Why Judaism Rejects Jesus

"The central criterion for evaluating a Messiah must therefore be a single question: Has the Messianic age come?" — David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod, 1978¹

"But who says your description is right? That is the crux of the problem." — Michael L. Brown, 2000²

Summary

Judaism rejects Jesus for one main reason and several supporting ones.  The main reason is that the Hebrew prophets describe what the Messiah will do, and Jesus did not do it.  The Temple was not rebuilt, the exiles were not gathered, and the world did not learn war no more.  Maimonides made this a legal test in the twelfth century:  a claimant who fails, "or was killed", "surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah".³  Behind it stand a theological objection, that God is one and is not a man, and two thousand years of arguments over individual verses and over the church's treatment of the Jews.

This article states the Jewish case first, in the words of its strongest writers:  Maimonides, Nachmanides at the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263, the Karaite Isaac of Troki, and the modern counter-missionaries Aryeh Kaplan, Gerald Sigal, Tovia Singer, David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod.  It then gives the strongest Christian reply, from Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (about AD 155) to Michael Brown's Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, and a verdict on each point.

• The job list: the Jewish argument is the strongest in the debate, and the Christian reply postpones it rather than defeats it. On a plain reading most messianic prophecies describe one coming that changes the world. The Christian answer, that the Messiah comes twice, first to suffer and later to reign, is as old as the debate and has real footholds: Isaiah 53, Zechariah 12:10, Daniel 9:26, and the Talmud's own slain "Messiah ben Yosef". But no Hebrew text says he will come twice. If Jesus rose from the dead, the delay is a delay; if not, the Jewish verdict stands. (Part 2)
• God and the incarnation: this comes down to prior commitments. The Jewish claim that a divine Messiah is unthinkable in Judaism is overstated; the Jewish Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin argues that its "germs" were Jewish before Jesus.⁴ But worship of a man as God in the full sense of the later creeds is a step no pre-Christian Jewish text takes. (Part 3)
• Atonement: each side wins against the other's popular version. The Hebrew Bible forgives the repentant without blood, so "no atonement without a Temple" is wrong. But one righteous person suffering for many is in Isaiah 53, and the Talmud itself says "the death of the righteous atones".⁵ (Part 3)
• The Torah and the new covenant: the Jewish reading is stronger on the texts' own words. Jeremiah's new covenant is made with Israel and Judah, writes God's law on the heart, and ties Israel's survival to the sun and moon. The claim that the church replaced Israel contradicts it. (Part 3, Part 7)
• The disputed verses: mixed. Isaiah 7:14 in its own setting is about a sign for King Ahaz, and Christian scholars grant it. Zechariah 12:10 and Isaiah 9:6 give the Christian reading real footholds. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22 and Daniel 9 have their own articles. (Part 4)
• History: the crucifixion, the Jews' rejection and the church's persecution explain why Jews did not follow Jesus, but prove nothing about whether he was the Messiah. The persecution record is real, and Christian writers concede it. It does refute one old Christian claim: that Isaiah's age of peace began among Christians. (Part 5)
• The Talmud on Jesus: late polemic, not independent history. The passages name Jesus, say he practised sorcery and led Israel astray, and say he was hanged on the eve of Passover. Peter Schäfer dates the explicit ones to Babylonia in the late third or early fourth century at the earliest and reads them as a deliberate "counter-Gospel".⁶ David Instone-Brewer argues, against most scholars, that one core sentence goes back to about AD 200 or earlier. (Part 6)
• The same standard both ways. Christian scholars themselves grant that Isaiah 7:14, Hosea 11:1, Jeremiah 31:15 and Matthew's "Nazarene" are not predictions in their own settings, and that a "Talmud" quotation still printed in apologetics books cannot be found. Counter-missionary writers are also wrong on several points: that Christians invented the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14, that Hebrews altered Jeremiah, and that vicarious atonement and a dying messiah are foreign to Judaism. (Part 8)

Verdict.  The honest form of the disagreement is narrow.  Judaism holds that the Messiah is a human king judged by public results, and by that standard Jesus has not qualified.  Christianity holds that his work is in two stages and that God vindicated him by raising him from the dead.  The prophecies cannot settle which is right, because each side's reading of them depends on its answer to that one historical question.  The resurrection is argued in The Historical Case for the Resurrection.  The other Judaism articles take up whether the Oral Torah comes from Sinai and whether today's Jews descend from ancient Israel.

Part 1: The Jewish case in its own words

Judaism has no creed that every Jew must sign, but its answer to Jesus has been stable for eight centuries.  Its main witnesses run from a medieval codifier of Jewish law to the modern counter-missionaries.

Maimonides: the test of a messiah

Moses Maimonides, "the 12th-century rabbinic authority" whose code of law, the Mishneh Torah, is still the starting point for Jewish law,⁷ gives the rule in the laws of kings, chapter 11.  The Messiah is a king.  He "will arise and renew the Davidic dynasty", "build the Temple and gather the dispersed of Israel".³  He need not work miracles.  Maimonides' proof is Rabbi Akiva, who called the rebel Bar Kokhba "the Messianic king" without asking for any sign, "until he was killed because of sins.  Once he was killed, they realized that he was not the Mashiach."³  The test is what the man does.  A Davidic king who keeps the Torah and fights the Lord's wars may be presumed to be the Messiah.  "If he succeeds in the above, builds the Temple in its place, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he is definitely the Mashiach."  And:  "If he did not succeed to this degree or was killed, he surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah."³

Then, in the text that Christian censors cut from printed editions, Maimonides applies the rule to Jesus.  In literal English:  "Also Jesus the Nazarene, who imagined that he would be the Messiah, and was killed by the court, Daniel already prophesied about him".  He goes on:  "Is there a greater stumbling block than this?  All the prophets spoke of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel and their saviour, who gathers their dispersed and strengthens their commandments.  And this one caused Israel to be destroyed by the sword, their remnant to be scattered and humbled, the Torah to be exchanged, and most of the world to err and serve a god other than the Lord."³  The common English translation by Eliyahu Touger, used on Sefaria and Chabad.org, renders "this" and "this one" as "Christianity";  the Hebrew has only the pronoun.

Maimonides does not stop there.  God's thoughts are not man's thoughts, he says, and "all the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth and that Ishmaelite who arose after him", that is, Muhammad, "will only serve to prepare the way for Mashiach's coming".  The proof is that "The entire world has already become filled with the mention of Mashiach, Torah, and mitzvot."³  Christianity, on this view, is a wrong turn that God uses to carry the Bible to the nations.

Nachmanides at Barcelona, 1263

In July 1263 King James I of Aragon ordered Rabbi Moses ben Nachman of Gerona to debate a convert from Judaism, the Dominican friar Pablo Christiani, in the royal palace at Barcelona.⁸  Nachmanides wrote his own account, the Vikuach.  The Dominicans wrote a shorter one, which the king sealed as correct.  The historian Hyam Maccoby calls the Christian document "a travesty of the disputation", and he also reports Yitzhak Baer's caution that the Jewish account is "a work of propaganda, not a factual account in the modern sense."⁸  So the words below are Nachmanides' own report of what he said, not a transcript.

He made three moves that every later Jewish writer repeats.  The first was to lower the stakes of the Messiah question:  "The Messiah is not fundamental to our religion.  Why, you are worth more to me than the Messiah!  You are a king, and he is a king.  You are a Gentile king, and he is a Jewish king; for the Messiah is only a king of flesh and blood like you."⁸  The second was to name the real disagreement, which was God, not the Messiah:  "the doctrine in which you believe, and which is the foundation of your faith, cannot be accepted by the reason, and nature affords no ground for it, nor have the prophets ever expressed it."  That the Creator "resorted to the womb of a certain Jewess and grew there for nine months", and was then betrayed and executed:  "The mind of a Jew, or any other person, cannot tolerate this".⁸  Maccoby himself asks whether Nachmanides really said anything so bold before a Christian king, or whether this "is an example of embroidery".⁸  The third was the argument from history.  The prophets promised that nations would beat their swords into ploughshares.  "Yet from the days of Jesus until now, the whole world has been full of violence and plundering, and the Christians are greater spillers of blood than all the rest of the peoples".⁸

Isaac of Troki: Faith Strengthened

Isaac ben Abraham of Troki in Lithuania (1533–1594) was a Karaite, a member of the Jewish movement that rejects the rabbis' oral law.  He died before finishing Chizzuk Emunah, "Faith Strengthened", and it was first printed in 1681 by a Christian scholar, Johann Christoph Wagenseil, with a Latin translation, in a collection he titled Tela Ignea Satanae, "the fiery darts of Satan".⁹  Troki opens with four proofs that Jesus was not the Messiah:  his pedigree, his acts, his time, and the promises left unfulfilled.  On pedigree, Jesus "was not a descendant of David, being merely affiliated to him through Joseph".  On acts, Jesus said he came to bring a sword, while Isaiah 2:4 promises that "nation shall not lift up sword against nation".  His conclusion:  "The above indications pointed out by the prophets as indispensable attributes of the true Messiah, have not been fulfilled in Jesus the Nazarene."¹⁰  The book outlived its purpose.  Through Wagenseil's Latin its arguments "were used by all freethinkers", and Voltaire wrote that the most determined unbelievers had alleged almost nothing that was not already in "le Rempart de la Foi du rabbin Isaac", the rampart of the faith of Rabbi Isaac.⁹

The modern counter-missionaries

The modern case is the medieval case with better Hebrew scholarship and a sharper target, the Messianic Jewish and "Jews for Jesus" movements of the 1970s.  David Berger, a historian of Jewish–Christian debate, and Michael Wyschogrod, a philosopher, put it most clearly in a 1978 booklet written for Jews drawn to those movements.  "The central criterion for evaluating a Messiah must therefore be a single question:  Has the Messianic age come?"¹  They also named the Christian answer and why they reject it.  After the crucifixion, they write, the basic structure of the Christian explanation "was to shift the function of the Messiah from a visible level, where it could be tested, to an invisible one, where it could not."¹  Their conclusion:  "If the Bible's description of the Messiah has not been fulfilled, there is only one conclusion to be reached:  he has not yet come."¹

Gerald Sigal's The Jew and the Christian Missionary (1981) is the verse-by-verse handbook.  It answers each Christian proof-text in turn, from Genesis to the letters of Paul.¹¹

Aryeh Kaplan's booklet The Real Messiah?, first issued by the Orthodox Union's youth movement in 1976 and still given away by Jews for Judaism, states the job list in two sentences:  "To the Jew, the Messiah has a most important mission, namely to bring the world back to G-d, and make it a place of peace, justice and harmony.  When Jesus failed to accomplish this, the early Christians had to radically alter the very concept of the Messiah."¹²  Rabbi Shraga Simmons's article on Aish.com, the most widely read popular version, turns the list into a test:  build the Third Temple, gather the Jews to Israel, bring world peace, spread the knowledge of God.  "If an individual fails to fulfill even one of these conditions, then he cannot be the Messiah."  To the Christian answer of a second coming, it replies that "in the Bible no concept of a second coming exists."¹³  Rabbi Tovia Singer of Outreach Judaism answers the Christian proof-texts one by one on the organization's website.¹⁴

The arguments, grouped

The rest of this article takes each group in turn.  For each it states the Jewish argument, the strongest Christian reply in its own words, and a verdict.

Part 2: The job list

The Jewish argument

The prophets describe what the Messiah's age will look like.  Nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares" and "neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:4).  "The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea", and God will "assemble the outcasts of Israel" from the four corners of the earth (Isaiah 11:9, 12).  A son of David will be king over a reunited Israel, and God will set his sanctuary "in the midst of them for evermore" (Ezekiel 37:24–28).  None of this happened in the first century.  The Temple was destroyed about forty years after the crucifixion, and the Jews were scattered further, not gathered.  Maimonides turns this into a legal test, quoted in Part 1:  a claimant who does not do these things, "or was killed", "surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah".³

The argument has a strength that is easy to miss.  Jesus' own followers expected the same job list.  After the crucifixion two disciples say, "we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel" (Luke 24:21), and after the resurrection the apostles still ask, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6).  The New Testament itself records that the first Christians had to be taught a different timetable.

The Christian reply: two comings

The Christian answer is as old as the Jewish objection.  In Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, written about AD 155, the Jew Trypho says that the Scriptures "compel us to wait for Him who, as Son of man, receives from the Ancient of days the everlasting kingdom", and that Jesus instead fell under the curse of the Law.  Justin answers that the prophets announced "two advents of Christ":  "the one, in which He is set forth as suffering, inglorious, dishonoured, and crucified; but the other, in which He shall come from heaven with glory".¹⁵  The job list belongs to the second coming.

Michael Brown, a Messianic Jewish scholar whose five-volume Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus is the most thorough modern Christian reply, calls the objection circular.  It assumes a definition of the Messiah and then rules Jesus out by it.  "But who says your description is right?  That is the crux of the problem."  He adds:  "nowhere in our Scriptures does it explicitly say, 'When the Messiah comes there will be peace on earth.'  Rather, it speaks of an era of peace at the end of the age (see Isaiah 2:1-4, without any mention of a Messianic figure there), tying this in with the reign of a descendant of David".²  On his reading the Messiah is a priest and a king, who first makes atonement and later rules.  Hosea 3:4–5 describes the interval:  Israel will "abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice", and "Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David their king".  Brown comments:  "This is the period in which we have been living since the coming of the Messiah twenty centuries ago".²

The reply has textual support, and some of it is inside Judaism.

1. The Hebrew Bible shows the Messiah two ways. Daniel 7:13 has "one like the Son of man" coming "with the clouds of heaven" to receive an everlasting kingdom. Zechariah 9:9 has the king coming "lowly, and riding upon an ass". The Talmud saw the tension and resolved it as alternatives: "If the Jewish people merit redemption, the Messiah will come in a miraculous manner with the clouds of heaven. If they do not merit redemption, the Messiah will come lowly and riding upon a donkey."¹⁶ Christians resolve it as a sequence. Both are readings; neither is stated in the text.
2. A slain messiah is in the Talmud. In Sukkah 52a the rabbis debate who is mourned in Zechariah 12:10, "they shall look unto Me because they have thrust him through". One view: the mourning is "for Messiah ben Yosef who was killed" in the war of Gog and Magog, before the coming of the Messiah son of David.¹⁶ This is a later tradition than the New Testament, so it cannot show what Jews expected before Jesus. It does show that a messiah who is killed was thinkable inside rabbinic Judaism.
3. Some texts put a messiah's death before the Temple's fall. Daniel 9:26 says that "shall Messiah be cut off" and then "the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary". Christians read this as Jesus' death before AD 70; rabbinic tradition reads the seventy weeks as the 490 years from the First Temple's fall to the Second's. On the documented dates that span is about 655 years (587 or 586 BC to AD 70), not 490, so this answer to Brown fails on its own arithmetic, as Traditional Jewish Chronology shows; it does not follow that Daniel 9 points to Jesus. The arithmetic is argued in Daniel 9 and the Seventy Weeks, and the rabbinic count in Traditional Jewish Chronology, which finds no evidence that the rabbis built their count to avoid Jesus. The date of Daniel itself is in When Was the Book of Daniel Written?.
4. Part of the job list has begun, by Maimonides' own account. Isaiah 11:9 and Zephaniah 3:9 look to a day when the nations know and serve the God of Israel. Maimonides grants that through Jesus and Muhammad "The entire world has already become filled with the mention of Mashiach, Torah, and mitzvot", and calls this God's way of preparing for the true Messiah.³ A Christian reads the same fact as the first coming's fruit. The fact is common ground; the reading is not.
5. Some prophecies need the Second Temple standing. Brown's strongest argument is about timing. Haggai promised that "The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former" (Haggai 2:9). Malachi promised that "the LORD, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple" (Malachi 3:1). Daniel 9:26 puts the cutting off of an anointed one before the city and sanctuary are destroyed. So, Brown argues, a divine visitation had to come to the Second Temple: "If it did, then the Messiah must have come before the Temple was destroyed in 70 c.e.; if not, God's Word has failed."² Each link has a Jewish reading that needs no messiah. The Talmud explains Haggai's greater glory as a building that was taller and that stood longer than Solomon's: "this is true and that is true".¹⁷ Malachi's "LORD" is most naturally God himself. And the rabbis read Daniel's seventy weeks as the years between the two destructions. Brown himself grants that "scholars disagree as to when this chapter was actually composed".² The argument is real, but it is no stronger than its weakest reading.
6. The suffering is in Isaiah 53. A righteous servant suffers for others, dies or nearly dies, and is then exalted. Whether the servant is the Messiah, Israel, or someone else is argued in Isaiah 53, which concludes that the passage is real but inconclusive evidence.

The answer to the answer

David Berger and Michael Wyschogrod reply that the second coming moved the Messiah's work "from a visible level, where it could be tested, to an invisible one, where it could not."¹  That charge is half right.  Atonement for sin cannot be seen.  But the Christian claim is not wholly invisible.  It rests on a public event in history, the resurrection, which its first witnesses said they saw, and it predicts a return that is testable, though only in the future.  The resurrection is argued in The Historical Case for the Resurrection.

Jewish practice has also not applied "a killed messiah is no messiah" as cleanly as the rule suggests.  Berger himself, writing in 2001, found that many followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, still held that he was the Messiah after his death in 1994.  Berger warned that tolerating this belief would "award victory to Christianity in a crucial aspect of its millennial debate with Judaism", and that on this point Orthodox Judaism "has effectively declared that, with respect to this fundamental issue of principle, Christians were correct all along and Jews profoundly mistaken."⁷  Berger's own position is that the belief breaks Jewish law.  But the episode shows that a dying-and-returning messiah is not unthinkable to Jews, only forbidden by the codified rule.

Two Christian arguments from the Talmud prove less than they claim.  The first is that the Talmud admits the Messiah was due long ago.  One tradition gives the world six thousand years, the last two thousand of them "the days of the Messiah", "but due to our many sins there are those years that have been taken from them".¹⁶  Rav says that "All the ends of days that were calculated passed, and the matter depends only upon repentance and good deeds".¹⁶  These are admissions that a schedule failed and that redemption waits on Israel's repentance.  They are not admissions that the Messiah came.  The second is the tradition in Yoma 39b that for "forty years prior to the destruction" of the Temple the Day of Atonement lot and the crimson thread gave bad signs.¹⁶  Brown asks:  "The Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., so from 30 to 70 c.e., a period of forty years, the annual atonement sacrifices were not accepted.  What great event happened in the year 30?"²  The Talmud presents these as omens of the coming destruction, and it never says the sacrifices were not accepted.  Forty is also the round number the Jerusalem Talmud gives for the end of Jewish courts' power over capital cases:  "Forty years before the Temple was destroyed, criminal jurisdiction was removed from Israel".⁵  A coincidence with a round number is weak evidence.

Verdict

The job list is the strongest Jewish argument, and the Christian reply does not defeat it so much as postpone it.  On a plain reading, most messianic prophecies describe one coming that changes the world, and the first coming did not change it in the ways those texts describe.  The two-coming reply is coherent, it is as old as the debate, and it has real footholds in texts that show a suffering or slain figure and in rabbinic readings of those texts.  But no Hebrew text says "he will come twice".  Whether the reply is special pleading or the right reading depends on one thing the prophecies cannot settle:  whether Jesus rose from the dead.  If he did, the delay is a delay.  If he did not, the Jewish verdict stands.

Part 3: The theological objections

God is one, and God is not a man

The Jewish argument.  Twice a day the observant Jew recites the Shema:  "Hear, O Israel:  The LORD our God is one LORD" (Deuteronomy 6:4).  Moses warns that Israel "saw no manner of similitude" of God at Sinai (Deuteronomy 4:15).  Balaam's oracle says that "God is not a man, that he should lie" (Numbers 23:19), and Hosea has God say, "I am God, and not man" (Hosea 11:9).  Aryeh Kaplan draws the conclusion:  "G-d does not suddenly decide to visit the earth in a human body", and he cites the Jerusalem Talmud:  "If a man claims to be G-d, he is a liar!"¹²  For Jewish law the issue is not only false belief but false worship.  David Berger writes that "even genuine Christianity, in which Jesus is a manifestation of one element of the single Creator God, is a form of 'foreign worship' (avodah zarah)" as far as classical Judaism is concerned.⁷  This was the objection Nachmanides called "the root of our controversy", and it is older than the rabbis.  Justin's Trypho says that a Christ who "existed as God before the ages" and then was born a man "appears to me to be not merely paradoxical, but also foolish".¹⁵

The weak Christian reply.  A popular Christian argument says that echad, "one", in the Shema means a compound unity, as when man and wife become "one flesh" (Genesis 2:24).  Jewish writers answer that the word is the ordinary Hebrew number one, and that the argument proves nothing to someone who does not already hold the doctrine.  Berger and Wyschogrod call the Trinity proof-texts "particularly weak as proofs aimed at someone who is not already a Christian".¹  Michael Brown makes a narrower claim.  He grants that "the best translation, as noted by the New Jewish Version and some classical rabbinic commentators, is, 'The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.'"  He argues only that echad "does not point to absolute unity; it simply means one", and he notes that the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself wrote that the word does not rule out an object "composed of parts".¹⁸  That narrower claim is correct, and it proves little.  The word allows a unity with parts, but nothing in Deuteronomy 6:4 requires it.

The strong Christian reply.  The stronger answer does not argue from one Hebrew word.  It argues that first-century Judaism already had room for a second divine figure.  Daniel 7:13–14 has "one like the Son of man" come "with the clouds of heaven" and receive "dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him".  The Talmud, as Part 2 showed, reads that figure as the Messiah.  The Jewish Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin of Berkeley, who does not accept Jesus, argues that this was the expectation Jesus walked into:  "The question was not 'Is a divine Messiah coming?' but only 'Is this carpenter from Nazareth the One we are expecting?'"⁴  In his words, "The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene".⁴  The Hebrew Bible also has God appear in human form.  In Genesis 18 "the LORD appeared unto" Abraham as one of three men who came to his tent and ate with him.  Brown builds on that chapter:  "An honest and straightforward reading of the text indicates clearly that God can come to earth in human form for a period of time if he so desires.  And notice: I have not quoted the New Testament to support this but instead have simply looked at the Torah."¹⁸  A Jewish reader can grant the passage and still deny the step Christians take from it.  A visit in human form "for a period of time", in Brown's phrase, is not the same claim as a man born of a woman, worshipped, and killed.

Justin himself saw that the incarnation and the messiahship are separate questions.  He tells Trypho that "the[proof] that this man is the Christ of God does not fail, though I be unable to prove that He existed formerly as Son of the Maker of all things, being God".¹⁵  A Jew could in principle grant that Jesus was the Messiah and still argue about his nature.  Most never reached that second question, because the first one failed for them.

Verdict:  this one comes down to prior commitments.  The Jewish claim that a divine Messiah is unthinkable within Judaism is overstated.  Boyarin's case for Jewish "germs" of the idea is serious, though contested, and Berger reports Chabad writers in the 1990s saying of their late Rebbe that "his entire essence is divinity alone".⁷  But "germs" are not the doctrine.  The worship of Jesus as God in the full sense of the later creeds is a step no pre-Christian Jewish text takes.  Whether it is a legitimate development or idolatry depends on whether Jesus' own claims and resurrection are true.  The early evidence is weighed in Early Belief in Jesus' Divinity, and the later doctrine in Councils, Creeds, and the Trinity.

Each person dies for his own sin

The Jewish argument.  "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father" (Ezekiel 18:20).  "Every man shall be put to death for his own sin" (Deuteronomy 24:16).  God forgives the one who turns back:  "Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?" (Ezekiel 18:23).  Gerald Sigal answers the Christian reading of Leviticus 17:11, "it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul", with Hosea 14:3, in the Jewish numbering:  "So will we render for bullocks the offering of our lips."¹¹  Kaplan puts it flatly:  "there is no place where the Bible says that blood is the only means of atonement."¹²  The Mishnah teaches that "Death and Yom Kippur atone for sins when accompanied by repentance."⁵  Berger and Wyschogrod add that the God of Israel forbids human sacrifice, so Jesus' death "can only be considered a sacrifice metaphorically and cannot substitute for, and certainly cannot terminate, the sacrifices specifically commanded by God".¹

The Christian reply.  Ezekiel 18 answers a proverb, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (18:2).  Its point is that God does not punish children against their will for their parents' sins.  It says nothing about a righteous person who chooses to suffer for others.  That is what Isaiah 53 describes:  "the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (53:6), and "he bare the sin of many" (53:12).  The Jewish scholars Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine grant that the passage is unique in the Hebrew Bible:  "nowhere else does it depict an individual punished for many."¹⁹  And the idea that a righteous death atones is not foreign to Judaism.  The Talmud teaches that "just as the red heifer atones for sin, so too, the death of the righteous atones for sin."⁵  A Jewish sermon on the Maccabean martyrs, usually called 4 Maccabees, has the old priest Eleazar pray:  "Make my blood their purification, and take my soul to ransom their souls", and it says the martyrs became "a ransom for our nation's sin".²⁰  Its translator dated it between 63 BC and AD 38.²⁰

Verdict:  each side wins against the other's popular version.  The Jewish side is right that the Hebrew Bible offers forgiveness to the repentant without blood.  David is forgiven on confession (2 Samuel 12:13), and Nineveh is spared for repenting (Jonah 3:10).  A Christian who says that Judaism has had no atonement since the Temple fell misstates the Hebrew Bible, and the slogan "without shedding of blood is no remission" (Hebrews 9:22) cannot be read back into it as the only way.  The Christian side is right that substitution is not foreign to the Hebrew Bible or to Judaism.  Isaiah 53, the Talmud's "death of the righteous atones", and 4 Maccabees all show it.  The real question is not whether one man can suffer for many, but whether Jesus was that man.

The Torah is forever

The Jewish argument.  The Torah calls its commandments "a statute for ever" (for example Leviticus 16:31, of the Day of Atonement) and the Sabbath "a perpetual covenant" (Exodus 31:16).  It warns, "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2), and it says that a prophet whose signs come true but who leads Israel after other gods must not be followed (Deuteronomy 13:1–5).  Maimonides makes this part of the test of the Messiah:  "This Torah, its statutes and its laws, are everlasting.  We may not add to them or detract from them."³  Troki asks why, if Jesus freed his followers from the commandments, he still urged some of them:  "wherefore did he urge the observance of a part of them; as, for instance, the honour due to parents, neighbourly love and charity?"¹⁰

The Christian reply.  Jesus said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil" (Matthew 5:17).  Christians read Jeremiah's promise of a "new covenant", taken up in Part 7, as God's own announcement that the Sinai covenant would be renewed in a new form.  Messianic Jews such as Michael Brown go further and keep much of the Torah.  Brown asks, "where is it written that believers, in particular Jewish believers, are forbidden to observe the Law?"²¹

Some Christian writers also quote rabbinic texts as Jewish admissions that the Messiah would bring a new Torah.  Most of these do not say that.  Leviticus Rabbah 13:3 has God say, "a novel Torah ruling will emerge from Me", but the passage is about one rule of ritual slaughter at the banquet of the world to come.⁵  Rav Yosef's saying that "mitzvot will be nullified in the future" in Niddah 61b is about the dead when they rise, not about the Messiah.⁵  The nearest real parallel is Ecclesiastes Rabbah 11:8:  "The Torah that a person studies in this world is vanity relative to the Torah of the Messiah."⁵  That expects deeper teaching in the messianic age, not the end of the commandments.

The same standard has to be applied to Judaism.  Since AD 70 rabbinic Judaism has not kept the Temple's sacrifices, which fill much of Leviticus.  It replaced them with prayer, on the strength of Hosea 14:3, as Sigal argues.¹¹  That is a faithful response to the loss of the Temple, not a breach of Deuteronomy 4:2.  But it shows that both religions had to decide what the Temple commandments meant once the Temple was gone.

Verdict:  on its face the Torah's "for ever" favours the Jewish reading.  The Christian answer depends on accepting that Jesus is the one Jeremiah's new covenant points to, so it cannot be used to prove that he is.  The Deuteronomy 13 objection is serious only if Jesus led Israel to another god, which takes the argument back to the incarnation.

Part 4: The disputed texts

The Jewish textual case is that the Christian proof-texts are mistranslated, read out of context, or not about the Messiah at all.  Several have their own articles on this site, and their verdicts are summarized here rather than argued again.

Isaiah 7:14: the young woman

Isaiah 7 is set in the reign of King Ahaz of Judah.  The kings of Aram and Israel are marching on Jerusalem, and Isaiah offers King Ahaz a sign:  a young woman will bear a son named Immanuel, "For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings" (7:16).  The sign is about the next few years.  The Hebrew word is almah, and the Jewish Publication Society's 1917 translation renders it "the young woman".²²  Gerald Sigal notes that the Torah's word for a virgin in legal texts is betulah, and argues that "if Isaiah 7:14 refers specifically to a virgin, the prophet would have used the technical term betulah so as to leave no doubt".¹¹  The objection is as old as the debate.  Justin's Trypho answers in the 150s:  "The Scripture has not, 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,' but, 'Behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son'".¹⁵

Christian scholars grant the point about the original setting.  Raymond Brown, the Catholic author of the standard commentary on the birth stories, writes that the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 "does not refer to a virginal conception in the distant future",²³ and the evangelical Craig Blomberg defends Matthew's use only as a "double fulfillment" (Part 8).²⁴

The Christian reply has two parts.  First, the Greek translation made by Jews before Christianity, the Septuagint, already renders the verse "ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ λήμψεται", "behold, the virgin shall conceive", so Matthew did not invent the reading.²⁵  Second, betulah is itself not always precise.  In Joel 1:8 a betulah mourns "the husband of her youth".²⁶  Neither point changes what the sign meant to Ahaz.

Verdict:  the Jewish reading is right about Isaiah's own setting.  The sign was for Ahaz's generation, and almah does not by itself mean "virgin".  A Christian who claims that Isaiah 7:14, read in context, plainly predicts a virgin birth seven centuries later is claiming more than the text says.  The defensible Christian position is that Matthew read the passage as a pattern with a fuller meaning, a reading that persuades only those who already accept Matthew.  The details are in Messianic Birth Texts.

Isaiah 9:6: "The mighty God"

The King James Version renders the child's names "Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace".  The Jewish Publication Society's 1985 translation reads the names as a sentence about God:  "He has been named 'The Mighty God is planning grace;  The Eternal Father, a peaceable ruler'".²²  Rashi reads the child as King Hezekiah and the titles as God's.²⁷  The Aramaic Targum makes the child the Messiah but gives the divine titles to God:  "His name is called from before Him who is wonderful in counsel, the mighty God who liveth to eternity — the Messiah whose peace shall be great upon us in his days."⁵  Berger and Wyschogrod compare names that describe God without making their bearer God, such as Jeremiah's "The Lord is our righteousness".¹

The Christian reply is that "mighty God", El gibbor, appears again in the next chapter, where it is plainly God himself:  "The remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the mighty God" (Isaiah 10:21).

Verdict:  this comes down to prior commitments.  Hebrew names that are whole sentences about God are common, so the Jewish reading is grammatical.  The Christian reading is grammatical too, and the use of El gibbor in 10:21 gives it weight.  The Targum shows that an ancient Jewish reading took the child to be the Messiah, but it does not support his divinity.

Zechariah 12:10: "whom they have pierced"

God says, "they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him".  Sigal answers that "God cannot literally be pierced":  the nations attack Israel, and to attack Israel is to attack God.  But he reads the one mourned as "the slain of Israel as personified by the leader of the people, the warrior Messiah who will die in battle".¹¹  The Talmud agrees that someone is killed and mourned.  One view in Sukkah 52a says the mourning is "for Messiah ben Yosef who was killed".¹⁶  John's Gospel applies the verse to the soldier's spear at the cross (John 19:37).

Verdict:  the Christian reading has a real foothold here.  The verse shifts from "me" to "him", which allows either reading of who is pierced.  But the Talmud's own interpretation, and even Sigal's, puts a slain messianic figure in this verse, which is the core of the Christian claim.  The Messiah ben Yosef tradition is later than Jesus, so it cannot show what Jews expected before him.

Genesis 49:10: the sceptre and Shiloh

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come".  The Aramaic Targum Onkelos, the standard Jewish translation of the Torah, renders "until Shiloh come" as "until the Messiah comes, whose is the kingdom".⁵  So the messianic reading of this verse is Jewish and ancient.  The Christian argument built on it is that the Messiah had to come before Judah lost its sceptre, and that Judah lost it when Rome took away the Jewish courts' power over capital cases.  The Jerusalem Talmud does report that loss, "Forty years before the Temple was destroyed".⁵  But the argument is weak.  It depends on reading "sceptre" as a court's right to execute, when no descendant of David had reigned since the Babylonian conquest six centuries earlier.  And the quotation most often given for it is not in the Talmud where it is said to be (Part 8).

The line of David

The Messiah must be a descendant of David through his father.  Rabbi Shraga Simmons states the Jewish objection in its sharpest form:  "Because Joseph descended from Jeconiah (Matthew 1:11) he fell under the curse of that king that none of his descendants could ever sit as king upon the throne of David (Jeremiah 22:30; 36:30)."¹³  Jeremiah says of Coniah, that is Jeconiah:  "Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah" (Jeremiah 22:30).  And if Jesus had no human father, as Christians hold, Troki asks how he can claim David's line at all:  he "was not a descendant of David, being merely affiliated to him through Joseph".¹⁰

Christians answer in two ways.  Luke's genealogy runs through Nathan, not Solomon and Jeconiah, and many read it as Mary's line.  And the curse on Jeconiah was reversed in his grandson Zerubbabel.  Jeremiah had said that though Coniah "were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence" (22:24), and Haggai has God tell Zerubbabel that he "will make thee as a signet: for I have chosen thee" (Haggai 2:23).  Matthew's own genealogy makes Zerubbabel Jeconiah's grandson:  "Jechonias begat Salathiel; and Salathiel begat Zorobabel" (Matthew 1:12).  Simmons himself grants that the Talmud says Jeconiah repented, and adds only that "it's not at all clear from the early sources that his repentance was accepted to the degree that the royal line continued through him."¹³

Verdict:  a genuine difficulty for Matthew's genealogy, with a reasonable Christian answer.  The Haggai reversal is a real textual answer, and Simmons' own concession shows that rabbinic tradition did not treat the curse as final.  Whether Luke gives Mary's line is disputed, and the claim that legal adoption passes on royal descent is a Christian argument, not something the Hebrew Bible states.

Part 5: The historical objections

A crucified messiah

The Torah says of an executed criminal whose body is hung on a tree that "he that is hanged is accursed of God" (Deuteronomy 21:23).  Before Jesus, Jews already applied the verse to men hanged alive, which is to say crucified.  The Temple Scroll from Qumran orders that a traitor be hanged "on a tree" and gives the reason:  "For he who is hanged on the tree is accursed of God and men."²⁸  The Qumran commentary on Nahum condemns a "furious young lion" who "hangs men alive", and Geza Vermes calls the phrase "a familiar Hebrew circumlocution for crucifixion".²⁸

So when Christians proclaimed a crucified Messiah, the objection was immediate.  Paul called it "unto the Jews a stumblingblock" (1 Corinthians 1:23).  Justin's Trypho grants that "the Scriptures announce that Christ had to suffer", but adds:  "whether Christ should be so shamefully crucified, this we are in doubt about.  For whosoever is crucified is said in the law to be accursed".  And:  "we cannot bring ourselves even to think of this."¹⁵

The Christian reply does not deny the curse.  It claims it.  Paul writes that "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree" (Galatians 3:13).  Justin argues the same way a century later:  the Father willed "His Christ for the whole human family to take upon Him the curses of all".¹⁵  The idea that a righteous person's death can atone for others is not foreign to Judaism, as Part 3 shows.

Verdict:  the objection explains history well and settles nothing.  It explains why most first-century Jews could not accept Jesus.  As an argument, though, it assumes what it must prove.  If Jesus was guilty, the curse fell on him justly.  If he was innocent and died for others, then he bore a curse he did not deserve, which is what Isaiah 53:4–5 describes and what Christians claim.  The objection also cuts the other way as historical evidence.  No Jew expecting a Messiah would invent one who died the death the Torah calls cursed, so the first Christians' belief was not built from expectation.  That point is argued in Isaiah 53, which concludes that "the cross came first and the text was recruited afterwards".

His own people did not follow him

The second historical objection is that the people who knew the prophets best rejected Jesus, and that a true Messiah would have been recognized.  Berger and Wyschogrod put it gently:  "many of the first-century Jews who had been attracted by Jesus' preaching sadly submitted to the conclusion forced upon them by his death.  They had been mistaken."¹

The premise is true for the majority and false for the start.  Every one of Jesus' first followers was Jewish, and Acts reports that on Paul's last visit to Jerusalem there were "many thousands of Jews there are which believe; and they are all zealous of the law" (Acts 21:20, where the Greek says "myriads").  Jewish believers in Jesus who kept the Law were still known to Justin in the 150s.¹⁵  The split came over generations, not in one decision, and it is the subject of The Jewish Revolts and the Parting of the Ways.  The Talmud dates a step in it to Yavneh, where Rabban Gamaliel asked for a "blessing of the heretics" to be added to the daily prayer and Shmuel HaKatan composed it.⁵  The Talmud's word is minim, "heretics", and it does not say who they were, though Justin complains in the same century of Jews "cursing in your synagogues those that believe on Christ".¹⁵

Numbers do not decide the question either way.  Rabbi Akiva, the greatest sage of his day, said of Bar Kokhba, the leader of the second Jewish revolt against Rome, "this is King Messias".¹⁶  Maimonides records that "He and all the Sages of his generation considered him to be the Messianic king until he was killed".³  In the 1660s Sabbatai Zevi drew what Gershom Scholem calls "the most important messianic movement in Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple", and then, in 1666, apostatized before the Ottoman sultan.²⁹  Majorities have accepted messiahs who failed, so majority rejection cannot by itself show that a messiah failed.  The comparison of messianic movements after their leaders' deaths is worked out in The Resurrection Belief:  Event or Process?.

Brown's answer is theological, not historical.  "Because our leadership rejected Jesus the Messiah when he came, God judged us as a people", he writes, "and as a result, our hearts have become especially hardened toward the concept of Jesus as Messiah", and he cites Paul in Romans 11:7–8.²  That answer will persuade only someone who already accepts the New Testament.

Verdict:  weak as an argument, strong as a fact.  Jewish rejection of Jesus is a fact the New Testament itself records and tries to explain (Romans 9–11).  It is not evidence that he was not the Messiah, any more than Akiva's endorsement was evidence that Bar Kokhba was.

Christian persecution of the Jews

The third historical objection is moral.  If Jesus was the Messiah who brings peace, why did his followers spend most of two thousand years humiliating and killing the Messiah's own people?  Maimonides wrote in the twelfth century that Jesus "caused Israel to be destroyed by the sword".³  Nachmanides told a Christian king that "the Christians are greater spillers of blood than all the rest of the peoples".⁸  Troki gave a whole chapter to "the chastisement inflicted on the Gentiles, who relentlessly persecuted the Jews".¹⁰

The Christian side does not dispute the record.  Michael Brown, a Messianic Jew and the most thorough modern Christian answerer of Jewish objections, wrote a book on it for Christians, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood (1992).  He quotes Pope Innocent III:  "The Jews, against whom the blood of Jesus Christ calls out, although they ought not to be killed, lest the Christian people forget the Divine Law, yet as wanderers ought they to remain upon the earth, until their countenance be filled with shame."²¹  He quotes Martin Luther in 1543:  "First, their synagogues should be set on fire...Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed....Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds".²¹  The Talmud itself was burned:  Pope Julius III ordered every copy destroyed in 1553.³⁰  The friar who debated Nachmanides advised King Louis IX of France to enforce the badge that Jews were made to wear.⁸  Brown's summary:  "Two thousand years ago, the cross brought reproach because it represented the ultimate scandal to the Jews: The Messiah died a criminal's death!  For the last 1500 years, the cross has brought reproach because of a different scandal: The Church has often led a criminal life!"²¹

Brown's own book of answers concedes the charge before replying:  "It is true that many false followers of Jesus have hated and persecuted the Jewish people and that many true followers of Jesus have been stained with an ugly anti-Semitic spirit, thereby making a mockery of the very faith they profess.  This is tragic and reprehensible."²  The Christian reply is that this record condemns the persecutors by Jesus' own words ("Love your enemies", Matthew 5:44), not Jesus.  That is true, and it is also the reply every religion gives for its worst followers.  The same standard has to be applied the other way.  The Talmud's harshest lines about Jesus, such as Gittin 57a, were written by rabbis answering a church that would later burn their books, and Part 6 asks readers not to read those lines as the measure of Judaism.  Brown applies the same standard from the Christian side.  He calls the medieval Jewish literature that vilified Jesus "a bastard, a magician, an idol worshiper, and an arch deceiver" a "lasting shame", grants that "some of this was written as a result of the despicable actions of so-called Christians", and concludes that "it has been a vicious cycle".²  Christians should not ask for a charity they refuse to give.

Verdict:  the persecution record is real, it is the main reason most Jews never consider Jesus, and it has one logical bite.  It says nothing about whether Jesus rose from the dead.  But it does count against one Christian claim:  Justin's argument that Isaiah's age of peace had begun among Christians, who "have each through the whole earth changed our warlike weapons,--our swords into ploughshares".¹⁵  Nachmanides answered that claim with eleven centuries of evidence, and history since has not helped Justin.

Part 6: What the Talmud says about Jesus

The Babylonian Talmud names "Yeshu ha-Notzri", Jesus the Nazarene, in about half a dozen places.  Most of them were cut from printed editions in the sixteenth century.  The Christian printer Daniel Bomberg needed papal approval to print the Talmud, and his censorship "was meant to remove all disparaging passages about Jesus".³⁰  Jewish authorities later kept the cuts themselves.  A rabbinic letter from Poland in 1631 ordered printers to leave out anything "which relates whether for good or evil to the acts of Jesus the Nazarene, and to substitute instead a circle like this 'O'".³⁰  The passages survive in manuscripts, above all the Munich manuscript of 1343, and modern editions such as Sefaria's print them again.³⁰

The passages

The table follows the William Davidson translation on Sefaria, checked against the Aramaic.³¹  Two cautions apply.  First, the Davidson English adds explanation in plain type around the translation in bold, and in Avodah Zarah 27b the words "a disciple of Jesus the Nazarene" are only the translators' gloss.³¹  Second, Shabbat 104b never says "Yeshu".  Scholars tie ben Stada to Jesus because Sanhedrin 67a says ben Stada too was hanged on the eve of Passover.³⁰

The Gittin story, which is the one most often quoted, runs like this.  Onkelos, a nephew of the emperor Titus, wants to become a Jew.  He raises three dead enemies of Israel to ask their advice.  Titus tells him to fight the Jews.  Balaam tells him "You shall not seek their peace or their welfare".  Jesus tells him the opposite:  "Their welfare you shall seek, their misfortune you shall not seek".  Asked his own punishment, Jesus answers that he is punished "with boiling excrement", because "Anyone who mocks the words of the Sages will be sentenced to boiling excrement".  The Talmud then draws its lesson:  "see the difference between the sinners of Israel and the prophets of the nations of the world."³¹  So the story is harsh, and it is also more complicated than the anti-Jewish websites that quote it admit.  It ranks Jesus as a sinner of Israel who wished his people well, against a gentile prophet who wished them harm.

Two scholarly readings

Peter Schäfer, a Princeton historian of ancient Judaism, wrote the standard modern study, Jesus in the Talmud (2007).  He accepts that most of these passages really mean Jesus, against the older minimalist view of Johann Maier.  But he denies that they preserve memory of the historical Jesus.  "The most explicit Jesus passages (those passages that deal with him as a person) appear only in the Babylonian Talmud and can be dated, at the earliest, to the late third—early fourth century C.E."⁶  They are "deliberate and highly sophisticated counternarratives to the stories about Jesus' life and death in the Gospels", built on "a detailed knowledge of the New Testament, in particular of the Gospel of John".⁶  What matters, he argues, is where they were written, not when.  Jews in Persian Babylonia lived outside Christian rule and could say what Jews in Christian Palestine could not.⁶  Read together, the Babylonian texts "become a daring and powerful counter-Gospel to the New Testament in general and to John in particular."⁶

Each story answers a Christian claim.  The illegitimate birth answers the virgin birth and the Davidic line;  in Schäfer's words it "posits that the whole idea of Jesus' Davidic descent, his claim to be the Messiah, and ultimately his claim to be the son of God, are based on fraud."⁶  The charge of sorcery answers the miracles.  The trial answers the claim that he was innocent:  "We, the Jews, he argues, have put him on trial and executed him for what he was".  Schäfer notes that the rabbis "were certainly aware" that Jesus was crucified, not stoned, and that the stoning is "precisely the core of their polemical counternarrative".⁶  The punishment in boiling excrement answers the resurrection and inverts Jesus' own teaching that food does not defile.⁶

David Instone-Brewer, a specialist in rabbinic texts at Tyndale House, Cambridge, agrees that "The censored passages are almost all late anti-Christian polemics."³⁰  He dissents on one passage.  He argues that the trial tradition in Sanhedrin 43a was already being debated as an authoritative text by rabbis in the early third century, so it "must have become fixed by at least the end of the Second Century."³⁰  He separates an early core, "On the Eve of Passover they hung Jesus of Nazareth for sorcery and leading Israel astray", from later explanations such as the forty-day herald.³⁰  His reason for thinking the core is old:  a Jewish storyteller would not invent a trial on a festival eve, a method of execution the Torah does not prescribe, and a charge of sorcery that implies real wonders.  He concludes that "the simplest solution is that this tradition originates from the actual charge sheet for the trial of Jesus."³⁰  He says plainly that this is a minority view:  "Most scholars dismiss its historical value".³⁰

What the passages show, and what they do not

1. They take for granted that Jesus lived, taught, had disciples and was executed by authority. No rabbinic text suggests he was invented. That fits the case made in Jesus Mythicism, which rates Sanhedrin 43a as worthless for details but telling for what Jewish opponents never disputed.
2. They call his deeds sorcery rather than deny them. The same charge appears in Mark 3:22 ("by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils") and in Justin Martyr around AD 155: "they dared to call Him a magician, and a deceiver of the people."¹⁵ A charge of magic concedes that something happened which needed explaining. It does not show what happened.
3. They do not give independent evidence for any Gospel detail. If Schäfer is right, the Babylonian stories were written from the Gospels, so their agreements with the Gospels prove nothing. The eve-of-Passover date matches John alone, which is what dependence on John would predict.⁶ Even on Instone-Brewer's early dating, the 43a core is a hostile charge sheet recorded more than a century after the event.
4. Their chronology is confused. Sanhedrin 107b makes Jesus a student of Yehoshua ben Perachya, who fled King Yannai. Yannai "ruled from 103 until 76 B.C.E."⁶ That puts Jesus about a century too early, so whatever lies behind that story is not dated memory.
5. They are not a fair basis for judging Jews today. These passages fill a few columns of a very long work, a share Schäfer calls "the proverbial drop of water in the ocean".⁶ They were written by rabbis in Persia who were answering a church that, in the following centuries, burned the Talmud. Pope Julius III ordered every copy burned in 1553.³⁰ A Christian who quotes Gittin 57a to show what "the Jews" think of Jesus is using a polemical story out of its setting, which is what this article asks no one to do to the Gospels.

Part 7: The covenant

Jeremiah 31:31–34 is the one Hebrew Bible passage that speaks of a "new covenant".  "Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:  Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers".  Its content:  "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts".  Everyone "shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them", for "I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."  The next verses add that if the sun, moon and stars cease, "then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever" (31:35–36).

The Jewish reading.  The covenant is new in how it is kept, not in what it contains.  The law written on the heart is "my law", the Torah God already gave.  The medieval commentator David Kimhi (Radak) explains:  "Its newness is that it will be kept, and not broken like the covenant that b'nei Yisrael cut with God at Mount Sinai."²⁷  Troki makes the same point:  "the Almighty had not intended to issue a new law, but to impress His ancient divine law on their hearts, that it never should be forgotten throughout all time."¹⁰  Sigal adds that the passage names its partners, Israel and Judah, and that "There is nothing in Jeremiah's statement to suggest that the new covenant will contain any changes in the Law."¹¹  Tovia Singer adds that the promise is still in the future, since it is not yet true that everyone "knows the LORD":  "In short, the era of the new covenant has not yet arrived."¹⁴

The Christian reading.  Jesus at the Last Supper calls his cup "the new testament in my blood" (Luke 22:20), using the same word as Jeremiah.  The letter to the Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31:31–34 in full and concludes:  "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old.  Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13).  Justin went further:  "law placed against law has abrogated that which is before it, and a covenant which comes after in like manner has put an end to the previous one".¹⁵

Michael Brown, a Messianic Jew who keeps much of the Torah, reads the covenant as inward renewal rather than replacement.  He writes that "once the law of love is written on our hearts, by nature, we will not sin against our fellow man", and that "That was part of the Messianic promise of the new covenant, spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet (Jer. 31:31-34)".¹⁸

Verdict:  on Jeremiah's own words the Jewish reading is stronger, and the strongest Christian reading is narrower than Justin's.  The new covenant is made "with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah", and its law is God's law written on the heart.  Nothing in the passage says the Torah's commandments will end, and verses 35–36 tie Israel's existence as a nation to the sun and the moon.  A Christian reading that the covenant passed from Israel to the church contradicts those verses, and contradicts Paul, who wrote of Israel that "the gifts and calling of God are without repentance" (Romans 11:29).  What a Christian can fairly argue is that the passage promises something the Sinai covenant did not deliver, a forgiven people who know God from the heart, and that this is what Jesus' death and the giving of the Spirit began.  Hebrews' "ready to vanish away" is the author's inference about the sacrificial system, not something Jeremiah says, and Jewish readers are right to say so.

One Jewish charge against Hebrews does not hold.  Singer writes that in Hebrews 8:9, "while 'quoting' Jeremiah, the Christian author changed a most crucial word".¹⁴  The Hebrew of Jeremiah 31:32 ends "although I was an husband unto them";  Hebrews has "and I regarded them not".  But Hebrews is quoting the Septuagint, the Greek translation Jews made before Christianity, which already reads "καὶ ἐγὼ ἠμέλησα αὐτῶν", "and I disregarded them".²⁵  The difference is the Jewish translator's, not a Christian's.

How the church has read Israel's future is the subject of Eschatology and Israel.

Part 8: The same standard both ways

Both sides of this debate have used bad arguments for a long time.  A reader who wants the truth should drop them all, starting with the ones that help his own side.

Where Jewish critics are right about Christian readings

Christian scholars themselves grant most of these.

1. Isaiah 7:14 does not, in its own setting, predict a virgin birth. The Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, in the standard commentary on the birth stories: "In summary, the MT of Isa 7:14 does not refer to a virginal conception in the distant future. The sign offered by the prophet was the imminent birth of a child, probably Davidic, but naturally conceived".²³ The evangelical Craig Blomberg agrees that "most recognize that there is at least a provisional fulfillment in Isaiah's day, given the explicit statements of 7:15-16".²⁴ What both defend is a second, fuller sense that Matthew saw, which Blomberg calls "double fulfillment".²⁴
2. Hosea 11:1 is about Israel. Blomberg: "Hosea 11:1 is a reference to the exodus, pure and simple."²⁴ Brown speaks of "the general inapplicability of the Hosean context to Jesus".²³ Matthew's use is typology, a pattern repeated, not a prediction fulfilled.
3. "He shall be called a Nazarene" quotes no known verse. Blomberg: "But no OT text ever declares that anyone will be called a Nazarene!"²⁴ Brown calls it "the most difficult formula citation in the Gospel since it is not indisputably related to an identifiable OT text."²³
4. Jeremiah 31:15, Rachel weeping, is not a prediction. Blomberg: "The text in Jeremiah is not a prediction, nor does it even use the future tense."²⁴
5. The prophets did not foresee the details. Brown goes further than many conservatives would: "there is no evidence that they foresaw with precision even a single detail in the life of Jesus of Nazareth."²³ Conservative scholars dispute how far that goes, but it is a Christian scholar's judgment, not a skeptic's.
6. "Pierced" in Psalm 22:16 is in no manuscript, and the Dead Sea scroll Christians cite for it dates from after the crucifixion, not before, a mistake that runs from Michael Brown's own book into popular apologetics. See Psalm 22.
7. Two popular claims about Isaiah 53 are false. Rashi did not invent the reading that the servant is Israel, since Origen met Jews who held it around AD 248. And "Targum Onkelos" contains no Isaiah at all. See Isaiah 53.
8. A famous Talmud quotation cannot be found. Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict quotes a "Rabbi Rachmon" who cried, "Woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah, and the Messiah has not come!"³² McDowell's source is an 1886 English translation of a book by M. M. Lémann, not a Talmud text. The sentence is not in Sanhedrin 37, where it is usually placed, nor in the Jerusalem Talmud's account of the lost jurisdiction, nor in the Talmud's main discussions of the Messiah.⁵ Until someone finds it in a rabbinic text, it should not be quoted.
9. The Talmud does not admit that the Messiah came. Its sayings that the appointed times have passed are admissions of delay (Part 2).
10. "Echad means a compound unity" and "no atonement without blood" do not hold as arguments from the Hebrew Bible (Part 3).
11. The charge that Jews cut prophecies out of their Bible is unproven. Justin made it around AD 155. One of his three examples, "I [was] like a lamb that is brought to the slaughter", which he says was cut from Jeremiah, is still at Jeremiah 11:19 in every Jewish Bible.¹⁵ Psalm 22:16 is not on his list at all. See Psalm 22.

Where Christian critics are right about counter-missionary arguments

1. Isaiah 53 was not always read as Israel. Early rabbinic texts mostly read the servant as an individual, and the Talmud names the Messiah from Isaiah 53:4. The Jewish scholars Brettler and Levine grant that "Early rabbinic texts generally understood the servant as an individual rather than as collective Israel."¹⁹ Maccoby notes that even Nachmanides did not claim that the Israel reading could be found in the Talmud or Midrash.⁸
2. "Christian theologians came centuries later and translated it as 'virgin'" is false. So writes the Aish article.¹³ The Greek parthenos at Isaiah 7:14 is in the Septuagint, which Jews made before Christianity. Raymond Brown calls it "a deliberate preference for understanding the young woman of Isa 7:14 as a virgin" by the Jewish translator in Alexandria.²³
3. Hebrews did not alter Jeremiah. It quoted the Septuagint (Part 7).
4. Vicarious atonement is not foreign to Judaism, as Moed Katan 28a and 4 Maccabees show (Part 3).
5. A messiah who dies, and even one who returns, is not unthinkable in Judaism. The Talmud's Messiah ben Yosef is killed. Sigal's own reading of Zechariah 12:10 has "the warrior Messiah who will die in battle" (Part 4). And David Berger has spent years arguing against a large Orthodox movement whose members hold that their dead Rebbe is the Messiah (Part 2).
6. "Christians changed the spelling" of Psalm 22:16 is false. Kaplan's booklet says that "fundamentalist Christian interpreters actually changed the spelling of the word from KeAri to Kari".¹² The reading with a waw is in a Jewish scroll from Nahal Hever and in medieval Jewish manuscripts, and neither side forged the text. See Psalm 22.

What the bad arguments show

Neither list decides the main question.  Matthew's typology does not prove that Jesus was not the Messiah;  it shows that Matthew did not argue the way a modern apologist argues from prediction.  And the counter-missionaries' mistakes do not make the job list any less unfulfilled.  The cleanest version of the debate leaves out every item above and turns on three things:  the job list, the nature of God, and whether Jesus rose from the dead.

Objections and responses

1. "Jesus failed like every other would-be messiah, so the Jews were simply right." Berger and Wyschogrod grant that the first century had "at least three or four 'Messiahs'", and add the one difference: "Unlike the other movements, the one started by Jesus survived its founder."¹ Why it survived is the question of the resurrection, not of prophecy. The other claimants and what became of their movements are tabulated in Was Jesus One of Many Would-Be Messiahs?. Movements that outlived failure are compared in The Resurrection Belief: Event or Process?, and the evidence for the resurrection is weighed in The Historical Case for the Resurrection.
2. "Prophecy proves nothing: both sides read old texts with hindsight." Largely agreed. Raymond Brown, a Christian scholar, says there is "no evidence that they foresaw with precision even a single detail in the life of Jesus of Nazareth."²³ This article's verdicts do not rest on any prediction. They rest on what the texts say in their own settings, and they leave the main question to history.
3. "The New Testament says the end would come within a generation, and it did not." The Jewish booklet The Real Messiah? presses this from Mark 13:30, "this generation shall not pass till all these things be done".¹² It is a real difficulty. Christians read the saying of the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, of the generation alive at the end, or of the Jewish people, and the readings are argued in Eschatology and Israel.
4. "The Messiah had to come while the Second Temple stood, and only Jesus fits." This is Michael Brown's strongest argument (Part 2). It depends on reading Haggai 2:9, Malachi 3:1 and Daniel 9:26 as messianic, and each has a Jewish reading that is not. Even granted, it shows only that a messiah was due before AD 70, and Berger and Wyschogrod count several first-century claimants.
5. "Judaism has had no atonement since the Temple fell." False as a claim about the Hebrew Bible and about Judaism (Part 3). Repentance, prayer and the Day of Atonement atone in rabbinic teaching, on the strength of verses such as Hosea 14:2 (14:3 in Hebrew) and Ezekiel 18:21–23.
6. "The Talmud shows that Jews hate Jesus." The Babylonian passages are polemic written in Persia by rabbis answering the Gospels, a few columns in a vast work, and some of them are harsher than others (Part 6). Michael Brown, a Christian, calls the cycle of polemic and persecution "vicious" on both sides.²
7. "The New Testament is the root of Christian antisemitism." The persecution record is real (Part 5), but this article does not settle how far the New Testament's own words caused it. Most of the New Testament was written by Jews about a dispute among Jews, and it forbids revenge (Romans 12:19). Later Christians who persecuted Jews went against those words. That defends the text, not the church.
8. "Most Jews rejected Jesus because God hardened them" (Romans 11). That may be true, but it persuades only someone who already accepts Paul. As an argument to a Jewish reader it assumes what is in dispute (Part 5).
9. "Christianity brought the knowledge of Israel's God to the nations, which is half the messianic age." Maimonides grants the fact and gives it a different meaning: God used Christianity and Islam to prepare the world for the true Messiah (Part 1). The fact is common ground, and the meaning depends on prior commitments.
10. "Judaism's own rule, that a killed messiah is no messiah, comes from Maimonides, not the Bible." Partly true. The rule is codified in the twelfth century. But it rests on the prophets' picture of a reigning king, and on Akiva's experience with Bar Kokhba, which Maimonides cites. The Talmud's Messiah ben Yosef shows that a slain messianic figure was discussed, but he is not the son of David who reigns.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Michael Brown's volumes 2 to 5 were not read. His Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus takes theological objections in volume 2, the messianic prophecies in volume 3, objections to the New Testament in volume 4, and traditional Jewish objections in volume 5. Only volume 1 is readable online, so his fullest answers on the Shema, Ezekiel 18, Isaiah 7:14 and Jeremiah 31 are represented here from his shorter books. A reader of volumes 2 and 3 may find stronger Christian replies than this article gives.
2. The date of the Sanhedrin 43a core is unsettled. Schäfer's late Babylonian dating is the majority view; Instone-Brewer's case for an early core is a serious minority view. Neither changes what the passage can show, since even an early core is a hostile charge sheet.
3. The source of the "Rabbi Rachmon" quotation is unknown. McDowell took it from Lémann's book of 1886, which was not obtained. It may come from a medieval Christian anthology rather than from any rabbinic text. It was searched only in the Talmud passages where it is usually placed.
4. Boyarin's thesis is contested. His argument that a divine Messiah was a Jewish expectation before Jesus rests heavily on the Similitudes of Enoch, whose date is disputed, and his "suffering Messiah" evidence leans on later rabbinic texts. Replies by other specialists were not read for this article.
5. What Nachmanides actually said at Barcelona is uncertain. Both accounts are partisan. Maccoby prefers the Jewish one but reports Baer's judgment that it too is propaganda, and he asks himself whether the sharpest words on the incarnation are "embroidery".
6. The uncensored text of Maimonides is taken from a modern edition. No manuscript of the Mishneh Torah was checked. A note in Chabad's English edition says that a second censored passage, in the laws of idolatry, originally named the "Romans" where printed texts say "Canaanites".³³ Sefaria's text reads "Canaanites",³⁴ and the note was not checked against a manuscript.
7. The Tosefta's "Jesus son of Pantera" depends on one manuscript reading. Schäfer's text has it, the printed Hebrew does not.
8. Daniel 9 is left to its own article. This article does not test the arithmetic of the seventy weeks. The site's Daniel 9 and When Was the Book of Daniel Written? take different emphases, and the second notes that on the critical reading the anointed one who is cut off is the high priest Onias III, murdered in 171 BC.
9. The date of 4 Maccabees is uncertain. If it was written after Jesus, its value as a witness to pre-Christian Jewish ideas of atonement is weaker, though the Talmud's "death of the righteous atones" still stands.
10. Errors noticed in sources and not used. Kaplan's booklet dates the Crusaders' entry into Jerusalem to 1215.¹² Michael Brown's first volume says the Crusade was "first launched in 1096" and then that "in the summer of 1096" the Crusaders took Jerusalem, which cannot both be true.² Neither date is used here. Sigal names Jehoiakim where Jeremiah 22:30 names Coniah, Jehoiakim's son.

Verdict

Judaism's case against Jesus is strong where it is narrow and weak where it is broad.

Its strongest argument is the plainest one.  The prophets describe a Messiah who restores Israel, rebuilds the sanctuary and brings peace to the nations, and Jesus did none of these in his lifetime.  The Christian answer, that he will do them when he returns, is ancient and coherent, and it finds real support in texts that show a suffering or slain figure:  Isaiah 53, Zechariah 12:10, Daniel 9:26, and the Talmud's own Messiah ben Yosef.  But no prophet says the Messiah will come twice, and a test that can be passed only in the future has not yet been passed.

The theological objections come down to what each reader already believes.  Judaism is right that the Hebrew Bible forgives the repentant without blood, and that Jeremiah's new covenant renews the Torah with Israel rather than replacing Israel.  Christianity is right that one person suffering for many is in Isaiah 53 and in rabbinic teaching, and that the idea of God appearing in human form is not foreign to the Torah.  Whether Jesus was God incarnate cannot be settled by proof-texts.

The verse-by-verse war is mostly a draw.  Christians should drop the readings their own scholars abandon:  Isaiah 7:14 as a plain prediction, Hosea 11:1, the "Nazarene" prophecy, "pierced" in Psalm 22, and quotations from the Talmud that no one can find.  Counter-missionaries should drop the claims that Christians invented the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14, that Hebrews altered Jeremiah, and that atonement through a righteous death or a dying messiah is foreign to Judaism.

The historical objections explain why Jews did not follow Jesus, and the church's persecution of the Jews is a record Christians should confess rather than explain away.  None of them shows that he was not the Messiah.

So the question reduces to one event.  If Jesus rose from the dead, the job list is unfinished, not failed, and the Christian reading of the suffering texts is vindicated.  If he did not, Maimonides' rule applies to him like every other claimant:  "If he did not succeed to this degree or was killed, he surely is not the redeemer promised by the Torah."³  The prophecies cannot decide between these, and this article does not pretend that they can.

Sources