Issue 2

ONE16 is the theological journal of Christian Witness to Israel.

Christian Witness to Israel is an international, interdenominational evangelical Christian mission to Israel the people. Our basis of faith is the consensus of the historic Protestant Confessions.

Christian Witness to Israel exists to share the Good News of Jesus with the Jewish people, to relieve the poor and sick, to make the Church aware of its spiritual and material debt to the Jews and to oppose anti-Semitism.

CHRISTIAN WITNESS TO ISRAEL166 Main Road, Sundridge, Sevenoaks, Kent TN14 6ELTel: 01959 565955Fax: 01959 565966Email:info@cwi.org.ukwww.cwi.org.ukwww.shalom.org.uk

A COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE REGISTERED IN ENGLAND NO. 1254746, CHARITY REG. NO 271323 & SC041720 IN SCOTLAND

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Visit CWI at www.youtube.com/CWI1842 to watch our new video series entitled The Jews and You in which CWI General Secretary Mike Moore examines the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people.

The Jews and You...

ONE16 Issue 2Table of Contents:

First Things:Confused Signals 3

ONE16 Vision:A Divine Madness 4 Connections:Aye, Claudius; 12Ideas worth considering 16

Contending:A most urgent agenda 17

Orthodoxy:Chabad and the Resurrected Messiah 23

Old School:Charles Simeon; How then should we pray?; He loveth our nation 25

The Old Paths:The Restoration of the Jewish Nation 28

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In certain evangelical circles, those who view the state of Israel positively and have a concern for the salvation of the Jewish people are regarded as being on the lunatic fringe of the Church. I preached some years ago at a respected Reformed church in the UK and although I had not dealt with the issue of Israel in my morning sermon, after the service I was grilled by a group of church members about my views on the Jewish state. The starting point of the discussion was that ‘intelligent’ Christians no longer hold that the events of May 1948 were divinely ordained. In another instance, a friend of mine was told at his university Christian Union that the idea of Jewish evangelism sounded ‘dodgy’.

In the nineteenth century, love for the Jewish people was far from being the domain of crackpots. In fact, 200 years ago it was difficult to find any British Calvinists who were not positive about the Jews. In the previous century, most British and American Puritans were proto-Zionists, believing that the Scriptures foretold a return of the Jews to their ancient homeland where they would return to their God and his Messiah.

In 1948, when the modern state of Israel was founded, there were twelve Jewish Christians in the land. Twenty years later, in 1968, there were less than fifty and they all knew each other. In 1988, around the time I first visited the land, Jewish believers numbered around 500 and, apart from one or two brave souls, they were keeping a low profile. Today, 25 years later, no one knows how many Messianic Jews there are in Israel. Estimates range from 11,000 to 20,000. Every town and village in Israel has at least one indigenous Messianic congregation. There are Messianic

publishing houses (including CWI’s HaGefen Publishing), there are Bible colleges that provide a high standard of theological education, there is a national evangelistic committee and a number of internationally known preachers and teachers. Moreover, a number of Israeli congregations, notably Chesed ve Emet (Grace and Truth) congregation pastored by CWI’s field leader David Zadok, are decidedly and unashamedly Reformed in their doctrine.

In the Diaspora, the increase of Jewish believers in Jesus has been so great that anti-missionary Rabbi Tovia Singer claimed some fifteen years ago that more Jews had become Christians in the previous twenty years than in the previous twenty centuries.

This issue of ONE16 has an emphasis, once again, on Jewish mission. A Divine Madness is the second and concluding part of a biblical examination of the ‘Jew first’ principle of Rom. 1:16, demonstrating that the principle ‘to the Jew first’ is far from arbitrary; there is a divine method in what might appear to us to be a madness.

In the post-apostolic period, the ‘Jew first’ principle was quickly forgotten or neglected as the Church adopted a theology of contempt for the Jewish people, labelling them as killers of Christ and the spawn of the devil. The Jews have a long collective memory, and the history of Church anti-Semitism in both the Catholic and Protestant branches remains a major barrier to Jews coming to faith in Jesus. Nevertheless, in an astonishing way, as Martin Pakula reveals in his article on page 15, in every generation from the first century to the present there have been Jews who believe in Jesus.

The excerpt from John Ross’s acclaimed Time for Favour: Scottish Missions to the Jews 1838-1852 on page 12 focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which some of the greatest evangelical minds from Jonathan Edwards to Charles Simeon expressed a positive attitude to the Jewish people and a zeal for Jewish mission. In the nineteenth century, Christians across the evangelical spectrum, but especially those on the Reformed wing, were at the forefront of Jewish mission. It is remarkable that the newly-founded Free Church of Scotland, while coping with the significant administrative and logistical adjustments that were necessary following its break away from the Church of Scotland, took up the responsibility for the Jewish mission the mother church had founded.

What is more remarkable, however, is that as the hopes of eighteenth and nineteenth century Reformed visionaries have come to pass in the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland and, more importantly, their return to their God and his Messiah, an increasing number of their spiritual descendants have embraced the Roman Catholic model of an Israel cast off by their God. How curious, then, that as the state of Israel approaches retirement age expressing no sign that it is ready to be pensioned off, and as more and more Jews turn to Jesus, an increasing number of evangelical voices are claiming that God has finished with Israel. If they are right, the God who ‘is not the author of confusion’ is sending out some very confusing signals.

Yours for the salvation of Israel,

Mike MooreGeneral SecretaryChristian Witness to Israel

Confused SignalsFirst things

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At the time of his conversion Saul was commissioned to bear Messiah’s name before Gentiles and their kings and the Jews.3 However, it was not until after Saul and Barnabas had served the church in Antioch for a number of years that, at the urging of the Holy Spirit, the church in Antioch officially set them apart for the work to which Saul had been called.4

In the accounts of Paul’s missionary journeys, however, there appears to be an incongruity between his calling to be the apostle to the Gentiles and his adopted strategy for fulfilling that call: ‘They sailed to Cyprus. And when they arrived in Salamis they preached the word of God in the synagogues’.5 At Antioch in Pisidia, Saul and Barnabas attended the synagogue where they proclaimed the necessity of the Word of God being preached to the Jews first.6 At Iconium Saul and Barnabas went once again to the synagogue before preaching to the Greeks.7 Even in Athens, the centre of Gentile culture and learning, where Paul was greatly distressed to see the blatant idolatry of the Greeks,

he first ‘reasoned in the synagogue’.8

Whatever other sins the Athenian Jews might have been guilty of, it is hardly likely that the worship of idols was one of them. Nevertheless, Luke links Paul’s reaction to Athenian idolatry to his reasoning in the synagogue: Paul was disturbed by the idolatry, ‘therefore he reasoned in the synagogue’.9

Having established that the apostle to the Gentiles habitually took the saving message of Yeshua to the Jews first, we must ask what motivated him to do so. Was there madness in his method? Or was there method in his madness?

It must be said, first of all, that Paul’s mission strategy was not motivated by a misguided ultra-nationalistic loyalty or patriotism. The apostle to the Gentiles was a man of strong emotions, as he reveals in Rom. 9:1-4, but his heart never ruled his head. He was ‘not disobedient to the heavenly vision’.10 More noble reasons dictated his seemingly inconsistent methodology.

Neither did Paul preach in the synagogues because they were ‘the churches of the day’. When the apostle arrived in Rome, a church already existed. He had previously written to the Roman church to tell them how much he longed to see them and that Rome was high on his list of places to visit in the cause of the gospel. Although a welcoming party from the church at Rome went out to meet him unbidden at Appii Forum and Three Inns11, when Paul reached Rome his first recorded act was to call the rulers of the synagogue together, not the elders of the church.12

At any rate, Paul was no pragmatist. His missiology was primarily biblical and theological. If his approach was in any way pragmatic, it was because Jewish mission carried divinely ordained practical consequences. What biblical considerations, then, motivated the apostle to the Gentiles to take the gospel consistently to the Jew first?

In the first issue of ONE16,1 Mike Moore established that until Saul and Barnabas were set

apart for Gentile mission by the church in Antioch, apostolic evangelism was carried out almost

exclusively among Jewish communities. Here he continues to look at how, with the calling of

Saul, the great commission to proclaim repentance and remission of sins among all nations2

began in earnest.

A divine ?Why did Paul go to the Jews when he had been sent to the Gentiles?

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God’s loveI used to be a pastor and there was in one of my congregations a college lecturer who was also an ordained minister of the Church of the Nazarene. Theologically, we were in some respects poles apart. Ray was a firm Arminian and I a convinced Calvinist but we respected each other’s positions and I went out of my way to avoid doctrinal dust-ups with him. But when Ray told me the Bible made it ‘absolutely clear’ that God loves every human being equally, I interpreted that as the throwing down of a gauntlet. Although Ray stuck to his guns when I asked how he understood Malachi 1:2f: ‘Jacob I have loved; but Esau I have hated’, he had to admit that he didn’t understand the verse.

God certainly loves the world but if words mean anything, the introductory verses to Malachi clearly indicate that God has a particular love for the Jewish people. The teaching of God’s special love for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is evident throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. In Deut. 7:6-10a God explicitly declares his unconditional love for Israel for the first time:

For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the LORD loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Therefore know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations

with those who love Him and keep His commandments; and He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them.

Nowhere in the Bible is the love of God for the Jewish people declared with as much passion as in the book of Hosea, where God declares his eternal, undying love for the idolatrous, unfaithful nation of Israel.

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred. I will not execute the fierceness of My anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim. For I am God, and not man, the Holy One in your midst; and I will not come with terror.13

Admah and Zeboiim were cities of the plain that God destroyed in spite of Abraham’s pleas. Would God destroy Israel in the same way? If not, why not? Because the Lord had a special love for Israel.14

In Jer. 31:20, immediately before God declares he will establish a New Covenant with ‘the house of Israel and the house of Judah’, he says: ‘Is Ephraim My dear son? Is he a pleasant child? For though I spoke against him, I earnestly remember him still; therefore My heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him.’

The fact that the gospel is ‘to the Jew first’ means Israel continues to enjoy favoured nation status with God. God still loves the Jewish people and because of that particular love he desires the Jewish people to have the privilege of hearing the gospel before others. And because God has a special love for the Jewish people, Gentile Christians who claim God as their Father should have a special place in their hearts for the Jews and do all they can to assist gospel work among them.

In his famous sermon on Rom. 1:16, Our Duty to Israel, Robert Murray M’Cheyne rhetorically asked, ‘Should we not share with God in His peculiar affection for Israel? If we are filled with the Spirit of God, should we not love as he loves? Should we not grave Israel upon the palms of our hands, and resolve that through our mercy they also may obtain mercy?’15

God’s covenantIsrael is the only nation in the world that exists by divine decree for the benefit of the rest of mankind. When God called Abram in Gen. 12:1-3, it was with a view to all the families of the earth being blessed. In Gen. 12:7, God extended the promise of the first three verses by assigning to Abram’s ‘seed’ a particular area of land, part of which we today call ‘Israel’. But Abram wanted assurance that the God who had called him from his native country would keep his promise and not renege on his pledge.

Gen. 15 starts ten years after God had promised ‘seed’ and land to Abram; ten years in which no sign had been apparent that the promise was near to being fulfilled. Abram and Sarai were already old when the original promises

ONE16 Vision

If we are filled with the

Spirit of God, should we

not love as he loves?

Should we not grave Israel

upon the palms of our

hands, and resolve that

through our mercy they also

may obtain mercy?

Robert Murray M’Cheyne

6 • ONE16

were given and they were not getting any younger. Abram was desperate for some confirmation that God would and could keep his promise. How could he know? The evidence God supplied was so remarkable that Abram would never again waver in his faith.

God entered into a covenant with Abram. He instructed him to take a three-year old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle-dove and a young pigeon, and to cut them in two. Then, in the form of a ‘smoking furnace’ and a ‘fiery torch’, God passed between the pieces, declaring to Abram that he would give the land to his seed.

The scene, bizarre though it appears to us, was familiar enough to Abram. In the ancient Middle East powerful kings often entered into covenants with weaker kings, promising them protection in return for the payment of a certain number of camels, asses and other livestock, or for an agreed number of slaves, or for the regular payment of a set sum. To ratify and seal the covenant, the kings offered sacrifices to their respective gods and walked between the sacrificial carcasses, swearing by the names of their gods that they would be faithful to the stipulations of the treaty into which they were entering.

The parties of the treaty would call down curses on themselves should they default on the agreement, saying something like: ‘May the gods do to me and more also if I fail to keep all the words of this covenant.’ Similar oaths can be found in several Old Testament texts, including 1 Kings 20:10 and 2 Kings 6:31. In I Kings 19:2, Israel’s pagan queen Jezebel vowed to kill Elijah in the names of her gods: ‘So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.’ Elijah recognised that Jezebel meant

business and immediately put as much distance as possible between himself and the queen.

We find a reference to the practice of walking between the carcasses of sacrificial offerings in Jer. 34:18-20: ‘I will give the men who have transgressed My covenant, who have not performed the words of the covenant which they made before Me, when they cut the calf in two and passed between the parts of it . . . I will give them into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of those who seek their life. Their dead bodies shall be for meat for the birds of the heaven and the beasts of the earth.’

The remarkable feature of the covenant in Gen. 15 is that God alone – in the forms of a smoking oven and a firebrand – passed down the grisly avenue. In Deut. 4:24, God declares himself to be a ‘consuming fire’ and at times he appears in Scripture in the form of fire, as when he appears to Moses at the burning bush.16 When God established his covenant with Abram in Gen. 15 he appeared not only as a burning pot or oven but also as a blazing torch. To be legitimately ratified, the kind of covenant into which God entered with Abram required two parties to pass between the pieces and to take responsibility for

keeping the stipulations. Two parties did pass between the pieces but Abram was not one of them. Two members of the Godhead – no doubt the Father and the Son – entered into covenant to assure Abram that he would be granted ‘seed’ and land ‘from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates’. No obligations were laid on Abram; everything depended on God.17

The covenant to grant Abraham a ‘seed’ that would bless the nations and a land in perpetuity was unconditional. When Abram saw and heard God in the forms of a smoking oven and a firebrand pass between the sacrificial victims, he understood the implications. God had undertaken, if he failed to deliver on his promises, to be broken like the blood-soaked offerings he had passed between. Paul, a Jew who knew his Hebrew Scriptures, was fully aware of the unconditional covenant that undergirded Israel’s national calling to bless the nations, hence his unwavering commitment to preaching the gospel to the Jew first.

Tom Holland understands Romans 9-11 as Paul’s defence of Israel’s status. ‘Conscious of how crucial this issue is, he is concerned that the Gentile converts understand God’s purpose for his ancient people so that they can relate appropriately to them. However, behind Paul’s argument is a further concern: if God can cast off his ancient people who were bound to him by covenant, what security can there be for the new covenant community? Can God’s promises be taken seriously if he was able to abandon his people when they failed him?’18

This being so, it is essential then that there should always be Jewish disciples in the Body of Messiah. If there should ever come a time when no evident ‘remnant according to the election of grace’ remains in the Church, the conclusion one could draw would be

The apostle was aware

that Israel’s calling

was to be ‘a light to the

Gentiles’. The Scriptures

had been given to them

in order that they might

spread God’s truth

among the nations.

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that God had cast off the Jewish people. And if God could cast off his covenant people, what guarantee can any Gentile Christian have, bearing in mind our own failure to match up to our high calling, that God will not break his covenant with us? Therefore it is of the utmost importance that particular care be taken to accord the Jewish people a primary place in the Church’s mission to the nations.

Israel’s callInGPaul was not only a great theologian, he was also a man of action. His strategy for the efficient accomplishing of his missionary calling to the Gentiles was carefully thought out. When writing to the Romans, he shared with them that he had a long-term plan, which included an ambition to reach Spain.19

The apostle was aware that Israel’s calling was to be ‘a light to the Gentiles’.20 The Scriptures were entrusted to the Jews so that, by walking in the light of God’s truth, they might draw the nations to that light. In any given locality, if Paul could win the synagogue the Jews would then begin to function fully as God’s light to the Gentile community around them. The apostle could then move to the next city leaving the Gentile converts to be nurtured by those who already possessed a knowledge of the Word of God.

Evidence for this line of thought can be seen in the difference between Paul’s evangelistic approach to the Jews and his method of evangelising the Gentiles. In the synagogue he reasons from the Scriptures but when disputing with the Athenian philosophers Paul quotes from the Greek poets and appeals to the common sense of the Areopagites.21 To have presented proof texts from the Hebrew Scriptures to the Greeks would have been a fruitless exercise inasmuch as the pagan Greeks did not acknowledge the authority of the

Jewish holy books. In his synagogue discourses, Paul’s primary appeal was to the Hebrew Bible. Moses and the Prophets were read and the Psalms were sung every week in the Jewish assemblies. Making Jewish mission a priority ensured that the congregations Paul founded included members who were familiar with the Scriptures and could teach the Gentile converts. When Paul later wrote to those congregations, he could assume his readers possessed some familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures or at least that there were Jewish teachers who could explain his quotations and allusions. Former pagans who were part of the Church would derive their familiarity with the Bible from their fellow converts among the Jews.

There is a common presumption that until the death of the apostles and/or the completion of the New Testament canon, the earliest Christian congregations were ‘established’ through the charismatic gifts of tongues, interpretation and prophecy.22 The reasoning goes something like this:

Question: How could the early churches have been established and how could they have remained faithful to Christ without a complete New Testament? From what source did the teaching in the early New Covenant congregations originate?

Answer: From the charismatic gifts of tongues, interpretation and prophecy.

The presumption is fraught with major difficulties. First of all, it assumes the Old Testament Scriptures are inadequate as a source for Christian truth and that until the New Testament canon was complete Christian doctrine had to be conveyed by means of supernatural revelations. Even after the New Testament books had been written, very few of the

early Christian assemblies would have possessed a complete copy of even one of the Gospels, let alone a full set of apostolic epistles. It is difficult to see what benefit the completion of the New Testament would confer if the vast majority of Christians had no access to it.

The Scriptures of the early Church were those we know as the Old Testament. According to Paul, those Scriptures contain all that is necessary to lead us to faith in Messiah.23 Because the New Covenant congregations began in the first century synagogues of the ancient Middle East and Europe, Jewish believers had access to all the books of the Old Testament in the local synagogue. When Luke recorded that the Berean Jews ‘searched the Scriptures daily’ to check out Paul’s message,24 he did not intend his readers to imagine that each evening the members of the Berean synagogues spent their evenings at home with a copy of the Bible and a concordance. ‘Searching the Scriptures’ for the Berean Jews would have been a collective and collaborative effort at the Beit Hamidrash, the ‘house of study’, searching through the scrolls – the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings – to see if Paul’s claim that ‘Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead’ was true.

These Jewish students of Scripture would have been in a position to instruct and teach Gentile converts to the faith. Jewish believers were able to fulfil the nation’s calling to be a light to the Gentiles.

A future dimension to this principle becomes apparent in Rom. 11: ‘For if their being cast away is the reconciling of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?’ However one interprets Paul’s statement, there can be no doubt that Paul believed the conversion of Israel would benefit the Gentiles.25

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The great nineteenth century evangelical leader Charles Simeon was convinced of the relevance of Rom. 11:15 for Jewish mission. Edward Bickersteth, a former Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, was once at a missionary meeting at which Simeon was the speaker. Towards the end of his speech, Simeon stated that the meeting that day was ‘for the furtherance of the most important object in the world, viz., the conversion of the Jews.’ When Simeon sat down Bickersteth, whose major concern was for mission among the heathen world, ‘wrote on a slip of paper—eight million Jews, eight hundred million heathens, which of these is the most important? This paper he handed to Simeon, who at once turned it over and wrote on the other side: Yes, but if the eight million Jews are to be as “life from the dead” to the eight hundred million heathens, what then?’26 Simeon’s reply made a profound impact on Bickersteth and his passion for Jewish mission ultimately surpassed his zeal for the evangelism of the heathen.

At the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, Paul declared that his gospel ministry was a fulfilment of Israel’s calling: ‘Then Paul and Barnabas grew bold and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; but since you reject it, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have set you as a light to the Gentiles, that you should be for salvation to the ends of the earth’. ” ’27

Paul was quoting from Isaiah 49:6, a verse in the third of the prophet’s ‘Servant Songs’ in which the nation of Israel, God’s servant, is represented by a single righteous individual. In his epistles, Paul terms himself a servant (Gk: doulos) of God, Doulos was the common Greek term for a slave and it is common among New Testament commentators to interpret Paul’s self-designation as an

indication of his humility. Tom Holland, however, has convincingly pointed out that Paul never thought in Greco-Roman terms; his entire frame of reference was Hebraic.28 In the Septuagint (LXX), the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the words doulos and pais are used interchangeably to describe servants from domestic workers to the kings as servants of the Lord. The New Testament follows the practice of the Septuagint, using the two words interchangeably.

Paul, as a servant of God and Christ, was an imitator of Christ and in his ministry filled up what remained of the sufferings of Christ.29 The fact that he quotes a messianic text to describe his ministry indicates that he saw his role as the doulos of Messiah as an exalted office.

Holland identifies ‘a fundamental error in the understanding of scholars regarding the use and meaning of doulos in the New Testament. The traditional Hellenistic setting in which doulos is set [is] inadequate to explain the theological implications which surround its use. A Semitic setting, however, proves itself authentic for interpreting many of the concepts where Paul has allegedly been lacking in clarity. Paul, nor indeed any Christian, is not a slave of Christ, but is a servant with all the dignity and privileges that such a calling carries.’30

The doulos of Isaiah 49:6 (LXX) is the Messianic servant of God who represents the nation. The verse echoes 42:6: ‘I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles. . .’ If a few first century Jews acting out the role of God’s doulos could turn the Mediterranean world ‘upside down’, what will be the effect when the nation turns back to God and becomes a ‘light to the Gentiles’? Paul provides the answer in Romans 11:15: it will be ‘life from the dead’.

PrIvIleGe and resPonsIbIlItyAnother cause of Paul’s seeming evangelistic madness must have been his understanding of the spiritual status of Israel. He writes in Romans 9:4-5, theirs is ‘the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God’. To take the gospel to Gentiles while ignoring the Jews would be to take the legal inheritance of a royal heir and distribute it to beggars. If the prince rejects his rightful riches, arrangements might be made to dispose of his inheritance in other ways but to give those riches to others first would be criminal.

It should be noted that, as in Romans 1:16, the present tense in Romans 9:45 signifies continuous possession: ‘theirs is’, not ‘theirs was’.

They had been adopted as God’s son(s) (Ex. 4:22-23), had the Lord dwelling among them in his divine glory (Ex. 40:34), and had been the only nation with whom God had entered into covenants. Paul is probably referring to covenants with Abraham (Gen. 15:1-21), Moses (though, in reality, he was the mediator of the covenant between God and Israel), and David (2

If the promise of a Prophet

like Moses was fulfilled in

both the Old Testament

prophets and the Messiah,

why may the promise of

Abraham’s ‘seed’ not be

fulfilled in both the people of

Israel and Messiah?

• 9One16

Sam. 7:12-16). Furthermore they had received the law of God, which Paul sees as a privilege, even though he speaks elsewhere of it bringing condemnation. They also had the temple in which the Creator God dwelt and his promise of blessing when he sent his Messiah into the world.

The significance of these privileges is difficult for Gentiles to appreciate; they define the Jewish people and their relationship with God. 31

The reference to ‘the promises’ in Rom. 9:4 is significant. All the promises of Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures were made to Israel. The Lord would raise up a prophet like Moses ‘for them’ (Dt. 18:18); the ‘New Covenant’ was originally promised to ‘the house of Israel and the house of Judah’ (Jer. 31:31); the ‘righteous servant’ of Isaiah 53 was stricken for the sins of Isaiah’s people, Israel (Is. 53:8). If all the promises were for Israel, should not Jacob’s seed be the first to hear the news that the promises have been fulfilled?

Israel’s privileged position dictates that the Jewish people not only have a right to hear the gospel first but also a need to hear it first: ‘To whom much is given, from him much will be required’. Israel’s spiritual riches impose on them great responsibilities: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities’ (Am. 3:2). Paul expresses the thought even more strongly in Romans 2:9, when he indicates that while tribulation and wrath inevitably come on ‘every soul of man who does evil’, it does so ‘to the Jew first’. From this, M’Cheyne drew the lesson that just as any medic worth his salt attends to the most life-threatening conditions first, so too the Church must first reach out to those who are in greatest spiritual danger.32

blessInGsThere are blessings promised to those who bless Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3) and also to those who love Jerusalem and pray for its peace (Ps. 122:6). These two passages of Scripture are the major proof texts for lovers of Israel. To bless Abraham’s descendants is to be blessed, and to love Jerusalem and pray for its peace is to prosper. Others would dismiss this understanding as naive on the grounds that Jesus is the seed of Abraham envisaged in Gen. 12:1-3 and that ‘Jerusalem above’ is ‘the mother of us all’. 33

There is also a curse on those who curse Abraham. I recall vividly an incident that occurred when I was at Bible College. A number of fellow students emerged white-faced from a lecture on the Old Testament. The tutor had informed them that they ‘might not get to heaven’ if they had ever told a joke about Jews. I was shaken too because there was probably not a single student, including me, who had not at some time joked about rabbis, the size of Jewish noses, the mythical stinginess of Jews, of circumcision or anything else that put Jewish people in a less-than-favourable light. The lecturer’s take on what it meant to ‘curse’ Abraham in Gen. 12:3, included telling humorous stories about Abraham’s physical descendants.

When Bill Clinton became president of the United States, his pastor

warned him that if he abandoned Israel, God would never forgive him. No doubt Clinton’s pastor had Gen. 12:3 in mind.

Such extreme maximalist interpretation of Scripture causes other interpreters of Scripture to swing to another extreme. Gary Burge, for example, objects when Gen. 12:1-3 is ‘frequently used as a warning to theologians and political policy makers today.’34

Some pro-Israel interpreters are so extreme that they appear to make salvation or damnation dependent on one’s attitude to the Jewish people. The interpretations of scholars like Burge, however, are so vacuous that they appear to empty Gen. 12:3 of all meaningful content. The respected Lutheran commentator H. C. Leupold, however, makes the point: ‘Abram will be so closely identified with the good work of God, that to curse him comes to be almost the equivalent of cursing God.’35

According to H. L. Ellison, the Hebrew verb qillel signifies vilification and, hence, ‘Not so much the bitter hatred of the anti-Semite is here envisaged but man’s despising and dishonouring of Abraham’s descendants.’36

John Goldingay makes a similar point: ‘The curse applies to the strange individual who treats Abraham with contempt. Imagine someone who doesn’t view Abraham or Abraham’s descendants as people God is involved with and is working through and is committed to making a blessing.’37

William Still’s comment is helpful: ‘This nation which was to be Jehovah’s evangelist to the whole world would be the touchstone of weal or woe for every nation. Those who acknowledged the Hebrews as blessed of God would be blessed, for God would be pleased with them and those who cursed them would be cursed by God. Nor was this a mere

God deals favourably with

those who are good to the

Jews. In fact, Psalms 122:1

says that He will prosper

us just for praying for the

peace of Jerusalem.

threat to try to advance the Hebrews’ prosperity, but objectively expressed what would happen to each nation as the Almighty pursued his sovereign and invincible purpose of blessing the whole world through them.’38

Those who take the verses at less than face value claim to view them through the lens of the New Testament which, they believe, teaches that a new, spiritual Israel has come into being, an Israel that transcends national, racial and cultural boundaries. Because the Church consists of Jews and Gentiles, which (according to this line of reasoning makes up ‘the Israel of God’) the focus of the promises is relocated to the Church, the ‘true Jews’. The Jerusalem for which we are exhorted to pray in Ps. 122:6 is now the New Jerusalem, ‘Jerusalem above, which is the mother of us all’, and Psalm 67:1, in which the Hebrew poet pleads with God to bless Israel, becomes a prayer for God to bless the Church.

While not wishing to deny a degree of truth in this line of interpretation, the largely Gentile Church cannot stake an exclusive claim to those promises without doing violence to the basic meaning of the text. Contrary to the claims of supersessionist theologians, the New Testament writers do not ‘reinterpret’ Old Testament passages and promises; they bring out what theologians refer to as the sensus plenior, the full sense of the texts.

Of course Jesus is the ‘seed of Abraham’ but that does not mean the Jewish people are not also Abraham’s ‘seed’. Let me illustrate what I mean. The New Testament views Jesus as the ‘prophet like Moses’ predicted in Deuteronomy 18. Nevertheless, many conservative Old Testament scholars believe the promise included the line of biblical prophets. If the promise of a Prophet like Moses was fulfilled in both the Old Testament prophets and

in the Messiah, why may the promise of Abraham’s ‘seed’ not be fulfilled in both the people of Israel and Messiah? Chris Wright makes the point:

Jesus is the Saviour of the world because he is the Messiah of Israel. He cannot be one and not the other. If he is not the Messiah for the Jews, then he cannot be the Saviour of the Gentiles. So if evangelism among Jews (in the sense of graciously calling them to see in Jesus the Messiah who fulfils their historic scriptural faith) is disallowed, it cuts the nerve of all other evangelism. The Gospel has to be the Good News for the Jews if it is to be Good News for anyone else. And if it is Good News for them, then to fail to share it with them is the worst form of anti-semitism.39

The greatest blessing Christians can bestow on Israel is, according to Is. 40:9, to bear the good tidings of Jesus to Zion. The greatest curse the Church can lay on the Jewish people is to deny them the life-giving gospel of Messiah.

an abIdInG PrIncIPleIn 1984, a large evangelistic initiative took place in the West Midlands. A BBC television interviewer, after a

live broadcast of one of the meetings asked the organiser why enquirers were being given Luke’s Gospel, rather than one of the other Gospels. The response was that Luke was specifically written for Gentiles and was therefore the most appropriate for that outreach. The West Midlands has a Jewish population of some 6,000. Nevertheless, although every other ethnic and cultural group was catered for, there appeared to be little or no provision for Jewish enquirers.

That the early church gave priority to the Jewish people in its evangelistic programmes should be evident from what we have considered. The question remaining, then, is: Should we accord the Jews the same priority in modern mission?

If not, when did the principle of Rom. 1:16 cease to apply? Is there any indication in the New Testament that Jewish mission must eventually take a back seat in the Church’s missionary concern? Would there ever come a time when the principles outlined above would cease to apply? I think not.

If one might paraphrase Jeremiah: If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth be searched out beneath, then will the Lord cast off the seed of Israel as a priority in Christian mission.

The Church must cease being pragmatic in its approach to mission. Mission strategies must be formulated in the light of the ‘Jew first’ principle. Of course, not every Christian is called to be a missionary but every Gentile Christian, according to Paul, is called to provoke Israel to jealousy.40 At the very least, then, every Christian should give as much support as practically possible to assist those who are called to proclaim the good news to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

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History declares that the

Abrahamic Covenant is

still relevant today. If God

allows entire civilizations

to rise and fall according to

their treatment of Israel, is

it unreasonable to think that

He would do the same for

a ministry?

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end notes1. Moore, Mike ‘Can I get a witness?’ ONE16, 1.2. Lk. 24:47.3. Acts 9:15.4. Ibid. 13:2.5. Ibid. vv4f.6. Ibid. v46.7. Ibid. 14:18. Ibid. 17:16f9. The Greek conjunction oun, ‘therefore,’ is ignored in some English versions of the Bible, including the NIV, NLT and The Message. It is capable of being translated in a number of ways, including: ‘therefore’, ‘accordingly’, ‘consequently’, and ‘these things being so’.10. Acts 26:19.11. Ibid. 28:13-15.12. Ibid. 28:17.13. Hos. 11:8f.14. See Craigie, Peter C. ‘Twelve Prophets, Volume 1,’ The Daily Study Bible, Edited by John C. L. Gibson (St Andrews Press, 1984). p.74: ‘. . .both justice and common sense would dictate that God abandon Israel. Indeed the law of covenant clearly implies that God was legally bound to abandon Israel. But in the conflict raging within the heart of God, love conquers law. God cannot abandon his people.’15. M’Cheyne, Robert Murray ‘Our Duty to Israel’ in Bonar D.D., Andrew A. Memoir and Remains of the Rev. R. M. M’Cheyne (Banner of Truth, 1966). p. 493.16. See Ex. 3:2.17. See Horton, Michael. The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way. (Zondervan, 2011). ‘. . .in Abram’s vision (Gen. 15) . . . God alone walks through the pieces, assuming upon his own head the curse sanctions.’ (p. 441). Richard Hess observes that ‘God’s own divine life forms the surety for the promise . . . God’s act of walking between the pieces signifies his presence with his people.’ (Hess, Richards S, ‘The Slaughter of the Animals in Genesis 15:8-21’ in Hess R. S., Wenham, J. G., Satterthwaite, P. E. (eds.), He Swore an Oath: Biblical Themes in Genesis 12-50, p. 63,64). Desmond Alexander emphasises the unconditional nature of God’s covenant with Abraham in Gen. 15: ‘Nowhere is it indicated that that the fulfilment of the covenant is dependent upon the actions of either Abraham or his descendants; God

covenants unreservedly to fulfil his promise . . . For this reason it may be designated an unconditional promissory covenant’ (emphasis added) (Alexander, T. Desmond From Paradise to the Promised Land: An Introduction to the Main Themes of the Pentateuch, Paternoster Press, 1995. p.52.).18. Holland, Tom Romans: The Divine Marriage, Pickwick Publications, 2011). p. 297.19. Rom. 15:24.20. See Is. 42:6, 49:6; 60:3.21. Compare Acts 17:1-3 in which in the synagogue at Thessalonica Paul, ‘as his custom was’, reasoned from the Scriptures, ‘demonstrating and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead’ and his address to the Areopagites in vv22-31. In his Mars Hill speech (v.28), Paul cites two poems. ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ appears to be a quotation from a hymn to Zeus by Epimenides of Crete (c. 600 B.C.). Paul quotes the same poem in Titus 1:12. ‘For we are indeed his offspring’ is from Phainomena by the Stoic poet Aratus (c. 315–240 B.C.). He also appeals to logic: ‘Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the Divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising’ (v.29).22. See for example, Gaffin Jr, Richard B. ‘Where Have All the Spiritual Gifts Gone?: A Defense of Cessationism’ in Volume 10, Number 5 of Modern Reformation. Gaffin argues that most people would agree that the apostolic office ceased with the first century; therefore other gifts that were used for ‘the establishment of the church’ would cease.23. See II Tim. 3:14-17; Jn. 5:39; I Pet. 1:10-12; II Pet. 1:16-21.24. Acts 17:10-12.25. Rom 11:15. It should not surprise us that Paul sees Israel’s ultimate salvation as being a source of blessing to the Gentiles. From the very beginning, God’s the plan to bless the nations has been inextricably linked to his blessings on Israel. God tells Abram, ‘I will bless you and you shall be a blessing. . .’ (Gen. 12:1-3). ‘God be merciful to us [Israel] and bless us [Israel]. . . that the nations may know your salvation . . .’ (Ps. 67:1-2). 26. Gidney, W. T. The History of The London Society For Promoting Christianity Among The Jews From 1809 to 1908, London Society

For Promoting Christianity Among The Jews, 1908, pg 273 27. Acts 13:46.28. See Holland, Tom Contours of Pauline Theology, Christian Focus Publications, 2004. Also available to download free at http://www.tomholland.org.uk/contours-of-pauline-theology.29. ‘Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ’ (I Cor. 11:1). ‘I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church’ (Col. 1:24).30. Holland. Contours, p.62. Unabridged download: http://www.tomholland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/chapter-4.pdf.31. Holland. Tom Romans: The Divine Marriage. Pickwick Publications, 2011. p. 301.32. ‘In a hospital, the kind physician runs first to the bed where the sick man lies who is nearest to die. When a ship is sinking, and the gallant sailors have left the shore to save the sinking crew, do they not stretch out the arm of help first to those that are readiest to perish beneath the waves? And shall we not do the same for Israel? The billows of God’s anger are ready to dash first over them—shall we not seek to bring them first to the Rock that is higher than they? Their case is more desperate than that of other men—shall we not bring the good Physician to them, who alone can bring health and cure?—for the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.’ (‘Our Duty to Israel’ in Bonar, Memoir, p. 491).33. Gal. 4:26.34. Burge, Gary M. Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to ‘Holy Land’ Theology, SPCK, 2010, p. 118. 35. Leupold, H. C. Exposition of Genesis, Evangelical Press, 1972, p. 413.36. Ellison, H. L. Fathers of the Covenant, Paternoster Press, 1978, p.39.37. Goldingay, John Genesis for Everyone. Part 1: Chapters 1-16, SPCK, 2010, p.143.38. Collected Writings of William Still. Volume 3: Genesis and Romans, Edited by Ferguson, Sinclair B. and Searle, David, Christian Focus/Rutherford House, 2000, pp.59,60.39. Wright, Christopher J. H. Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament, Marshall Pickering.1992, pp. 176,177.40. Rom. 11:11.

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At the Reformation, John Knox supported the establishment of small groups for prayer and fellowship. Later, during the troubled Covenanting times of the 1680s, clandestine and secure prayer cells helped maintain the faith and endurance of Scottish Presbyterians whose civil and religious rights had been denied. Often deprived of the regular services of a minister, these groups kept personal faith vigorous and prepared the way for the Evangelical awakening of the eighteenth century which, in its turn, provided the momentum to drive forward imaginative evangelistic work at home and new missionary ventures overseas.

At these gatherings for prayer, people very often prayed for the restoration of the Jews. Seeing no obvious answer in their own days, they confidently awaited God’s time, believing that intercession retains its urgency and immediacy because it is perpetually before the eternal God. Their faith

was amply rewarded in the sending forth of Scotland’s first missionary to the Jews. But before that could happen, many pieces of the puzzle of Providence had first to be put in place.These included international revival, a cross-Atlantic coordinated prayer movement, and the bizarre search for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

To the New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards, such awakenings as that at Cambuslang, as well as the others in England and North America, were part of a spiritual continuum, dating back to Pentecost, whereby, from time to time, God renews and reinvigorates the life of the Church. Without in any way denigrating the regular preaching and pastoral work of men called to the ministry, Edwards was led by his experience of revivals to believe that the cause of God was advanced not so much by the ordinary work of the ministry but, rather, by extraordinary works of the Holy Spirit such as at Cambuslang. In his work

A History of the Work of Redemption, published in 1774, Edwards predicted that the revivals of the mid-eighteenth century were precursors of yet greater blessings to come throughout the world. This theory, empowered by spiritual renewal, resulted in a growing commitment to international missions. This was certainly so in the case of Cambuslang, where some people found freedom in prayer only when they ceased to be preoccupied with their own spiritual concerns and prayed instead for the salvation of the wider world.

Around 1743, the Great Awakening began to falter. Edwards attributed this slow-down to a lack of faithfulness in prayer, and therefore believed that the lost momentum was only a temporary setback and that God would continue to revive his work until he had ‘subdued the whole earth’. In order to regain the earlier progress of revival, Edwards wrote to M’Culloch proposing the launching of what he

Aye, Claudius...Claudius Buchanan: the Pioneer Scotland, England, India, 1766-1815

This article is an extract from chapter 2 of John Ross’s Time for Favour: Scottish Missions

to the Jews 1838 – 1852, ‘Claudius Buchanan: the Pioneer ’ (see the review in the March

issue of the CWI Herald). Dr. Kai Kjaer Hansen describes the book as ‘unique: no other

contemporary work covering this field is as thoroughly researched, so well written or so

engaging to read.’ This excerpt provides an insight into the motivations behind Scotland’s

first missionary to the Jews and the remarkable chain of providence which resulted

in his being sent.

Connections

termed a Concert for Prayer. This was no novelty but the reintroduction, on an international basis, of the old Scottish custom whereby Christians covenanted to pray for a common cause. What marked out this proposal as different, was the suggestion made by the Scottish ministers, John McLaurin of Glasgow, James Robe of Kilsyth and William M’Culloch, that rather than hold a single day of fasting and intercession they should inaugurate a regular, recurring day of prayer, reflecting the biblical injunction to persist in prayer until an answer is received. The Concert for Prayer led indirectly, fifty years later, to William Carey’s pioneering initiative of 1792. This connection has become an integral part of the popular history of modern Christian missions but what is just as important, though inexplicably neglected, is the more direct connection between the Concert for Prayer and missions to the Jewish people.

Jonathan Edwards was not alone in believing that the conversion of the Jews was a crucial element in the international expansion of the Christian church, the same view was widely held by Christians in Scotland during the same period. As he wrote in

A History of the Work of Redemption, Edwards saw the restoration of Israel as a part of the fall of Antichrist, immediately preceding the Latter-day Glory.

Nothing is more certainly foretold than this national conversion of the Jews... When they shall be called, that ancient people, who alone were God’s people for so long a time, shall be his people again, never to be rejected more. They shall be gathered into one fold together with the Gentiles… Though we do not know the time in which this conversion of Israel will come to pass; yet thus much we may determine from Scripture, that it will be before the glory of the Gentile part of the church shall be fully accomplished; because it is said, that their coming in shall be life from the dead to the Gentiles.

If Edward’s clear thought and febrile pen provided Jewish missions with the stimulus of a well thought out Biblical and theological rationale, it was his deeply moving account of David Brainerd, the godly young missionary to the American Indian people, based on Brainerd’s own journal, that set before the Church an inspirational role model of self-sacrificial missionary service. The connection between Brainerd, Scotland and the Jews is, to say the least, a strange and fascinating tale.

Brainerd was employed by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, which had been established in 1709 and had its origin in the prayer societies. By 1730 it had branched out into missionary work among the indigenous people of Pennsylvania, employing both David Brainerd and his brother John. The motivation that led the SSPCK to engage in missionary work among the native American was its belief that

they were the descendants of the ten lost tribes. Jonathan Edwards, who also had been a missionary to the Indians, expected the restoration both of the Jews (Judah) and of Ephraim, or as he put it, ‘the remains of the ten tribes, wherever they be,’ yet it does not seem that he committed himself to their identity as American Indians. The link between the evangelisation of the lost tribes of Israel, David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, the Great Awakening, the Cambuslang revival, the Concert for Prayer and modern missions to the Jews, was the life and work of Claudius Buchanan, Scotland’s first missionary to the Jews.

Buchanan was born in 1766, and baptised by the Rev. William M’Culloch, the 85 year old minister of Cambuslang. His maternal grandfather was Claudius Somers, a convert of the 1742 revival who, by the time of his grandson’s birth, was one of the elders at Cambuslang and the congregational treasurer. We may be confident that if, on the day he baptised the infant Claudius, M’Culloch could have seen into the future, he would have felt that his prayers had been amply answered by the contribution this child would make to building God’s kingdom among the Bene Israel Jews of Cochin in India, as well as contributing much to the wider establishment of missions to the Jews, especially in advocating the translation of the New Testament into Hebrew. It is much to be regretted that Buchanan’s notable contribution to Jewish missions should today be almost unrecognised and therefore unappreciated.

In Cambridge, Buchanan was brought under influences that compelled him to consider the place of the Jewish people in God’s scheme of things, the most significant was his becoming a protégé of Charles Simeon, one of the select group privileged to hear their

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Jonathon Edwards saw the conversion of the Jews as a crucial element in the international expansion of the Church

mentor reading Natural and Revealed Religion, in his rooms in King’s College. It was this group which in 1792 developed into Simeon’s famous Sermon Class, thus filling a vacuum in the contemporary training of men for evangelical ministry. Simeon had an immense influence with students, and it was impossible to belong to his inner circle and not be exposed to what he passionately believed was ‘the most important object in the world,’ namely, missions to the Jewish people. Simeon’s commitment to this cause was the keenest interest of his life and, inevitably, he acted upon it by helping to found, in 1809, the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (LSPCJ). Simeon’s renowned dedication to the evangelisation of the Jews is well illustrated by a famous incident, that took place at a meeting of the LSPCJ. Edward Bickersteth, secretary of the Church Missionary Society, passed to Simeon a note suggesting that Simeon had his priorities back to front. The note provokingly asked, ‘Eight millions of Jews and eight hundred million heathens — which is more important?’ Simeon’s succinct rejoinder, alluding to Romans 11.15, was written on the other side of the note: ‘If the conversion of the eight is life from the dead to the eight hundred, what then?’ Consequently, Bickersteth, who wrote the introduction to Hugh Pearson’s biography of Buchanan, became a fervent supporter of Jewish missions, addressing, in all, eighteen Anniversary meetings of the LSPCJ. His very last words uttered his desire for the spiritual recovery of Israel.

Another influence to which Buchanan was exposed whilst at Cambridge was the thought of the saintly seventeenth century Scottish Episcopal Archbishop of Glasgow, the ‘Apostle of Peace,’ Robert Leighton, of whom Spurgeon would later say that, ‘everything that fell from his

pen is worth its weight in diamonds.’ Best known today, perhaps, for his Practical Commentary on the First Epistle of Peter, Leighton held strong and clear convictions concerning the conversion of the Jews, once observing that, ‘They forget a main point in the Church’s glory, who pray not daily for the conversion of the Jews.’

After a brief period as John Newton’s curate at St. Mary, Woolnoth, Buchanan was appointed as one of five chaplains to the East India Company, the other four being Thomas Thomason, David Brown, Daniel Corrie and Henry Martyn. Sailing in September 1796, Buchanan arrived in Calcutta on 10th March the following year. Here, through his linguistic interests, he became a friend of William Carey, who also shared his belief in the restoration of the Jews.

In 1803 Henry Martyn, Buchanan’s junior by fifteen years, became Charles Simeon’s curate in Cambridge and three years later followed Buchanan to India. Under Simeon’s tutelage, Martyn developed a keen missionary interest in the Jewish people. In his later travels through Persia, Simeon’s influence on Martyn was such that when he encountered Sephardic Jews from Basra, Isfahan and Shiraz who,

like the ‘Jewish Mullah’ Abdulghanee, had embraced popular Islam, Martyn sought to liberate them from their spiritual entanglement. In 1812, on his thirty-first birthday, the last before his death, Martyn met two of Abdulghanee’s acquaintances who quizzed him regarding their spiritual welfare ‘in another world.’ Much moved by this he later reflected on their anxiety and spiritual insecurity, recording in his Journal his sorrow for their plight:

Feelings of pity for God’s ancient people, and the awful importance of eternal things impressed on my mind by the seriousness of their enquiries as to what would become of them, relieved me from the pressure of my comparatively insignificant distresses. I, a poor Gentile, blest, honoured, and loved; secured for ever by the everlasting covenant, whilst the children of the Kingdom are still in outward darkness! Well does it become me to be thankful.

On 18th August, 1808 Buchanan arrived in London to learn that his friend and mentor John Newton had been buried on 27th December the previous year, the day on which Buchanan had arrived in Cochin. There followed a visit to Scotland to see his elderly mother. He discovered with delight that the rigours of old age – she was seventy-two years old – had diminished neither her intellectual nor her spiritual faculties one whit. Buchanan’s wife, too, was both astonished and amused by her mother-in-law’s eloquence ‘on the prophecies, which she utters in hard words [Broad Scots dialect], without affecting at all the English language’.

Like his mother, Buchanan had been brought up speaking the Scots dialect but, whilst preparing for the Anglican ministry at Cambridge, he seems to

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Claudius Buchanan, Scotland’s original missionary to the Jewish people

have suffered a minor crisis of identity which led him to reject his native accent and take elocution lessons to assist him to adopt a more English mode of speech. It is likely that Charles Simeon, who had very decided views on elocution, may have had a hand in this cultural transformation. Whatever the stimulus to change, the fact that he was willing to alter his speech in so radical a fashion reflects an apostolic willingness to be ‘all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.’

Returning from Scotland, Buchanan visited Cambridge in April 1809, where he deposited in the University library his collection of manuscripts. These included a very ancient and beautifully illuminated version of both Old and New Testaments written in Syriac. Then there was a 150 year old Hebrew New Testament, translated by a rabbi from Travancore who had, in the course of his work, become a Christian. Buchanan told the rabbi’s story at the first annual public dinner of the LSPCJ, arguing that this man’s close attention to Scripture had entirely subdued his unbelief and opened his mind and heart to Jesus the Messiah.

Buchanan transcribed this New Testament manuscript at his own expense, with the intention that it should form the basis of a translation of the New Testament in Hebrew, to equip the LSPCJ in their work of evangelising the people from whom the world had received God’s written Word. We may, therefore, readily understand his strongly expressed regret that the society allowed a whole year to pass without significant progress in this work. As reported in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, Buchanan urged the swift implementation of the project, because, he said, ‘How can you find fault with a Jew for not believing the New Testament if he has never seen it?’ Adding:

How strange it appears that, during a period of eighteen hundred years, the Christians should never have given the Jews the New Testament in their own language! By a kind of infatuation they have reprobated the unbelief of the Jews, and have never, at the same time, told them what they ought to believe.

In fact, at the time of Buchanan’s remonstrance there were three Hebrew translations of the New Testament in existence: Hutter’s, Robinson’s and Cradick’s. However, all three were inadequate, unobtainable or incomplete. His reproof was nevertheless taken to heart and the work entrusted to a Jewish scholar, Judah d’Allemand, who, with a gentile colleague completed Matthew’s Gospel in 1814, the remaining books appearing in rapid succession to much critical acclaim.

On 6th December 1814, Buchanan was surprised to be visited at his home in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, by two men, whom he calls Mr S. and Mr. B., sent by the LSPCJ to recruit him to be the society’s Secretary. He felt unable, however, to accede to their wishes, not because of any lack of commitment to the cause – far from it – but because he held radical objections to the way in which the society had been established. The delegation returned on 24th December, but this time Mr. B. had been replaced by Mr. Lewis Way, one of the founders of the LSPCJ. Still they could not prevail upon him to accept their invitation.

Buchanan further elucidated arguments against the current constitution. These amounted to three. First, there was inadequate consultation with ‘good and eminent ministers’ in the country. Secondly, the name of the society was all wrong; it ought not to include the words ‘for the conversion of the Jews’ in

its name, as these were offensive to Jews and would immediately prejudice their efforts. Lastly, the society, in sharing a common denominational loyalty and missionary goal, should become part of the Anglican Church Missionary Society.

Buchanan was now in the last months of his life but his thoughts and prayers were still focused on India. One day, the plight of two Cochin Jews stranded in London was brought to his attention. He promptly sought advice from his old friend Colin Macaulay, who did not fail him, offering the two men a satisfactory solution to their dilemma. Just three weeks later, on 9th February 1815, Buchanan died, aged forty-nine years, his soul finding eternal repose with Christ his Lord, and his mortal remains being laid to rest, awaiting the resurrection, near those of his second wife in the burial ground at Ouseburn, between Ripon and York.

John Ross was the General Secretary of Christian Witness to Israel from 1991 to 2002. Before that he served as a missionary in Nigeria with the Qua Iboe Mission and as the pastor of Knock Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland. He left CWI to answer a call to serve as the minister at Greyfriars Free Church of Scotland in Inverness before teaching Church History and Missions at Dumisani Theological Institute in South Africa. John is married to Elizabeth and is currently the minister of the congregation of Glenurquhart and Fort Augustus Free Church of Scotland. He is the author of Time for Favour: Scottish Missions to the Jews 1836-1852, from which this article is extracted.

Time for Favour: Scottish missions to the Jews 1838 - 1852 is available from the CWI Bookroom for £14.99 + p&p.

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Among my books there are several by Rev Dr Adolph Saphir: The Hidden Life (Thoughts on Communion with God), Christ and the Scriptures, Expository Lectures to the Epistle to the Hebrews and The Divine Unity of Scripture. They are doubly treasured, for the gracious wisdom and understanding of their content and for the way that God brought his life and light to their author

In the 19th century, as a result of a remarkable chain of providences, the Church of Scotland sent a mission team to Pesth to work among the Jews. The best known of these missionaries was John Duncan, later Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in the Free Church of Scotland College in Edinburgh. One of the families contacted by the missionaries was the Saphir family. The father was a very highly respected leader in the Jewish community who eventually became a believer in Jesus as the Messiah. His love for his son, Adolph, showed itself in a remarkable way and he entrusted the one for whom he had a special love to those who had brought the light of the Messiah into his life. Adolph went to Scotland where he completed his academic studies and prepared himself for the Christian ministry.

While studying at the Free Church College in Edinburgh, Adolph wrote to Rev. Charles Kingsley, the novelist

and Christian Socialist, to thank him for his writings and sending him a short biography of his brother who had died very young. Among other things, he said, “It has pleased God to let me see Christ, the perfect God Man, who alone draws us unto God’s communion, and makes us true, real men; the dark riddles that had perplexed me began to be solved.”

The response from Charles Kingsley would be worth including in its entirety for its affection and its discernment. Its length forbids it, but some extracts will indicate its quality.

“If I am surprised at your writing to me, it is the surprise of delight at finding that my writings have been of use to any man, and above all to a Jew. For your nation I have a very deep love, first, because so many intimate friends of mine are Jews; and next, because I believe that you are still ‘The Nation’ and that you have a glorious part to play in the history of the race. Moreover, I owe all I have ever said or thought about Christianity to the study of the Old Testament, without which the New is to me unintelligible; and I cannot love the Hebrew books without loving the men who wrote them; and therefore I love your David, and Jeremiah, and Isaiah, as men of like passions with myself – men who struggled, and doubted, and suffered, that I might learn from them; and loving them, how can I but love their children,

and yearn over them with unspeakable pity.

“It is my belief that the Christian Jew is the man who can interpret the New and Old Testament both, because he alone can place himself in the position of the men who wrote them, as far as national sympathies, sorrows, and hopes are concerned.

“I would therefore entreat you, and every other converted Jew, not to sink your nationality because you have become a member of the Universal Church, but to believe with the old converts at Jerusalem that you are a true Jew because you are a Christian; that as a Jew you have your special office in the perfecting of the faith and practice of the Church, but try to see all heaven and earth with the eyes of Abraham, David and St. Paul.”

Today we need that discernment and that yearning.

Rev William MacKay formerly served as Chairman of the International Missions Board of the Free Church of Scotland and is also a former member of the CWI Council of Management. This article was originally appeared in the Winter 2003 edition of the Herald.

Hungarian Jewish believer, Rev Adolph Saphir 1831 - 1891

Ideas worth considering

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In reading the book of Acts one can see that the first church in Jerusalem was made up entirely of Jewish Christians. Thousands of Jews believed in Jesus. The book of Acts tells us that there were Jews who turned to Christ everywhere the gospel went. In Acts 27:20 James told Paul of the many thousands of Jews who believed that were in the Jerusalem church.

The Jerusalem church escaped from Jerusalem during the 66-70 AD Roman/Jewish war. It continued strongly until well into the second century. However after the second Roman/Jewish war 132-135 AD, there is not a lot recorded about the Jewish church. There were some outstanding Jewish Christians at this time: such as the second century church historian Hegesippus, whose work was used later by the great church historian Eusebius.

It seems though that in general Jewish Christians were either assimilated

into the general church, or that they lost their way and became something of a Jewish sect, separated from the rest of the church, and with heterodox teachings. For instance, the latter group, often called the Ebionites, did not believe in the deity of Jesus.

At this time there were works of the church fathers that had a very polemical thrust against the Jews in general, and maintained a strong replacement theology: that the church had replaced Israel in God’s plans. Such a theology is antithetical to Jewish mission: if there is no Jewish nation then there is no need for mission to the Jews.

From constantIne throuGh the mIddle aGes When the Roman empire became largely Christian under Constantine in the early fourth century the Jews suffered various restrictions.

Massacres and synagogue burnings occurred. Some, like Jerome, were still somewhat favourable to the Jewish Christians and their heritage. But by the fourth century Jewish converts were mainly assimilated into the mainstream church, and Jewish Christianity was lost. Constantine’s anti-Jewish policies caused a final rift between the Jewish community and the church. Jews who became Christians were also persecuted bitterly by the Jewish community.

By the fourth century the antipathy between the Jewish community and the church became pronounced. In the fourth century church councils met and declared that if any clergyman entered a synagogue or was found joining in a Jewish festival he would be deposed.1 Christians were forbidden to eat with the Jews.

As for Jewish Christians, they were required upon conversion to

The understanding of Jewish mission as an urgent need today, placed upon the church

as a theological priority arising from the Scriptures, has not been the understanding of

the church very often in the past. The history of the Church’s dealings with the Jewish

people is a sad one indeed. However, positively, there have always been Jews who have

believed in Jesus in the Church. Here, Martin Pakula, himself a Jewish believer who

has been widely involved in ministry to the Jewish people in Australia, provides a brief

history of mission to the Jews up to the present day.

A most

Contending

18 • ONE16

denounce all things Jewish. Jewish Christians were to refuse to eat with other Jews, to keep any Jewish practices, such as a festival or the food laws. Jewish Christians were required to swear openly that they would not do any of these things, and that they would vigorously revile the Jews and their beliefs.

The implications for mission to the Jews are all too obvious. The Jewish and Christian communities were combative enemies. Jewish believers were cut off from their community and unable to share the gospel with them. The name of Jesus became synonymous with hatred and persecution. One wonders at the amazing grace of God – that any Jews became Christians at all. This situation did not change until the nineteenth century. There was rarely anything that even approached Jewish mission as such. There were individual converts from the Jews. However, ‘such was the intolerance of the times’, writes Hugh Schonfield, that they could ‘scarcely dare acknowledge their Jewish extraction for fear of persecution’.2

Many converts were not sincere. These Jews did not become Christians because they had put their trust in Jesus, but were baptized to escape the confiscation of their goods, or other hardships. Such converts were carefully watched to see if they reverted to any Jewish practices.

There were even instances of compulsory conversions by force. In 674 AD King Sisebut of the Visigoth kingdom forced the Jews in his kingdom to be baptized and become Christians. Interestingly, his contemporary St Isidore of Seville said that the king was acting with zeal, but zeal without knowledge. For, he said, ‘he forcibly compelled those whom he should rather have

persuaded by arguments of the faith’.3 About 90,000 Jews were forcibly baptised.

In Spain such practices continued, even to the point of removing Christians from Jewish spouses, and removing Jewish children from their parents, lest they be led astray by Jewish heresies. The power of the church in the West was such that force was often used upon the Jews as the preferred method of mission to the Jews. Sometimes the atrocities were beyond disgraceful, such as the rapes, tortures and murders perpetrated upon the Jews by the crusades. Again, though, there were dissenting voices throughout this time. Bernard of Clairveaux (twelfth century) wrote letters in defence of the Jews. He wrote: “Does not the Church obtain a richer victory over the Jews by daily bringing them over from their errors and converting them, than if by the sword she had destroyed them all at a blow?”4

In the Eastern church the approach was more through persuasion than by force. This took the form of disputations. There are some strange accounts of the disputations which must be greatly embellished or exaggerated. Nevertheless it seems that some Jews were persuaded to become Christians through these debates, and that the debates were often held in a fairly respectful manner.

The Western disputations however were different. In these the Jews were usually not voluntary participants. A famous one of these disputations was held over 69 sessions during 1413-1414. The sessions were held before antipope Benedict XIII at Aragon. A very able Jewish Christian Joshua ben Joseph ibn Vives al-Lorqui, along with another Jewish Christian, debated with twenty two rabbis. At

the end, twenty of the rabbis admitted defeat and about 5,000 Jews accepted Christ and were baptised.

An idea arising from these debates was that of requiring Jews to listen to sermons designed to win them to Christ. Though this is still far from ideal, at least it didn’t involve physical persecution.

It should also be said that throughout these times there were Jewish Christians who became famous in the church, advancing to the position of Bishop, or excelling in scholarship.

Sometimes however Jewish converts were not treated well at all by the church. They could be deprived of all their possessions at baptism. This situation led in England to the establishment of homes for Jewish converts. The first one appeared in 1213, and two decades later there were ones in Oxford and London founded by King Henry III. 5

In Spain, due to forced conversions, there were many Christianized Jews,

Many converts were not

sincere. These Jews did

not become Christians

because they had put

their trust in Jesus, but

were baptized to escape

the confiscation of their

goods, or other hardships.

Such converts were

carefully watched to see

if they reverted to any

Jewish practices.

• 19One16

called Marranos. The clergy were suspicious that many of them were secretly practising Judaism, which was probably true. This led to their persecution by the Inquisition, which sought to rid the church of heresy, including the doctrines and practices of Judaism. My family today, for cultural reasons, sometimes celebrates Passover or Hanukah. Under the Spanish Inquisition my family would have been seen as gross violators of Christianity. New Jewish converts who still retained some vestiges of Jewish customs were tortured by the Inquisition.

the reFormatIon

Although a real change in attitude towards the Jews did not come until the nineteenth century, the Reformation did see some positive changes, and a move away from using force in mission to the Jews.

Martin Luther makes for a fascinating case study. At first the changes of the Reformation led Luther to believe that the Jews would hear the pure form of the gospel and would be converted. He wrote a tract in 1523 titled ‘That Jesus was born a Jew’, which decried the terrible treatment that the Jews had suffered at the hands of the church. He advised treating the Jews with kindness to win them over, not using force, and not prohibiting Jews from living and working in normal society:

‘Those fools the papists, bishops, sophists, monks, have formerly so dealt with the Jews, that every good Christian would rather have been a Jew. And if I had been a Jew, and seen such stupidity and such blockheads reign in the Christian Church, I would rather be a pig than a Christian. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs, not men, and as if they were fit for nothing but to be reviled. They are

blood relations of our Lord; therefore if we respect flesh and blood, the Jews belong to Christ more than we... Therefore, it is my advice that we should treat them kindly...’ 6

However when the Jews did not accept the gospel as he had hoped, Luther changed his attitude dramatically. In 1544 he published a tract called “Of the Jews and their Lies”. He viewed the Jews as the chief enemy of Christendom, and advocated burning their synagogues, destroying their houses, removing all their books, and making them do forced physical labour.

One time when I was door-knocking in a Jewish area in Sydney, a Jewish man invited us in. As we talked, he mentioned the endless bad treatment of the Jews at the hands of the church. I replied that such people were not real Christians. He replied: ‘What about Martin Luther?’ I had no further reply.

If the lesson isn’t clear yet – no people, Jewish or otherwise, are going to respond positively to such horrific treatment. The picture of Jesus, under such treatment, became that of an intolerant torturer. Kindness and honest discussion it seems were rarely used. Anti-Semitism is a blight on the church and its attempts to take the gospel to the Jews. The church should denounce anti-Semitism in all its forms.

Nevertheless Calvin was more congenial towards the Jews than Luther, and the later Puritans and other evangelical movements in the seventeenth century gave attention to what the Scriptures say about the Jews and God’s purposes for them, resulting in a renewed interest in the Jewish people. Thus, in the seventeenth century the Dutch established a mission to the Jews. In Germany at the same time Esdras Edzard led hundreds of Jews to Christ.7 In the religious revival in Germany in the eighteenth century there was a special interest in mission to the Jews.

the nIneteenth century But it is in the nineteenth century that missions to the Jews began in earnest. ‘The Evangelical Awakening in Great Britain and North America in the nineteenth century saw the establishment of modern Jewish missionary societies.’8 It has been said that more Jews were won to Christ in the nineteenth century than in any other century before or since.

I have my own theory about this. No doubt the work of Jewish missions was very important. However I think that God’s general work in history was the main impetus in the conversion of 250,000 Jews in the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century

One time when I was door-knocking in a Jewish area

in Sydney, a Jewish man invited us in. As we talked,

he mentioned the endless bad treatment of the Jews

at the hands of the church. I replied that such people

were not real Christians. He replied: “What about

Martin Luther?” I had no further reply.

20 • ONE16

the Enlightenment was taking hold. Enlightenment thinking fostered the spirit of equality. And if all people were equal, then even Jews might be considered equal – something we now take for granted, but that was unfortunately a revolutionary thought in the early nineteenth century.

Napoleon Bonaparte had a great hand to play here. Napoleon approached the leading Jews of France and made them an offer. If the Jews agreed to become normal French citizens, recognizing France’s courts and not just their own Jewish ones, and if they fought in the army, as did other French citizens, then Napoleon would emancipate them from their ghettoes, and bring them into normal French society as equals. The French Jews agreed.9 Thereafter as Napoleon conquered eastwards across Europe, he emancipated the Jews from their ghettoes.

In the nineteenth century Jewish people, for the first time in centuries, became normal citizens in the community - something so familiar to us now that it is hard to believe that it was ever otherwise. That emancipation led to huge changes within Judaism, but also led to many Jewish people being exposed to real Christianity. Many, many Jews became Christians.

The call of the gospel to go first to the Jew was taken up at last again in the early nineteenth century. In 1809 the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews was formed. Many of the people who formed the London Missionary Society (later known as the Church Missionary Society) in 1799 were instrumental in this. They saw the need for a separate mission to the Jews. By the end of the nineteenth century this mission society to the

Jews had 184 missionaries, including 82 Jewish Christians, and a total of 50 mission stations throughout England, Europe, and the Middle East.10 There were 200 Jewish Christian ministers in the Church of England.

One of the ventures of the London Missionary Society was to establish an Anglican church in the land of Palestine. Appropriately the first Bishop of Jerusalem in modern times whom they chose was a Jewish Christian: Michael Solomon Alexander. He was appointed as the first Jewish Christian bishop of Jerusalem since 135 AD.11 He saw several dozen Jews turn to Christ in Jerusalem before his premature death in 1845.

By the end of the nineteenth century there were nearly 100 agencies working in mission to the Jews. The Free Church of Scotland Jewish Mission had 77 missionaries. Ridley Herschell, Robert Murray M’Cheyne and Andrew Bonar conducted a trip to the Middle East to investigate Jewish communities, and upon their return were instrumental in setting up the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews (the British non-conformist/non-Anglican version of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews). They claimed to have seen thousands of Jews won to Christ.

Other countries actively involved in mission to the Jews besides the British included the USA, the Scandinavian countries, Germany, France and Switzerland.

Many Jews migrated to the USA in the nineteenth century and the churches responded by raising up many missionary organisations to the Jews. By the end of the nineteenth century there were 29

agencies with 60 missionaries. The nineteenth century Jewish converts include famous people, such as composer Felix Mendelssohn, British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, and English theologian and writer Alfred Edersheim.

Hugh Schonfield notes that many of the 250,000 Jewish converts were no doubt not genuine.

Yet many of them were. And he adds: ‘... is it not striking that when all compulsion and necessity for Christian baptism was removed there was an increase and not a diminution of conversions.’12

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in 1893, the mission to Jews called the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel was founded. This was a mission of Jewish Christians to their fellow Jews. Schonfield writes: “The emancipation of the Jews also brought with it the emancipation of the Jewish Christian.”13 No longer did the Jewish Christian have to hide his or her Jewishness, but could speak now as one Jew to another about their faith in Jesus.

The nineteenth century saw the establishment of Jewish Christian groups: known then as Hebrew Christians. These were not churches, but groups of converted Jews who met for mutual fellowship. The first major group of Hebrew Christians was formed in 1866: the Hebrew Christian Alliance. The USA branch was established in 1915. Their desire was to remain true to Christ while not sacrificing their Jewish identity. A Jewish Christian church was not on view, I believe, for most of these Hebrew Christians. The first Jewish Christian congregation was nevertheless formed in the late 1880s by Joseph Rabinowitz. His sermons were published in Hebrew, Russian

• 21One16

and Yiddish in the tens of thousands and distributed to Jews across Eastern Europe. Rabinowitz’s move to form a Jewish Christian congregation was a controversial one at the time.

the twentIeth century For various reasons the first World War brought freedom to many Jews who subsequently turned to Christianity. The numbers of Jewish Christians across Europe were in the many tens of thousands. In response to this growing number of Jewish Christians the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America moved to form an International Hebrew Christian Alliance. An inaugural conference was held in1925 at which 18 countries were represented. National alliances were subsequently formed in many countries, including Australia.

Hugh Schonfield wrote his history of Hebrew Christianity in 1936. He was aware of the growing threat of Nazism. Anti-Semitism was still in general a problem anyway throughout Europe, as it always had been. It is hard not to be infected by his enthusiasm and joy at the tens of thousands of Jews who had turned to Christ; at the hundreds of Jewish Christian missionaries taking the gospel to their own people; of the new evangelical and united front achieved by the International Hebrew Christian Alliance. The dreams of a strong Jewish presence within the church and the dreams

of seeing many, many Jews won to Christ were being realised at last. He could not have known at the time that most of these Jewish Christians would soon be wiped out in the Holocaust. It is sobering indeed to realise the loss of so many Jewish Christians for no other crime than that of being born Jewish.

Since the second World War the shock of the Holocaust has had a tremendous effect upon the church. The church has sought to stamp out anti-Semitism and to join in dialogue with the Jewish community. Unfortunately this led to a great diminution of Jewish mission in the church. The Jewish community view attempts at conversion as the height of anti-Semitism. Sadly many church organisations have bowed to such pressures coming from the leaders of Jewish communities. Mission to the Jews became greatly subdued after 1945.

By 1970 however a new movement was arising. This new movement grew more out of the 60s hippy movements and the charismatic church rather than the reformed evangelical churches. Known as Messianic Judaism this new movement is quite a departure from the pre-war Hebrew Christianity of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Messianic Judaism strongly emphasises the formation of Messianic Jewish congregations separate to the mainstream church.

While this aim to establish messianic congregations was not a new idea it had been largely rejected previously.

The positives arising from the Messianic movement are that Jewish mission once again has become a dominant issue in many countries. Many thousands of Jewish people again have turned to Christ.14 I suspect that these many thousands of Jewish Christians, like myself, have largely become Christian through the normal witness of the mainstream church. However it can’t be denied that mission organizations to the Jews have promoted the cause of Jewish mission among the churches. In the USA alone today there are 400 Messianic congregations, 50,000 Jewish Christians, and 150 full time missionaries to the Jews.15

Martin Pakula is a member of CWI’s Australian Council. He was brought up as an Orthodox Jew in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. After his Bar-Mitzvah he continued to attend synagogue weekly until almost age twenty when he became a Christian. He was ordained as a minister in the Anglican church and taught Old Testament at the Bible College of Victoria in Melbourne (now the Melbourne School of Theology). He is a senior staff worker with AFES (Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students), working with international students at Deakin University in Melbourne. Martin ran an independent outreach to Jews for five years in Sydney and continues to be involved in Jewish mission. This article is an excerpt from First for the Jew: The Urgency of Jewish Mission Today, from the Leonard Buck Lecture in Missiology 2007, outlining a brief history of mission to the Jews up to the present.

Since the second World War the shock of the

Holocaust has had a tremendous effect upon the

church. The church has sought to stamp out anti-

Semitism and to join in dialogue with the Jewish

community. Unfortunately this led to a great

diminution of Jewish mission in the church.

22 • ONE16

end notes 1. Schonfield, Hugh J. The History of Jewish Christianity (London: Duckworth, 1936), 104.2. Ibid, 121.3. Ibid, 126.4. Ibid, 143.5. Ibid, , 165.6. Ibid, 184-5.7. Ibid, 198-9.8.www.lausanne.org/documents/2004forum/LOP60_IG31 ,pdf Page 22.

9. Wylen, Stephen M. Settings of Silver (NY: Paulist Press, 1989), 267-69.10. Gidney, W. T. The Jews and their Evangelization (London: Student Volunteer Missionary Union, 1899), 91.11. His story is given in detail by Kelvin Crombie in For the Eove of “Lion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991).12. Schonfield, Ibid, 213.13. Ibid, 214.14. There are widely varying figures given for the number of Jewish Christians world wide

today. Operation World gives the inflated figure of 332,000 [Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandryk, Operation World: When We Pray God Works, (London: Paternoster Press, 2001), 362.]. The Lausanne Consultation on Jewish evangelism gives the more conservative and realistic figure of 50,000-90,000; that is, half of one percent, www.lausanne.org/documents/2004forum/LOP60_IG31.pdf Pages 22-23.15.www.lausanne.orgdocuments/2004forum/LOP60_IG31.pdf Page 25.

Searching The ScrollThe description of the Suffering Servant found in chapters 52 and 53 of the Book of Isaiah is

accepted by Christians as being one of the clearest Messianic prophecies in the Bible. It has

been a pivotal text for many Jewish people who have found faith in Jesus as Israel’s long

awaited, promised Messiah.

Still however, many people remain completey ignorant of the existence of the passage

or alternatively believe that the text is speaking about either the nation of Israel or the

Jewish people themselves.

A new website has been set up to generate discussion on the subject, as well as to provide

helpful articles and resources, and to address the different positions surrounding this critical but controversial portion of scripture.

Join the conversation online at www.searchingthescroll.org.uk

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If you have ever seen Orthodox Jews handing out tracts on the street, with missionary zeal, then it is likely that you have encountered Chabad.

Chabad is a Hasidic group which has a great influence in Jewish communities around the world. To understand Chabad, we must comprehend the initial beliefs of Hasidim. Unlike the establishment rabbis of their day, the Hasidim took the focus away from Torah study as the zenith of human spirituality, putting the focus on a charismatic individual known as the Rebbe, who acted as a mediator between God and man. The Rebbe would filter wisdom through to rabbis who, in turn, would teach the sons of men. Various Hasidic sects sprouted up in Eastern Europe, often co-existing and sometimes conflicting.

Following the Shoah (Holocaust), which wiped out many Jewish communities in Europe, the Lubavitcher strand of Chasidism relocated to New York. The Seventh Chabad Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, became the Rebbe in 1951, succeeding his father-in-law. As the Rebbe began speaking of the Geulah (Redemption), people began to speculate whether he was the Messiah. The Rebbe neither confirmed or

denied this, and he appeared to court the attention of those proclaiming him the Messiah. In his final illness, some of his followers saw this as the affliction of Israel’s Chosen One. When he died, people continued to believe in Schneerson as Mashiach (Messiah).

The official Chabad website describes the Jewish Messiah using verses from Isaiah 52 and 53, including the famous verse ‘through his knowledge, my righteous servant shall justify many’1. It is unprecedented for Jewish groups to use the prophecies of Isaiah 53 to speak of an individual saviour who justifies others as Messiah. In the commentary of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki), Isaiah 53 refers to the nation of Israel, whose suffering is necessary to bring healing to the world. However, Chabad bring their own messianic approach to biblical prophecy, daring to read Isaiah 53 in a similar way to how Messianic Jews believing in Yeshua have understood the passage.

Should we be surprised that Chabad deviates from Rashi, to the extent that they are considered by some Jews as a new form of Christianity? The same article on the official Chabad website claims that the Torah will be very

different in the days of Moshiach, who will bring a new understanding to the books of Moses.

On the surface Chabad appear to share many similarities with the Messianic Jewish belief system. By now, most of the Messianic world is aware of the irony that, whilst we are rejected for our apparently heretical belief system, Chabad are tolerated for believing that a rabbi who died, still lives, and is the Messiah who will usher in a new Law for his followers, and a new world of redemption for the righteous. It is more than tolerance.

Whilst Orthodox Judaism is struggling to maintain its numbers, Chabad-Lubavitch is growing steadily, pumping funds into Jewish community projects and gaining increasing influence around the world. Chabad are well known for sending emissaries around the world. There are Chabad rabbis in exotic destinations like Thailand and India, who delight in meeting Israeli and Jewish revellers and offering them a Jewish experience whilst on holiday. Chabad are also growing in influence on campuses, providing a popular alternative to the well-established Hillel House.2

Chabad downThe Hasidic movement in Judaism was initially rejected by the rabbinic establishment, who

considered Hasidism esoteric and heretical. Joseph Weissman looks at how the Hasidim

moved away from Torah study as the focal point of human spirituality, towards a charismatic

individual known as the Rebbe, who would be the link between man and God.

The grave that holds

Orthodoxy

24 • ONE16

Some Jewish writers are aware of this paradox. David Berger is a historian on Jewish-Christian relations. He wrote the book The Rebbe, The Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference.3 In this book, Berger lamented the fact that Judaism had put up a barrier against belief in a once-deceased messianic candidate being the Jewish Messiah. According to the historic theology of Judaism, if someone dies he can no longer be considered a potential Messiah. Yet many in Chabad believe that their deceased rabbi is the Messiah, and certainly none will deny the possibility of this being true.

Increasing numbers within Chabad ascribe to the Rebbe a god-like status. Many within Lubavitch pray to the Rebbe and believe he is in control of the universe. The Israeli daily Haaretz recently published an article featuring elokeinists, who are Chabad followers who believe that the Rebbe is God – again, an irony not lost on Messianic Jews who recognise Yeshua as fully God and fully man.

To focus on these similarities between Chabad meshichists and Messianic

Jews is important. Yet to focus on the differences provides an intriguing proof that ought to encourage us in our faith.

Chabad followers often claim that the Rebbe lives on. Many Chabad followers eagerly expected the Rebbe to return to life in the immediate days after his death in 1994. Now they have grown accustomed to the fact that their leader is deceased, yet the hope for his return remains.

The crux of the matter is this. If Chabad could claim that the Rebbe had returned from the dead they would. These are people who will visit the former residence of the Rebbe in Brooklyn and convince themselves that they can see him in the inner rooms4, and celebrate the Torah with him. These are people who are motivated to live their entire lives based on the Rebbe’s guidance through the Torah and through life in general. These are people who reveal their hopes and fears to the rabbis and emissaries sent by the Rebbe, and long for him to rule this world. Yet they have not seen their deepest desire fulfilled; to witness the Rebbe alive after his death.

Not even the most committed and fervent meshichist (Chabadniks who think the Rebbe is Mashiach)5 or elokeinist (those who think the Rebbe is God), would dare to claim that the Rebbe has physically walked the earth again. They might say that they have seen the Rebbe, but not in a way that could be verified independently. Rather, the Rebbe is seen by those who believe enough, or have the faith to see him.

Now compare this to Yeshua, who appeared to his disciples. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8:

For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the

Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.

The Brit HaHadashah (New Testament) documents how Yeshua’s disciples witnessed Yeshua alive after his resurrection from the dead. They had not expected this to happen. By contrast, Chabadniks look everywhere to see the Rebbe. Many emissaries visit the Rebbe’s grave, year on year, to mourn.6 But he remains dead, and is not the messianic hope in whom Israel should put their trust. Yeshua alone merits this status.

end notes1 Schochet, J. I., ‘The Personality of Moshiach’. <Available at: http://www.chabad.org/library/moshiach/article_cdo/aid/101679/jewish/The-Personality-of-Mashiach.htm> [Accessed 16/10/12]

2 Nathan-Kazis, J., 2010, ‘On college campuses Chabad is the new Hillel’, Haaretz <available at: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/2.209/on-col lege-campuses-chabad-is-the-new-hillel-1.283994> [accessed 16/10/12]

3 Berger, D., 2001, The Rebbe The Messiah and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference, Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, Oxford: UK.

4 Kravel-Tovi, M., 2009, Religion, 39 (3), ‘To see the invisible messiah: Messianic socialization in the wake of Chabad.’

5 Student, G., 2002, Can The Rebbe be Moshiach? Proofs from Gemara, Midrash, and Rambam That the Rebbe Zt L Cannot Be Moshiach, Universal-Publishers, Florida: USA.

6 Fishkoff, S., 2004, ‘10 Years After His Death, Reach of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Continues To Grow,’ Jewish Telegraph Agency <Available at: http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=67432> Accessed: 16/10/12

Menachem Mendel Schneerson

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The Rev Charles Simeon was a prominent evangelical church leader and one of the founders of the Church Missionary Society in 1799 and the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (now CMJ) in 1809. This article was originally published in the July 1847 edition of the Jewish Herald.

FEW records of the “chamber where the good man meets his fate,” have presented a more striking instance of the power of faith, and the calmness of a mind stayed upon Jesus, than that with which we are favoured of the last days of the Rev. Charles Simeon, in the memoirs recently published by the Rev. W. Carus.

Our readers will be peculiarly gratified by the following paragraphs —

“His nights about this time were generally very restless, and he would employ himself in meditating on such portions of Scripture as particularly displayed the love and immutability and sovereignty of God, or else tended to deepen his sense of sin, and promote contrition of heart. But as the time approached for the meetings in behalf of the Society for the Conversion of

the Jews, and for the anniversary sermons at his church, his thoughts soon became engrossed with this great object to which he had so long devoted his warmest regards. He wished to deliver, he said, his dying testimony to ‘its immense importance’ and prepared to compose an address to be read to the under-graduates at their meeting on the following Monday. Being afraid he might not remember the texts which he wished to refer to when he came to dictate the address, he ordered his attendant to get his small Bible, and directed her where to find them; he desired her to read them out, and then mark them down, saying with great emphasis, ‘Take care of these texts, they are gold every one of them’ He then dictated the following:- ‘I wish to show you what grounds we have for humiliation, in that we have been so unlike to God in our regards towards his fallen people; see Jer. xii. 7, “I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hands of her enemies;” and again, (Rom. xi. 28,) “As touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sake.” And to bring you into a conformity to God in relation towards them, so far as it respects your efforts for their welfare and your joy in their prosperity, see Ezek. xxxvi.

22-24. “Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God; I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name’s sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went. And I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the heathen shall know that I am the Lord, saith the Lord God, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes. For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.” And again, (Jer. xxxii. 41,) “Yea, I will rejoice over them to

DYING-TESTIMONY OF THE REV. CHARLES SIMEON

ON THE DUTY OF CHRISTIANS TO THE JEWS(FROM REV. W. CARUS’S MEMOIR)

and RestoredRecycled

Old School

Rev. Charles Simeon 1759-1836

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do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul.” And lastly, (see Zeph. iii. 17,) “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty ; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love ; he will joy over thee with singing. I will gather them that are sorrowful for the solemn assembly, who are of them, to whom the reproach of it was a burden. Behold, at that time I will undo all that afflict thee; and I will save her that halteth, and gather her that was driven out; and I will get them praise and fame in every land where they have been put to shame. At that time will I bring you again, even in the time that I gather you; for I will make you a name and a praise among all people of the earth when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord.”

“On Sunday morning, October 30th, when I came to him, after hearing the sermons on behalf of the Jews, and began to speak to him of the forcible manner in which the matter had been treated by Mr. Noel, he immediately rejoined, by a comment on our ignorance, as well as want of feeling on the whole subject; and then, alluding to the texts before selected, he begged me to observe the strong expressions which God had been pleased to use, when describing His intense and unalterable regard for his ancient people. ‘See,’ said he, ‘how wonderfully be speaks; he calls them, 1. “The dearly beloved of my soul;” and then he says, 2, “I will plant them in this land assuredly, with my whole heart, and with my whole soul;’ and then again, 3. “He will rejoice over them with joy; he will rest in his love; he will joy over them with singing;” nay more, 4. “They shall be a name and a praise among all people of the earth.” ’ His thoughts on this, and the following days, as might be anticipated, were chiefly given to the subject of the Jews.”

How then should we pray?

The following enquiry, sent to the Editor of the Herald from a reader keen to know how he could better pray for the Jewish people appeared in the January 1847 edition of the magazine. The reply offered is as helpful and relevant today as it was 165 years ago. It is reprinted here for the benefit of those who share a similar concern for the salvation of the Jewish people.

PRAYER FOR JEWS

To THE EDITOR OF

THE JEWISH HERALD.

Sir I rejoice in the conviction that the spirit of prayer on behalf of Israel is very widely diffused, but I fear that our prayers are often general and vague. Will you, or one of your correspondents, give us some scriptural hints as to the specific blessings which we are directed, or warranted, or are to implore and expect for the seed of Jacob PETO

Note by EDITOR - Our friends may pray:-

1st For the conversion of the Jews generally, pleading the promises which refer to this blessing.

2nd For every instrumentality employed on their behalf, and particularly for the societies instituted with the view of bringing them to a knowledge of the truth, that the officers and committees may be endued with the Holy Ghost and with wisdom, and that the contributors may have a spirit of zeal, liberality, and prayer.

3rd For the church of Christ at large, that his people may be stirred up to prayer and to effort on behalf of the natural seed of Abraham.

4th For the missionaries who, either at home or abroad, are sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, that they may have, in an abundant measure, the spirit of their Master, may be instant in season and out of season, and may be encouraged by numerous instances of success.

5th For inquiring Jews, that they may be guided into all truth, may not be deterred by difficulties and trials, and may be led cordially to embrace Christ.

6th For Jewish converts, that they may be steadfast, may adorn the doctrine of God their Saviour, and may be made great blessings, especially to their brethren after the flesh.

7th For persecuted converts, that they may rejoice that they are accounted worthy to suffer for Christ, may be sustained and supported by strength from above, and that their persecutions may prove for the furtherance of the Gospel.

• 27One16

The following thoughts, taken from the July 1847 edition of the Herald, highlight the good character and example of the Gentile Centurion who loved the Jewish nation, for our benefit. Author unknown.

SUCH is the plea which the elders of the Jewish church made use of with Jesus on behalf of the centurion: “when they came to Jesus they besought him instantly, saying, that he was worthy for whom they should do this, for he loveth our nation, and he hath built us a synagogue.”

There are three particulars in this narrative which merit attention. The first is the interest which the elders of the Jewish church took in the centurion, and which prompted them to intercede with our Lord for him. The centurion “was a Gentile and a Roman soldier, and would, therefore, be naturally the object of the Jews’ aversion. In him they were reminded of the infringement made upon their liberties, and of the yoke which galled and oppressed them. But the clear expression of his personal love to them dispelled their prejudice, removed their animosity, and created in their hearts a regard to his welfare. Here, then, we see the powerful influence

of love on the heart of the Jew. It overcomes prejudice and bitter hatred, and produces love in return. We often hear of the feelings of enmity which the Jews entertain towards Christians, but is it not easily to be accounted for? Have they not been cruelly neglected, nay, oppressed and injured by the Gentile world for many ages? Who has cared for the soul of the Jew? Who has sought to alleviate his temporal distress? who has held out to him the hand of a brother? Human nature is the same in the Jew and in the Gentile. He who is irritated by injustice is not impervious to kindness. The heart which oppression has hardened, love may melt: sympathise with him in his sorrows, help him in his difficulties, rejoice with him in his happiness, and you make him your friend.

But we notice in the second place, the act of charity which was so peculiarly grateful to the Jewish mind, - he had built them a synagogue. The erection of such a building for the purpose of Divine worship could only be accomplished at a considerable cost, and thus it was a proof of his love. But in this disposal of his money the centurion evinced also a regard to their spiritual welfare. He rendered them important assistance in the

worship of God, and was the means of opening to them all the blessings which would arise from the services of the synagogue: they could not, therefore, but think that he loved them. But still more grateful shall that Christian be to the mind of a converted Jew who shall have been the means of bringing him to his long-wished-for Messiah, and of showing him that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, and the King of Israel.

This will introduce him to the favour which he once enjoyed and to all the love of God. Emphatically will he say, gratefully will he acknowledge that such a one hath loved him.

Thirdly, we notice the confidence which the character of the centurion gave to their appeal. “He is worthy.” They felt that such an argument would have weight with Christ, that he would be disposed to help the Gentile who had in so excellent a way helped the Jew. Nor were they mistaken. Our Lord himself loved the nation, and still loves it. Nor could he fail to feel an interest in one who had done it so good a service. In approaching him in supplication and prayer, happy are they who bear the character and have done the works of the good centurion.

‘HE LOVETH OUR NATION’

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‘I could stay out of heaven many years to see that

victorious triumphing Lord act that prophesied

part of His soul conquering love, in taking into His

kingdom the greater Sister, the Jews….Oh, what

joy and what glory would I judge it, if my heaven

should be suspended till I might have left to run

on foot to be a witness of that marriage-glory, and

see Christ put on the glory of His last-married

bride, and His last marriage love on earth; when

He shall enlarge His love-bed, and set it upon

the top of the mountains, and take in the Elder

Sister, the Jews, and the fulness of the Gentiles!’ Samuel Ruth erford

‘… of raising up a kingdom unto the Lord Jesus

Christ in this world … it is either expressed, or

clearly intimated, that the beginning of it must be

with the Jews.’ John Owen

the future restoration of the Jewish nation