There Is No End to the Perversion of Historical Truth

Anyone who has followed my writing about the problems of defining terms like “Jew” and “Judaism” knows that I take that discussion seriously, and have some strong differences of opinion with other scholars in the field.

Among the things I posit is that the Judaism championed by the sages of the Mishnah is a very different religion from the religion practiced by such well-known characters from the first century CE as Philo, Josephus, and Gamaliel.

In recent months, Amazon has bombarded me with publicity for a book they seem to think will interest me. The author is one Dr. Eitan Bar, the title of the book is Rabbinic Judaism Debunked. With a title like that, how could I not be intrigued?

To be fair, Dr. Bar makes no secret of his bias. He clearly labels himself a Christian. His attack on rabbinic Judaism is based entirely on his desire to deny credibility to Judaism and argue in favor of Christianity. And as a person born as a Jew, he falls securely into the group known as “Messianic Jews” or more familiarly, “Jews for Jesus.”

I began my own journey of debunking so-called Messianic Judaism almost 50 years ago when I was Associate Director of the Hillel Foundation at UC-Berkeley. San Francisco has some claim to being the birthplace of “Jews for Jesus” as the first ministry calling itself by that name was founded there by Moishe Rosen in 1978–coincidentally the first year of my employment at Hillel.

Rosen and I had a few encounters as he and his group attempted to use the Berkeley Hillel facility for his own church, and I (with the endorsement of the Director) prevented him from doing so. He complained that Jewish students should be allowed to congregate at Hillel and worship as they pleased, and I welcomed him to do so at any of the several dozen Christian churches nearby. Hillel is a place for Jewish students and all services held at Hillel conform to Jewish standards and principles. Acceptance of the Christian Bible and belief in Jesus as a divinity are not among those principles.

One of the hallmarks of the Jews for Jesus movement is a propensity to stretch the truth, and that is on full display in Bar’s book. If you look on the Amazon page, or click on Bar’s web site, you will be hard-pressed to learn how it is that Bar earned his doctorate. Most of us who have worked for that degree proudly provide the bona fides for it. For example, anyone can quickly discover my resume and know that my B.A. degree comes from the University of Wisconsin, my M.A. degree from UC-Berkeley, and my Ph.D. from the U of Tennessee. All secular institutions, all subscribing to rigorous academic standards. Dr. Bar, on the other hand, uses his title of “Dr.” wherever he lists his books, but says nothing about where that degree originated. As it turns out, all of his degrees were awarded by fundamentalist Christian schools. I found one place on the ‘Net where he mentions this, but I still haven’t found the names of the schools which awarded the degrees.

Dr. Bar uses some of the same arguments to “debunk” rabbinic Judaism that I use to explain how it does mark a major shift in religious beliefs from the era of Jesus. The funny thing about this is that he doesn’t seem to understand that Jesus, as he is portrayed in the Christian Bible, shared his basic religious beliefs with other Judeans of his era, and differed entirely from those Christians who later separated from Judean concepts and built their church along utterly different ideologies. In other words, to be even slightly honest about his use of terminology, he would have to “debunk” Christianity just as he “debunks” rabbinic Judaism. But he has no intention of being honest, his true goal is to convince people that Christianity is the only true religion, and in his mind, the end justifies the means.

The historical truth is not hard to discover. In 70 CE, the Roman state crushed the Judean movements which opposed its rule. They destroyed the Temple, and exiled Judeans from Jerusalem. Over the next several decades, it became increasingly clear to Judeans who still believed in the religion of Moses that it would no longer be possible to invoke those principles and worship in the way the Torah demanded because of its requirements to centralize worship in Jerusalem and its Temple.

Different factions of Judeans sought out and argued for other means of worshiping the God of Israel. Some followed the teachings of Jesus and were successful in drawing people of non-Judean background to those beliefs to add to the Judeans (like Paul) who were among the earliest Christians. Others continued congregating in synagogues and worshiping in ways we can only guess at. Others followed the sages of the Mishnah and created the basis for modern Judaism using arguments such as substitution theology; namely, that the ideals of Moses can be achieved by virtual reconstruction. For example, burning a small piece of a loaf of bread could substitute for the grain offering, or, a Passover meal with unleavened bread could substitute for the offering of a lamb on the Temple Mount. 

From the scholarly perspective, there is no need to “debunk” anything or discredit anyone. Both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism are authentic and respectable solutions to a colossal problem: how to deal with the absence of an entity the Torah describes in many places and in many ways as indispensable. What they share in common is that neither group can be said to be observing the requirements of that Torah as they are laid out in the Torah, they are each finding their own ways of coping with the new reality.