. The Gentiles saw the defeats of the Jews by the Romans as divine judgment: because the Jewish nation had rejected Christ, they said, God had rejected them.

The early Church Fathers – Justin Martyr, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage and Origen – were united in their condemnation of the Jews. God’s covenant with Israel, they said, was no longer valid, and the Gentiles had replaced the Jews. “The true spiritual Israel, and descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham,” said Justin Martyr (100 – 165), “. . . are we who have been led to God through the crucified Christ.”¹ He also said: “We who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ are the true Israelitic race.”²

The Emperor Constantine’s conversion in AD 306 led to the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. In AD 321 Constantine substituted Sunday for Saturday as the official day of rest for all Christian believers – Jewish as well as Gentile.³ The Council of Nicea in 325, with Constantine presiding, changed the celebration of the resurrection from Passover to Easter. The council is said to have referred to the Jews as “odious people,” “polluted wretches,” “a most hostile rabble,” and “parricides.”⁴

Ambrose, bishop of Milan (c340 – 397), said “The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. . . For killing God, there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians must never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.”⁵

Augustine (354 – 430) decided the promises to Israel should be interpreted symbolically and applied to the church, rather than being interpreted literally and applied to Israel. (There is evidence of this in our Bibles to this day. In Isaiah chapter 43 in the Authorised [King James] Version of the Bible, first published in 1611, God is speaking to Israel. “O Jacob. . . O Israel,” He says. The page heading says “God comforteth the church with his promises.”)

Professions of faith were designed for Jews desiring to join the church in which they were required to repudiate every connection with their Jewishness.

In the 11th century Jews, considered “vermin” who should be cut off from the rest of the population, were herded into areas of cities called ghettoes.⁶ Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153) said the Jews had “a stupidity more than bestial,” were “an evil seed,” and a race who had not God for their father, but were of the devil.⁷

It was in the 11th century the Crusades began, following a call to arms by Pope Urban II. Their stated purpose was to guarantee access to holy sites controlled by the Muslims, but everywhere they went the Crusaders massacred Jews. Thousands of Jews were killed in central Europe. Jews in Jerusalem fled to the Great Synagogue for sanctuary. The Crusaders set the synagogue on fire and sang “Christ, We Adore Thee” as the Jews burned to death.⁸

From the 12th to the 14th centuries were the Inquisitions, with massive attacks against Jews in Spain, France and England. Jews were murdered, synagogues destroyed and Torah scrolls burned. In 1288 was the first mass burning of Jews at the stake in France.⁹

In the 14th century came the Black Plague, which killed approximately a third of the population of Europe. The Jews were blamed. Rumour said they had poisoned wells. More than 60 Jewish communities were burned to the ground and their occupants killed. Jews were tortured and burned to death on bonfires.¹⁰

Christians may be surprised to learn that Martin Luther, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, was an antisemite. He may have hoped that Jews, freed from the bonds of Roman Catholic persecution, would join the reformed church. They did not. Luther called them “miserable, blind and senseless,” “thieves and robbers,” and “a brood of vipers,” whose synagogues were “a den of devils in which sheer selfglory, blasphemy and defaming of God and men are practised most maliciously.” He proposed setting fire to their synagogues and schools, destroying their homes, taking their money from them, and compelling them to manual labour.¹¹

Christian antisemitism paved the way for the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews died. Raul Hilberg, one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust, saw it as a progression. The Christian missionaries said: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed said: You have no right to live among us. Then the Nazis said: You have no right to live.¹²

David Reagan quotes Hitler as saying: “Martin Luther has been the greatest encouragement of my life. . . He saw clearly that the Jews need to be destroyed, and we’re only the beginning to see that we need to carry the work on.” Julius Streicher, who described himself as the “Jew-baiter Number One” of Nazi Germany, said at his trial at Nuremberg after the war: “I did not say anything that Martin Luther did not say.”¹³

There were, of course, many individuals who helped the Jews, often at great danger to themselves, but many of the Jews’ so-called Christian neighbours, alongside whom they had lived all their lives, helped the Nazis round up the Jews and send them to their deaths.

In one of his books,¹⁴ Michael L. Brown quotes one of the few Lithuanian rabbis to survive the Holocaust. Rabbi Ephraim Oshry says that on the evening of June 25, 1941, the Lithuanian fascists began “going from house to house, from apartment to apartment, murdering people by the most horrible deaths – men, women and children – old and young. They hacked off heads, sawed people through like lumber, prolonging the agony of their victims as long as possible.” Finding the rabbi of Slobodka studying Talmud in his home, they bound him to a chair, put his head on his open volume of the Talmud and sawed his head off. Then they killed the rest of his family.

Shortly I shall be writing further about Christian persecution of the Jews. I will be talking about the theology that made it possible, and what needs to be done about it. But first, let’s consider one more point.

¹  Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 135 ANF, 267 
²  Dialogue with Trypho123 ANF, 261
³  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great_and_Christianity
⁴  Dr David R. Reagan, www.christinprophecy.org/articles/the-evil-of-replacement-theology
 ⁵  ibid 
 ⁶ Ibid
⁷  Michael L. Brown, Our Hands Are Stained With Blood. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania: Destiny Image Publishers 1990, p12
⁸  Michael L Brown, pp92, 93
⁹  Dr David R. Reagan, www.christinprophecy.org/articles/the-evil-of-replacement-theology
¹⁰  ibid
¹¹  www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Luther_on_Jews.html
¹²  Michael L. Brown, p8
¹³  Dr David R. Reagan, www.christinprophecy.org/articles/the-evil-of-replacement-theology
¹⁴  Michael L. Brown, p90

     

How do we come to be so confused?

I was walking up the road one morning to do some shopping when I was stopped by a man begging the price of a cup of coffee. He was just out of prison, he said. He had been in prison a number of times, and always for the same offence: stealing from off licences. We continued to chat, and the conversation turned to spiritual matters. He said he was a Roman Catholic. OK, I said, but I suggested that the most important thing was not the denomination he belonged to so much as a personal relationship with God. After all, I said, Jesus wasn’t a Protestant, or a Roman Catholic. He was a Jew. “No, he wasn’t,” he said. “Nah. He was the first Roman Catholic.”

Does that seem surprising? Then how about this.

Richard Harvey, a British Jew, went with a mixed group of youngsters on a visit to a synagogue. The rabbi asked each one to describe his religious background. Harvey said he was a Jewish Christian. “I’m sorry, you don’t exist,” the rabbi told him.

Here’s something that may seem strange at first sight. A Jew is born a Jew, and consequently will always be a Jew. You can be a Buddhist, and still be a Jew. You can be a humanist, and still be a Jew. You can even be an atheist, and still be a Jew. But according to Jewish thinking, it’s impossible to be a Christian and a Jew. The two things are mutually exclusive. If you’re a Christian, then you are no longer Jewish.

Another Jewish rabbi, explaining why Jews don’t believe in Jesus, wrote that for 2,000 years Jews have rejected the Christian idea of Jesus as Messiah. That’s not wholly true. The early Christian church was Jewish. The apostles were all Jewish. The believers were all Jewish. Gentiles may have been touched by the gospel as it began to be preached after the resurrection, but it was only after Peter’s encounter with Cornelius in Acts chapter 10 that church membership was opened to the Gentiles.

How did we get into such confusion? Is Jesus Jewish? Was He the Jewish Messiah, the long-awaited fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy? Why is it impossible for a Jew to believe in Jesus? Did He just come to found a new religion?

There has been frightful misunderstanding. But something is happening in our day. More and more Gentile Christians are becoming aware of the Jewish roots of their faith. Equally, at the same time, more and more Jews are becoming aware of Jesus. Not, I would suggest, by accident.

Consider the facts.