Messianic Judaism is a conspiracy by Christians to convert Jewish people to Christianity.
What is Messianic Judaism? In general, very general, it is the idea that you can be “Jewish” and still believe in Jesus as “the Messiah” as a Christian does. This article will discuss why this is impossible and why people still try to promote the idea.
There are two camps of “Messianic Judaism” with which we need to carefully delineate.
First let it be stated that all of the “original” Jewish people (ex. 1st century Jews, later, European Jews) who became “followers of Jesus” – as well as any Jewish person in the present day who converts to modern Christianity – are no longer considered a Jew by any group (including themselves). In general, “jews” who convert to Christianity are no longer considered Jewish – especially by Jewish law as discussed in the Bible itself.
By way of explanation, it would be wrong for us to assume that such a Jew would (for example) not necessarily keep the Sabbath or the laws of Kashrut. So let us assume that such a Jew was a Jew in all respects except that he believed the essential core tennet of Christianity “The Trinity” and that Jesus had to die for our sins. In such a case these people are already not Jewish because they have broken faith with the standard prescription for salvation found in the “Old Testament”. Ezekiel 18 (entire chapter) is a slam dunk refutation of this belief, in various forms.
Any further separation from the body of Jewish practice only serves to isolate such a Jew from the nation of Israel; ex. not worshipping on the Sabbath, but on Sunday:
or for example the mention/use of the name Jesus:
In a nutshell:
(Ex. 31:13–17, Ex. 23:12, Deut. 5:13–14), a rule that also applies to proselytes, and a sign respecting two events: the seventh day, during which God rested after having completed Creation in six days (Gen. 2:2–3, Ex. 20:8–11), and God's deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt (Deut. 5:12–15).
“Jews” who believe in “Jesus” are no longer part of the Jewish Community. The purpose of this section (part 1) is only to illustrate how a Jewish person, raised and educated in a Jewish community, will have a certain set of beliefs, from which he must convert in order to become a “messianic jew”; there is no extant group of “messianic” Jews which have existed through history, which have passed down a belief in Jesus. All of them, without exception, are converts.
I'll just conflate the historical section with the second camp, because there really isn't any history of a Jewish sect that believed in Jesus – such a “sect” is in fact “messianic judaism”, so presenting the history of this group will be sufficient to kill two birds with one stone.
It is an undeniable fact of history that “Messianic Judaism”, as a movement which still exists today, begins with the Hebrew Roots movement. Here are the facts:
In the 19th century, some groups attempted to create congregations and societies of Jewish converts to Christianity, though most of these early organizations were short-lived.[28] Early formal organizations run by converted Jews include: the Anglican London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews of Joseph Frey (1809),[29] which published the first Yiddish New Testament in 1821;[30][verification needed] the “Beni Abraham” association, established by Frey in 1813 with a group of 41 Jewish Christians who started meeting at Jews' Chapel, London for prayers Friday night and Sunday morning;[31] and the London Hebrew Christian Alliance of Great Britain founded by Dr. Carl Schwartz in 1866.[32]
The September 1813 meeting of Frey's “Beni Abraham” congregation at the rented “Jews' Chapel” in Spitalfields is sometimes pointed to as the birth of the semi-autonomous Hebrew Christian movement within Anglican and other established churches in Britain.[33] However, the minister of the chapel at Spitalfields evicted Frey and his congregation three years later, and Frey severed his connections with the Society.[34] A new location was found and the Episcopal Jew's Chapel Abrahamic Society registered in 1835.[35]
In Eastern Europe, Joseph Rabinowitz established a Hebrew Christian mission and congregation called “Israelites of the New Covenant” in Kishinev, Bessarabia, in 1884.[36][37][38] Rabinowitz was supported from overseas by the Christian Hebraist Franz Delitzsch, translator of the first modern Hebrew translation of the New Testament.[39] In 1865, Rabinowitz created a sample order of worship for Sabbath morning service based on a mixture of Jewish and Christian elements. Mark John Levy pressed the Church of England to allow members to embrace Jewish customs.[37]
In the United States, a congregation of Jewish converts to Christianity was established in New York City in 1885.[40] In the 1890s, immigrant Jewish converts to Christianity worshiped at the Methodist “Hope of Israel” mission on New York's Lower East Side while retaining some Jewish rites and customs.[41] In 1895, the 9th edition of Hope of Israel's Our Hope magazine carried the subtitle “A Monthly Devoted to the Study of Prophecy and to Messianic Judaism”, the first use of the term “Messianic Judaism”.[42][43] In 1894, Christian missionary Leopold Cohn, a convert from Judaism, founded the Brownsville Mission to the Jews in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York as a Christian mission to Jews. After several changes in name, structure, and focus, the organization is now called Chosen People Ministries.[44]
Missions to the Jews saw a period of growth between the 1920s and the 1960s.[4][45] In the 1940s and 1950s, missionaries in Israel, including the Southern Baptists, adopted the term meshichyim (משיחיים, 'messianics') to counter negative connotations of the word notsrim (נוצרים, 'Christians'). The term was used to designate all Jews who had converted to Protestant evangelical Christianity.[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_Judaism
The Messianic Jewish movement emerged in the United States in the 1960s.[6][46] Prior to this time, Jewish converts assimilated into gentile Christianity, as the church required abandoning their Jewishness and assuming gentile ways to receive baptism. Peter Hocken postulates that the Jesus movement which swept the nation in the 1960s triggered a change from Hebrew Christians to Messianic Jews, and was a distinctly charismatic movement. These Jews wanted to “stay Jewish while believing in Jesus”. This impulse was amplified by the results of the Six-Day War and the restoration of Jerusalem to Jewish control.[47][48][49] Foundational Messianic organizations
In 2004 there were 300 Messianic congregations in the United States with maybe half of their attendance being Gentiles and maybe one third of the congregations consisting of thirty or fewer members.[50] Many of these congregations belong to the International Association of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues (IAMCS), the Union of Messianic Congregations (UMJC), or Tikkun International.[citation needed]
The Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA) began in 1915 as the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America (HCAA).[citation needed] As the idea of maintaining Jewish identity spread in the late 1960s, the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America (HCAA) changed its name to the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA).[51] David Rausch writes that the change “signified far more than a semantical expression—it represented an evolution in the thought processes and religious and philosophical outlook toward a more fervent expression of Jewish identity.”[52] The MJAA was and still is an organization of individual Jewish members.[53] In 1986 the MJAA formed a congregational branch called the International Alliance of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues (IAMCS).[54]
In June 1979 nineteen congregations in North America met at Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania and formed the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations (UMJC).[55] (emphasis added)
“Tikkun International is a Messianic Jewish umbrella organization for an apostolic network of leaders, congregations and ministries in covenantal relationship for mutual accountability, support and equipping to extend the Kingdom of God in America, Israel, and throughout the world.”[56]Wikipedia, ibid.
Now that we have established that the Messianic Judaism movement is not Jewish per-se, we must consider the Jewish response to Messianic Judaism:
As in traditional Jewish objections to Christian theology, opponents of Messianic Judaism hold that Christian proof texts, such as prophecies in the Hebrew Bible purported to refer the Messiah's suffering and death, have been taken out of context and misinterpreted.[107] Jewish theology rejects the idea that the Messiah, or any human being, is a divinity. Belief in the Trinity is considered idolatrous by most rabbinic authorities. Even if considered shituf (literally, “partnership”)—an association of other individuals with the God of Israel—this is only permitted for gentiles, and that only according to some rabbinic opinions. It is universally considered idolatrous for Jews.[15][108][109] Further, Judaism does not view the role of the Messiah to be the salvation of the world from its sins, an integral teaching of Christianity[110] and Messianic Judaism.[11]
Jewish opponents of Messianic Judaism often focus their criticism on the movement's radical ideological separation from traditional Jewish beliefs, stating that the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah creates an insuperable divide between the traditional messianic expectations of Judaism, and Christianity's theological claims.[111] They state that while Judaism is a messianic religion, its messiah is not Jesus,[112] and thus the term is misleading.[16] All denominations of Judaism, as well as national Jewish organizations, reject Messianic Judaism as a form of Judaism.[14][113] Regarding this divide, Reconstructionist Rabbi Carol Harris-Shapiro observed: “To embrace the radioactive core of goyishness—Jesus—violates the final taboo of Jewishness.…Belief in Jesus as Messiah is not simply a heretical belief, as it may have been in the first century; it has become the equivalent to an act of ethno-cultural suicide.”[114]
B'nai Brith Canada considers messianic activities as antisemitic incidents.[115] Rabbi Tovia Singer, founder of the anti-missionary organization Outreach Judaism, noted of a Messianic rabbi in Toledo: “He's not running a Jewish synagogue.…It's a church designed to appear as if it were a synagogue and I'm there to expose him. What these irresponsible extremist Christians do is a form of consumer fraud. They blur the distinctions between Judaism and Christianity in order to lure Jewish people who would otherwise resist a straightforward message.”[116]
Association by a Jewish politician with a Messianic rabbi, inviting him to pray at a public meeting, even though made in error, resulted in nearly universal condemnation by Jewish congregations in Detroit in 2018,[117][118] as the majority opinion in both Israeli and American Jewish circles is to consider Messianic Judaism as Christianity and its followers as Christians.[119] ibid.
It is important to note that in general, the MJAA and similar organizations do not deny the above;
Though Messianic Judaism itself dates back to Yeshua’s twelve apostles, its “resurrection” is a relatively new phenomenon.
In the late 1800s, after several large-scale “revivals” among protestant believers in the United States and Europe, many Christians sought to tell Jewish people about Yeshua, or Jesus. Even as some Jewish people in Europe began to desire to return to the land of Israel and establish a permanent Jewish homeland there, the Lord stirred many Jews to look at the so-called “Christian Bible,” or New Testament Scriptures, for themselves. […] In the following decades whole congregations of Jewish believers in Jesus were born. This movement was dubbed “Hebrew Christianity.”
“Hebrew Christianity” has since become known as “Messianic Judaism.” There are now tens of thousands of Messianic Jews in the United States alone; some estimate as many as 1.2 million.https://mjaa.org/messianic-movement/
Messianic Judaism, without exception, is a Christian creation and is not Jewish.