How to Answer Jews Who Use the Old Testament to Deny Christ
Conversion
One of the better modern examples of a Jewish scholar attempting to counter Christian interpretations of Scripture is author David Klinghoffer in his book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus? (Doubleday, 2005, 223 pages). As such I will go through his book, passage by passage, to show that the Jewish interpretations are erroneous.
Robert Sungenis, Ph.D.
The Virgin Birth
In his dealing with many of the proof texts Christians use from Old Testament prophecy to back up the fulfillments that occur in the New Testament, Klinghoffer chalks them up to “the earliest Christians [who] searched the Hebrew prophets and found some saying of Isaiah that could be put to use, retrospectively salvaging Jesus’s aborted career as messiah” (p. 79); and proud of his attempts to debunk them, concludes with some bravado: “Pointing out the imprecision of proof texts like these, one feels almost unsporting. It’s too easy….As the song says, ‘Is that all there is?’” (p. 66). As we will see shortly, however, the “imprecision” comes from Klinghoffer.
First, I will deal with an argument Klinghoffer continually falls back on in his book (pp. 65, 167, 203, 212) as an example of shoddy Christian exegesis of the Old Testament, namely, his claim that Mary was not a virgin, and therefore Jesus could not be the Messiah stated in Isaiah 7:14. On p. 65, Klinghoffer says:
“But then what to do with Matthew’s first explicit citation from a Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, with its doctrine of the virgin birth? This is a famous mistranslation: ‘Behold, a virgin (Greek: parthenos) shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’….The writer was working from his text of the Greek scriptures, the Septuagint. However, the Hebrew original calls the lady in question not a ‘virgin,” but merely a ‘young woman’ (almah), who –as the word is used in Hebrew scripture—could be married or single, sexually experience or not. In Isaiah’s words, there is no intimation of a virgin birth.”
Although Klinghoffer does not mention it, a further claim of Jewish apologists is that if Isaiah 7:14 had a virgin in mind Isaiah would have used the Hebrew word bethulah (DLEZA), a more specific Hebrew term for a virgin. That fact notwithstanding, what Klinghoffer misses is: (a) as almah (DNLR) is used seven times in the Hebrew bible (Gen. 24:43; Ex. 2:8; Ps. 68:25; Pr. 30:19; Song. 1;3; 6:8; Is. 7:14), in no passage does the context refer to a woman who is married or has had sexual relations, hence, the word could easily be used of Mary; and (b) many of the seven passages specifically indicate that almah refers to an unmarried woman who has had no sexual relations. For example, in Gen. 24:43, almah is used of Rebecca before she is married to Isaac. Yet in the same context (Gen. 24:16), Rebecca is also referred to as a bethulah (“An exceedingly beautiful maid, a virgin, and not known to man”). The interchange of almah and bethulah shows that the former was also understood as a virgin. Additionally, Rebecca is also called a naarah (DXRP) (“maid”) in the same passage, which is used elsewhere to designate a virgin (e.g., Deut. 22:15-29 in which the husband suspects his wife was not a virgin prior to marriage). Not surprisingly, naarah and bethulah are also interchanged (Deut. 22:23, 28; Judg. 21:12; 1Kg. 1:2; Sir. 2:3). Hence, Klinghoffer’s argument is totally destroyed. The irony is noted in Klinghoffer’s boastful anecdote about the Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity but was later told by Scott Hillman, director of Jews for Judaism, that the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 did not refer to a virgin, to which the woman was “taken aback and exclaimed, ‘Mah pitom!’ (what gives!)” (p. 203). “What gives” is that for centuries Jews have either been misreading their own Hebrew bible or deliberately fabricating the evidence against the Blessed Virgin Mary. The above information isn’t hard to find. All it takes are a few cross-checks of the Hebrew words. For more information, see the accompanying footnote.[1]
Jesus’ Genealogy
In another place Klinghoffer tries to discredit the genealogy of Jesus by an argument from Nachmanides, which claims: “On what basis was Jesus to be identified with the final and greatest king from the line of Judah – that is, the Messiah? In the Gospel account, the man’s claim to descent from Judah was through his mother’s husband, Joseph. If he wasn’t Joseph’s son, he cannot be the Messiah. If he was Joseph’s son, he cannot be the son of God: ‘Understand, then, that they are refuted by their own words,’ by ‘the book of their error’ – namely, the New Testament” (p. 164). This, of course, begs the question: where does the Old Testament state that the Messiah’s line must necessarily come from the father and not the mother? The answer is, nowhere. Num. 27:3-8; 36:2-3 allow for both tribal identify and inheritance to go through a woman in the case when there is no male descendant.[2] Hence, the Jews are refuted by their own words, the book of their truth, namely, the Old Testament. Similar objections have been raised by other Jews, namely, that the Messiah must come through Solomon’s line, not Nathan’s (the line leading to Mary). But in no place does the Old Testament say that it must be through Solomon.
Out of Egypt
Klinghoffer also belittles Matthew’s attempt [Matt. 2:15] to make Jesus’ departure from Egypt (after he had been sent there because of Herod’s attempt to kill him) as a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” He writes: “the ‘son’ was not Jesus or the Messiah, but Israel, as the rest of the verse from the prophet makes clear: ‘When Israel was a lad I loved him, and from Egypt I called forth my son’ – a reference to the Exodus” (p. 66). Was Matthew oblivious to the fact that Hosea 11:1 referred to Israel, or is Klinghoffer oblivious to the fact that Old Testament prophecy often has a dual fulfillment? I can assure you that the latter is the case. We already have a case of dual fulfillment in Isaiah 7:14 wherein the prophecy can apply both to the birth of Mahershalalhashbaz (Is. 8:2, 8) and the birth of Christ from the virgin Mary (Matt. 1:23). The dual method of fulfillment was already taught to the Jews in Genesis. For example, in Gen. 17:8, Abraham received a grand promise from God: “And I will give to YOU, and to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God." Notice that the passage includes both Abraham and his descendants as recipients of the land of Canaan, but Abraham never stepped foot in the land of Canaan. According to the rest of Scripture, Abraham won’t receive the promise of land until he is raised from the dead in the heavenly Canaan (cf. Heb. 11:13-16, 39-40; Rom. 4:13; Is. 65:17-25). But Scripture also assures us that Abraham’s descendants had, as God promised, received the earthly land of Canaan (cf. Jos. 21:43-45; 1Kings 8:56; Neh. 9:7-8). Thus, the prophecy of Gen. 17:8 is fulfilled in two different ways, just as Hosea 11:1, Isaiah 7:14, many other Old Testament passages.[3]
The Nazarene
Klinghoffer also objects to how Matthew speaks of Jesus as fulfilling the prophecy of being a “Nazarene” [Matt. 2:23]. He writes:
“Matthew then offers another apparent citation of Isaiah. The Gospel says, ‘And Jesus went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, “He shall be called a Nazarene.”’ The prophets say no such thing. Perhaps, as scholars suggest, Matthew had in mind Isaiah’s reference to the Messiah [in Is 11:1 in which] the Hebrew for ‘shoot,’ netzer, sounds kind of like ‘Nazareth.’ If so… ‘A staff will emerge from Jesse and Nazareth will spout [sic] from his roots,’ which makes no sense” (p. 66).
The problem here is that Klinghoffer has not paid close attention to what Matthew actually says. Matthew does not attribute the saying to Isaiah. In fact, he uses the plural “prophets” indicating that it was more than one prophet who said it (cf. John 1:45, Mark 14:67; Acts 24:5). Second, Matthew does not claim that the saying was written but that it was “spoken.” Apparently, Matthew is following a traditional saying among the prophets at large. Klinghoffer shouldn’t be surprised at this, since even the Palestinian Talmud refers to Jesus as Yeshu Hannotzri (i.e., Jesus the Nazarene), a fact Klinghoffer himself admits on page 73.
The Donkey and the Colt
Klinghoffer makes quite a big deal over the fact that Matthew says Jesus came riding into Jerusalem “mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.” He claims that
“The proof text is confused on two counts. First in what’s presented as a saying of ‘the prophet,’ there are actually the sayings of two prophets. ‘Tell the daughter of Zion’ is a phrase from Isaiah; the rest is from Zechariah. Second, in Hebrew, Zechariah speaks not of two animals, but one, ‘a donkey, a foal, a calf of she-donkeys.’ The colt thrown in there by the Gospel is extraneous” (p. 78).
First, there is no “confusion,” since Matthew often takes the liberty of paraphrasing or conflating texts in order to make a theological point, while mentioning only the prophet that has the most relevance to the issue at hand (e.g., Matt. 27:9). The reason for the substitution of Is. 62:11 at the beginning of the Zechariah quote is that Israel must be told that the king is coming before she can rejoice, for, according to the passage, Jesus is “telling” the Gospel “to the ends of the earth” (Is. 61:11a). Matthew also wants to make use of the term “Zion” instead of Zechariah’s “Jerusalem,” since the former represented the highest point in Jerusalem, above the Jerusalem temple. By his substitutions, Matthew is telling us that a change is coming. The Old is being superseded by the New. This change is also represented by the ass and the colt, the former representing the Old Covenant, while the latter, upon which “no one ever sat,” represents the New Covenant. Practically speaking, Jesus rode only upon the colt (which is why Mark and Luke mention only the colt), but the colt would not have come without its mother, the full grown ass. Hence, Klinghoffer’s claim that the “colt thrown in there by the Gospel is extraneous….the Hebrew doesn’t speak of two animals” is grammatically erroneous.[4]
The Atonement
As noted earlier, there is a constant drumbeat in Klinghoffer’s book that the Jews don’t need Jesus as a savior, much less a savior who was a man. In one instance he writes:
“The purpose of the Incarnation, specifically of death suffered on the cross, was to address the primordial sinful nature of man. Adam and Eve had sinned against the Lord—an infinite crime. This required an atonement of sacrifice of infinite scale, the sacrifice of God’s own Son. But the Jews asked how the Crucifixion met this requirement. Only the sacrifice of a God can be called infinite—but a God cannot die. If the sacrifice was not of a God, but of a man or a God-man, then it was not infinite. Thus, the alleged purpose of the terrible event was not met” (p. 176).
The problem here is with Klinghoffer’s casual use of the word “infinite” (e.g., “infinite crime,” “infinite scale,” “infinite sacrifice”). He is using the term in a quantitative and impersonal sense, as if it’s part of a mathematical equation. But Scripture does not refer to Christ’s atonement as an “infinite” sacrifice. Even Catholics sometimes get confused by this notion.[5] When various Catholic theologians use the term “infinite,” it is for the sole purpose of giving a word picture of the incalculable separation between God’s majesty and man’s frailty. But in regards to what was actually necessary to atone for sin, a sacrifice that is “most fitting” or “most perfect” is more theologically accurate (Heb. 9:11-13; 10:1-8). That is, whatever type of sacrifice God had previously determined would be sufficient to satisfy his justice and honor, so it was; nothing less, nothing more. [6] Christ, for example, didn’t have to spend an “eternity in hell to pay for the sins of an elect,” as the Calvinists teach. Christ didn’t need to become “sin itself” as the Baptists teach. Christ wasn’t “vicariously punished for our sins” as the Lutherans teach. Rather, Christ was a sinless propitiation in order to appease the Father’s wrath so that the Father would provide an open door for men, of their own free will, to accept His grace and be saved. As it stands, Scripture says that the only thing required was the suffering and death of Christ.[7] Whether one thinks of it as finite or infinite makes little difference. It was sufficient to appease the wrath of God. But contrary to Klinghoffer’s objection, the divine nature of Christ did not die. Christ is two separate natures and two separate wills, with no confusion or mixture. Hence, what happens to one nature does not necessarily happen to the other. The sinless human nature of Christ died, and in this way satisfied the need for an unblemished human victim to make the atonement for mankind.
In a related objection, Klinghoffer says:
“…there was no need to atone for the great sin by God’s offering up the incarnate second person of the Trinity. God can forgive any crime, finite or infinite, if He wishes, but Christians made it sound as if He were bound by some law beyond Himself, as if He could not forgive mankind without letting his Son die on the cross. Of course there is no law beyond God” (p. 176).
Despite what Klinghoffer heard from Christians that made him think that “it sounded as if He were bound by some law beyond Himself,” the sound was only in Klinghoffer’s head, since Christianity never taught such a thing. God wanted an Atonement because of the nature of God, a personal and honorable Being who is insulted and offended by our sin, but who, although willing to forgive, will not do so unless his honor is upheld and the insult appeased, hence the need for an Atonement. Klinghoffer would have known this just by reading a few passages of the Hebrew Bible. In Numbers 25, for example, Israel had sinned grievously by engaging in temple prostitution with the Moabites. In the midst of this sin, Phineas took a spear and killed one of the fornicating couples. God’s assessment of Phineas’ act was as follows. Notice the stress on appeasing God’s wrath and preserving his honor:
"Phineas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites; for he was as zealous as I am for my honor among them, so that in my zeal I did not put an end to them. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites" (Num. 25:11-13).
There are many narratives like this in the Old Testament. One of the first appears in the incident we discussed earlier, Exodus 32, when the Israelites had worshiped the golden calf. As we noted, God had determined to destroy the whole nation, until Moses stepped in to intercede for them (Ex. 32:9-14). How was Moses able to intercede? Did he need an “infinite” sacrifice? No, he needed one that was sufficient enough to appease God’s wrath, and he could only perform it if he himself was cleansed from sin. Of the two requirements, it was said that Moses was on such good terms with God that they would talk “face to face” (Ex. 33:9-11); and as for appeasing God’s wrath, Moses gives us his own description of what he had to do:
“Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord’s sight and so provoking him to anger. I feared the anger and wrath of the Lord, for he was angry enough with you to destroy you. But again the Lord listened to me. And the Lord was angry enough with Aaron to destroy him, but at that time I prayed for Aaron too” (Deut. 9:18-20).
Psalm 22
Klinghoffer writes:
On Psalm 22:16, ‘they pierced my hands and my feet (King James Version), Christians here found a famous example of an explicit prefiguration of Jesus’s sufferings….Nitzachon Vetus answered that the word given in the Latin translation as ‘they pierced’ is written in the Hebrew original not as karu (‘they pierced’), but as ka’ari (“like a lion”). The entire verse is properly translated, ‘For dogs have surrounded me; a pack of evildoers has enclosed me, like a lion [at] my hands and my feet.’ We could cite many other examples of allegedly Christological prophetic citations, to each of which the rabbis had their answer. On point after point, Christian exegesis was found to be dubious to anyone who could read the Bible for himself in its original language” (pp. 168-169).
First, this objection seems more like a red herring, since just two verses later, Ps. 22:18, the famous line, “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” was fulfilled verbatim at the Cross (cf. Matt. 27:35; Luke 23:34; John 19:24), but Klinghoffer has nothing to say about it. Second, the proper text of Ps. 22:16 is much more difficult to discern than Klinghoffer is making it to be. We don’t know whether the Hebrew is always the more accurate text, since our only extant copies come from the Masoretes of the 10th century AD, whereas the Greek Septuagint (LXX) was written mostly in the 3rd and 2nd century BC and copies still survive today. Accordingly, the LXX text of Ps. 22:16 reads: w[ruxan cei:ravV mou kai; povdaV (“they pierced my hands and my feet”). Where would the LXX have derived this reading, since the Latin version that Klinghoffer cites did not yet exist until the 5th century AD under Jerome? It is probably no coincidence, then, that the Hebrew word DXK (kara) means the same as the Greek w[ruxan (“pierce” or “dig”). Klinghoffer doesn’t know whether kara is the true text or not, since the various Hebrew manuscripts themselves are not clear on Ps. 22:16. There are three variants: IX@K (ka’ari), EX@K (ka’aru), and EXK (karu), which is similar to DXK (kara).[8] The first, IX@K (ka’ari), is the one Klinghoffer chooses as the correct word, but he has no certainty of this assertion.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, he is right. What we have, then, is the word IX@ (“lion”) with the prefix K, which means “like,” so the phrase would read “like a lion,” and it appears in three other places in the Hebrew (Num. 24:9; Is. 38:13; Ezk 22:25). The problem arrives when one has to make sense out of “like a lion” with “my hands and my feet” in Ps. 22:16. Klinghoffer does so by inserting the preposition “at” between the two phrases, but it’s not in the Hebrew. Consequently, we have at least three possibilities for why “pierced” was used in most translations: (a) the word “like” in “like a lion” implies that as lions bite through human flesh, so the soldiers put nails in Jesus’ hands and feet, or (b) the form IX@K (“like a lion”) is corrupt and should be DXK (“pierced”), or (c) the LXX’s w[ruxan (“pierced”) is the oldest and correct version and we must ignore all the Hebrew variants. All of this information would have helped the reader to see that deciding upon the correct word for Ps. 22:16 is a difficult task, at least before Klinghoffer concluded with: “On point after point, Christian exegesis was found to be dubious to anyone who could read the Bible for himself in its original language” (p. 169).
Jesus Didn’t Do Anything
One of Klinghoffer’s more common complaints is that Jesus and his Gospel never really fulfilled many passages in the Old Testament, such as Jer. 31:34 (“They shall teach no more every man his neighbor…saying, ‘Know the Lord, for they shall all know me”), or Is. 52:13 (“Behold, my servant will succeed; he will be exalted and become high and exceedingly lofty”); or Micah 5:1 (“but from you someone will emerge for Me to be ruler over Israel”) or Is. 11:6-9 (“And the wolf shall lie down with the lamb…they will not destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord”) (pp. 160-162). Let’s address a few of these passages and show how they were fulfilled:
Jeremiah 31:34 (“They shall teach no more every man his neighbor”) is quoted in Hebrews 8:7-13 as being fulfilled in the New Testament period and there is good reason for this. The revelation given by Moses and the prophets was both incomplete and disseminated in primitive ways. A prophet, for example, would preach in the temple to a few scores of people and these hearers would go out and tell others, and so on to the rest of the nation, a very laborious and time-consuming task. As noted earlier, even the written law was hid from most Jews until the late seventh century (2Chr. 34:14), and the surrounding nations had practically nothing of God’s revelation. But all this changed with the advent of Christ. Beginning at Pentecost, the revelation spread far and wide, first to Jerusalem and then to the “uttermost parts of the world” (Acts 1:8; Matt. 28:19-20; Col. 1:6). The final canon of Scripture was adopted by the Church and thus the peoples were no longer dependent on the oral word from the prophet. Everyone had access to this revelation, from children (Jer. 31:34’s “the least of them”) to theologians and clerics (“the greatest of them”). The same thing was prophesied in Is. 11:9; 54:13; Hab. 2:14; Joel 2:28, and it is the very reason Jesus said in John 6:45: “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from my Father, comes to Me” (cf. 1John 2:20, 27). Today, who has not heard of Jesus Christ, save for some remote tribe of pygmies in Africa? Even an oppressive regime has to work very hard to keep Christianity out. The Bible is the best-selling book year after year; there are churches on every street corner in some countries. If these things are not a fulfillment of Jer. 31:34, what else could be? Wasn’t it Klinghoffer himself who said that the acceptance of Christ by the nations was “the turning point in Western history”?
The best Klinghoffer can do with Jeremiah 31’s new covenant is to say it “is simply the ancient system of commandments, changed only by the fact that the Jewish people bring to it a renewed commitment,” and then quotes Jer. 31:35 as proof: “If these laws could be removed from before me…so could the seed of Israel cease from being a people before me forever” (p. 127). The first problem is that the context is not talking about the Mosaic law but the physical laws that govern the circuits of the stars in the heavens (Jer. 31:35-37). Second, practically the whole book of Jeremiah shows that Israel did not keep the covenant, much less renew it (Jer. 11:2-10; 22:9-12; 34:10-18). It is in the midst of Jeremiah’s tirades that the Jews are carted off to Babylon. Although the law was reestablished under Ezra and Nehemiah, this is not called a “new covenant” in their respective books, but the same “law of Moses” (Ezr. 3:2). The phrase “new covenant” only appears in Jeremiah 31 and it is contrasted against the Mosaic law (Jer. 31:32), not a renewed Mosaic law. Klinghoffer also complains: “if this was really the new ‘Torah of Jesus’ being referred to, why does the prophet not mention the other nations who supposedly will also have Jesus’s law of love inscribed within them?” (p. 168). But Jeremiah does mention the nations. He says in Jer. 31:7-14 that the nations are included in the redemption and are God’s mouthpiece to declare that Israel will be gathered and Jacob ransomed. It is the same thing about the nations that Isaiah and Hosea taught (Is 11:12; 49:6; Hos. 1:10-11). Moreover, the “Israel” that is saved by the New Covenant is not, as Klinghoffer believes, the nation of Israel, but the remnant of believers who come out of the nation of Israel, as Isaiah and Jeremiah made plain (cf. Is 10:20-22; 46:3; Jer. 23:3; 31:7; Rom 11:5-10). So intertwined are the houses of Israel and Judah with the nations in God’s redemption that Amos 9:11-12 prophecies that the restoration of “David’s tabernacle” will include “Edom and all the nations.” Even Klinghoffer himself says at one point: “There is even a certain sense in which such nations…are to be considered under the designation of ‘Israel’” (p. 181).
Whereas Klinghoffer complains that Christ didn’t fulfill Isaiah 52:13 because “the only place that Jesus ‘was lifted up and exalted was the tree on which they hung him’” (p. 161), what he obviously ignores is that this was only for three hours, and for the express purpose of offering a sacrifice for David Klinghoffer’s sins, a sacrifice Klinghoffer allows his own messiah (Israel of Isaiah 53) to do, but doesn’t allow Christ to do. Afterward Christ was raised from the dead and exalted as he sat at the right hand of God in majesty. Conversely, after Israel was rejected and despised, it was never exalted.
Isaiah 11:6
Klinghoffer also complains that Isaiah 11:6 (“the wolf shall lie down with the lamb”) wasn’t fulfilled, and if it is “understood allegorically, i.e., that at that time evil and righteous men will live together, such situation would be nothing new” (p. 162). Nothing new? When did Israel ever enjoy peace with the nations surrounding it, except in the days of Solomon, a brief interlude of 40 years out of 2000 years? Conversely, as the New Testament Church grew in influence and power it competed handily with the secular powers, often times having the major influence over the people. For almost 1800 years the pope and the emperor ruled the world side-by-side, the lamb with the wolf. Even today, the church has a marked influence on the world as secular leaders seek out the advice and approval of the Roman Pontiff on various issues. As for Klinghoffer’s supposed fulfillment, does he expect literal wolves and lambs to exist in the afterlife?
Klinghoffer quotes the Jew Nachmanides saying:
Yet while Christians asserted that the Messiah had come, the world had not changed its cruel, violent nature….‘from the days of Jesus until now, the whole world has been full of violence and plundering, and Christians are greater spillers of blood than all the rest of the peoples, and they are also practicers of adultery and incest’” (p. 160).
But where did Christ promise that there would be no violence on earth? Christ promised to save us from this wicked world, not make this world our home. This world has been cursed with sin and death, and it will not be cured of those ills until a new world is created (cf. Rom. 5:12-20; 1Cor. 15:1-56). It is the very reason Jesus said to Pilate, “my kingdom is not of this world.” But Klinghoffer complains: “This was not what the Hebrew Bible had promised for the messianic future” (p. 63). Of course, if one insists on disassociating all the references in the Hebrew Bible to the need for an atonement of mankind’s sin before the glory of the “messianic future” could take place (Isaiah 53; Dan. 7:13-14; 9:24-27; Psalm 22, etc.), it certainly would be difficult to see that the Messiah’s mission had to occur in two stages. But this has been the problem with the Jews since their inception. They have always been looking for some kind of earthly utopia in which all their physical needs would be satisfied and they would be rulers over the nations, but without the Messiah first atoning for their sins. This is why they rejected Christ at his First Coming. As Klinghoffer puts it:
Jews had always believed that the world would indeed be fixed – when the Messiah comes….enlightened Jews held Christians at fault for thinking, since the Messiah had already come, the world was satisfactory as it was. Joseph Klausner (1878-1958), historian and Jewish nationalist…wrote that ‘the Jews can and must march at the head of humanity on the road of personal and social progress, on the road to ethical perfection…The Jewish Messianic faith is the seed of progress, which has been planted by Judaism throughout the whole world’ (p. 199).[9]
This is little different than Israeli prime minister David ben Gurion’s vision for the Jews in his interview with Look magazine on January 16, 1962: “In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the scene of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.” To accomplish this superiority, Klinghoffer and his followers must make Jesus a fraud and a failure in the minds of Christians:
So he performed faith healings. So he’s even reported to have revived two individuals thought to have died. Very nice! But let him do what the ‘son of man,’ the promised Messiah, had been advertised as being destined to do from Daniel back through Ezekiel and Isaiah and the rest of the prophets. Let him rule as a monarch, his kingship extending over ‘all peoples, nations and languages. Let him return the exiles and rebuild the Temple and defeat the oppressors and establish universal peace, as the prophets also said….But let Jesus come up with the real messianic goods – visible to all rather than requiring us to accept someone’s assurance that, for example, he was born in Bethlehem – and then we’ll take him seriously” (pp. 71, 102-103).
Interestingly enough, Klinghoffer rejects the “two stage” concept of Christ’s mission even though he admits earlier in the book that the Talmud’s tractate Sukkah makes reference to two Messiahs, one called “Messiah son of Joseph” who eventually dies, and the other “Messiah son of David” who lives. Moreover, B. Sanhedrin 98B cites in reference to “Messiah son of Joseph” the same passage, Zech. 12:10, that the Gospel of John (19:37) cites at the crucifixion. None of this impresses Klinghoffer, however, because in the end, “a murdered messiah would have seemed a contradiction in terms” and “completely untethered to what the scriptural text [Zech. 12:10] actually says” (pp. 83-85). Nevertheless, he seems to have a tinge of guilt for his hardnosed position, asking himself: “Doesn’t that suggest precisely the sort of willfulness, the refusal to believe in Christ despite all the evidence, that the Gospels themselves attribute to the Jews?” He admits that his only escape from this accusation is the reliance on Jewish oral tradition (which apparently tells him to deny a suffering Messiah but which he never proves to be uncorrupted); and that “Christian doctrines…need a firmer support in Hebrew scriptures than the imaginative interpretations of prophecy that the Gospels in fact offer” (pp. 85-86), a charge we have clearly rebuffed in this review by demonstrating quite easily that it is Klinghoffer himself who has no firm support from the Hebrew scriptures.
As for Klinghoffer’s complaint that Christians commit sin, this is no news. The New Testament warns us of that possibility on almost every page. In fact, Paul uses the sinful experiences of the Jews and their subsequent punishment and damnation as an example for Christians not to fall into the same consequences, warning that they, too, can be cut off from God (cf. 1Cor. 10:1-12; Rom. 11:23-25; Hebrews 3-4). Christianity has nothing to hide. As it was in Israel so it is in the Church – only those who have faith and obedience will be saved, regardless if they go by the name Jew or Christian.
Contradictions in Luke?
In another place Klinghoffer complains: “In Luke [17:21], he [Jesus] says that the kingdom ‘is not coming with signs to be observed’ but rather ‘the kingdom of God is in the midst of you’ – yet four chapters later he says that observable signs will indeed be seen, such as ‘the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.’ Which is it?....a tendency to walk both sides of the street simultaneously. Heads I win, tails you lose” (p. 64). Obviously, Klinghoffer, as the Pharisees did on many occasions, hopes to catch Jesus in a contradiction, but as it was with the Pharisees, Klinghoffer is the one who gets trapped. We can start by pointing out that it is not only “four chapters later.” It also is in the immediately following verses, Lk. 17:22-37, that Jesus describes the observable signs of his coming. Because the signs are part of the context, Jesus is making a specific point when he introduces the topic in vr. 21 with the additional fact that the “kingdom of God is in the midst of you,” and the point hits right at the heart of the Pharisees’ problem. They, like Klinghoffer, have a total misconception of the kingdom. Because of their distorted reading of the Hebrew Bible, they are looking only for a physical and political kingdom in which they can rule the world, as it was in the time of Solomon, and they want it ushered in with pomp and circumstance so that every eye can see and bow down to them. But as they look from their unspiritual observation towers for the physical kingdom, the Pharisees have hardly a clue of the internal spiritual kingdom of virtue and grace that is its real essence. It is right in front of their eyes, but they can’t see it because they are blind. This was Jesus’ point in verse 21, but Klinghoffer totally missed it.
The Scriptures Are “Cryptic”
Klinghoffer’s main lines of argument are as follow:
“What are the key points that a reasonably informed Jew would have kept in mind in evaluating Jesus and, later, the early church? Judaism of the first century…can be boiled down to four points: that scripture is cryptic, that God is One, that religious commandments are the eternal essence of Judaism, and that a Davidic messiah may be expected” (p. 24).
Additionally, Klinghoffer also refers to “the cryptic text of the Pentateuch” with “its true meaning indiscernible” (p. 59), or “the text was merely shorthand, code, a mnemonic” (pp. 85, 147) unless interpreted by oral tradition “that originated at Mount Sinai, from the mind of God Himself” (p. 85). True, oral revelation certainly would have helped to explicate the written revelation, as long as the former remained confined to God’s actual words and did not evolve into man’s accretions. Klinghoffer assumes that the oral revelation could skip through the apostate generations of Israel without due harm. But as we saw earlier, even the written word had suffered emasculation until Hilkiah rediscovered it in the reign of Josiah, one of the last kings of Judah before the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC (2Chr. 34:14). How could the oral revelation from Sinai, which is even more difficult to preserve, have both escaped the same emasculation and prohibited human accretions? Klinghoffer treats oral tradition as if it was impervious to corruption, which is probably why he never mentions Jesus’ most illustrative example of how it could become so – the Corban law (see Mark 7:9-13).[10] Additionally, because of Israel and Judah’s continual apostasy, God himself limited the revelations he would give to the people (cf. Amos 8:11; 6:10; Is. 28:10-13). By the time of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the genuine word of God is so suppressed and the accretions of man are so abundant that Sinai is hardly recognizable. The problem, as Jesus pointed out to the Jews many times, is oral tradition began to contradict the Scripture, making up its own doctrines and practices. It wasn’t tradition, per se, that Jesus condemned (Mark 7:1-13) but the traditions the Jews invented that set aside Scripture.
Did Jesus Break the Sabbath?
Interestingly enough, for all Klinghoffer’s claims that Scripture is “cryptic” and cannot be easily deciphered without oral tradition, he later contradicts that stance by saying “the foundations of Jewish practice and doctrine are almost without exception stated plainly in the Hebrew Scriptures” (p. 86). In reality, it wouldn’t matter if Scripture was “cryptic” or “stated plainly,” since the Pharisees, by Klinghoffer’s own admission, argued with Jesus over such hair-splitting minutia of law that it’s a wonder Jesus didn’t just throw up his hand in utter disgust. Unfortunately, Klinghoffer’s own assessment of the encounters shows that he persists in the same pernickety mentality:
Healing on the Sabbath is a topic on which Jesus and his fellow Jews reportedly disagreed. In Jewish tradition, there is no problem with faith healing on the Sabbath since it involves no preparing of medications, which would be a problem. When Jesus healed a blind man by making a salve [medication] and touching it to his eyes, the Pharisees again objected: ‘This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.’ By the light of [oral] tradition, they were right. While the written Torah says nothing about using a medical salve, the oral Torah rules it out except in case of an emergency, which this clearly was not” (p. 57).
We have a good clue as to why Jesus purposely used the clay and spittle to heal the man instead of healing him instantaneously. He knew that oral tradition had made a superfluous distinction between healing with medicine and healing by miracle, and he wanted to expose this cancerous accretion for what it was. A day or so prior to this the Jews tried to kill Jesus in the temple, and they were relying on their oral tradition as justification (John 5-8:59). There was no better way of exposing their hypocrisy than by demonstrating how ridiculous their oral tradition was. As Jesus said in another place: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). That Klinghoffer would actually defend the Pharisees on this point of minutia shows that he is not seeking for a religion of the highest ethical and moral principles (for who in their right mind would begrudge medicine to sick people on the Sabbath, emergency or not?), but the institution of Judaism in all its mind-numbing and tedious trappings. Klinghoffer wants a religion of ritual and exclusionism, not a religion of loving God and loving one’s neighbor. Once again, that is why God said: “I gave them statues that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live” (Ezk. 20:25) or, “But if you had known what this means ‘I desire compassion and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent” (Matt. 12:7).
Deuteronomy 6:4: God is One
As for the “God is One” issue, Klinghoffer’s main argument is based on the traditional plea of the Jews found in Deut. 6:4: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is the One and Only” (p. 29).[11] The implication, of course, is that if Jesus is God, we then have an additional God to the “Lord” of Deut. 6:4, which automatically disqualifies Jesus as divine. The problem with this interpretation is that the context of Deuteronomy 6 does not concern the internal makeup of God (i.e., whether God can or cannot be three Persons in one God) but the contrast between the God of Israel and all the false gods of the nations. Since the Israelites had already shown themselves to be prone toward accepting these false gods (as they exhibited in Exodus 32 with the golden calf), consequently, as they are about to enter the land of Canaan (a land full of false gods), God wants to reinforce in their minds that He is the only God and He will not tolerate any more idol worship from the Jews. Interestingly enough, the only other time the Old Testament uses the same grammatical form as it appears in Deut. 6:4 is in Zech. 14:9 (“in that day there shall be one Lord”)[12] and for the same reason, for Zechariah’s context concerns God’s coming reign over all the earth, not the internal makeup of God Himself. God will be “One” because all the false gods of the nations will be destroyed and everyone will bow the knee to Christ alone (Phil. 2:9-11).
The Messiah of Daniel 9:25-26
As for the Jews expectation of the Davidic Messiah in the distant future, Klinghoffer must first set aside any link in Old Testament prophecy to Christ as the Messiah. In his attempt, Klinghoffer tries to tone down the meaning of the word “Messiah” in Hebrew. He says that it can apply to any “anointed” person or group. True enough. But the question Klinghoffer must convincingly negate is whether the “Messiah” of Daniel 9:25-26 refers to Jesus Christ, and in this he miserably fails. He claims that because the word “cut off (yi’karet) is the common Hebrew designation for spiritual excision (karet), visited by heaven on egregious sinners” (p. 33), he finds it “ironic that Christians apply Daniel 9:26 to their savior” (p. 225). So here we have two Hebrew words, Messiah (GI[N) and karet (ZXK). Both are very general in their usage, yet it is interesting to see Klinghoffer keep Messiah as a general term (i.e., it can apply to any anointed person or group) but make karet an exclusive term (it can only apply to “egregious sinners”). Karet simply means “to cut.” It appears 277 times in the Old Testament and is used in reference to cutting good, bad, and indifferent things. It is used of cutting off clothes, cutting down trees, making a covenant, and many other applications that are not dependent on the moral quality of the thing being cut. Just because many of the verses refer to cutting out bad things does not mean that karet only refers to bad things. Daniel 9:25-26 simply means that the Messiah was killed; his life was cut off.[13]
The Catholic Church
At another point, Klinghoffer attempts to bring the Catholic Church to his aid regarding the Messiah: “More recently, in 2002, the Catholic Church went even further in recognizing Judaism’s dignity, declaring that the ‘the Jewish messianic wait is not in vain’” (p. 190). Despite Klinghoffer’s claim, the quote about the “Jewish messianic wait” does not represent official “Catholic Church” teaching, since it was written by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, an arm of the Vatican that was stripped of its authority on doctrine back in 1971 by Paul VI.[14] The PBC is now merely an advisory arm of the Vatican. Although the then Cardinal Ratzinger signed the PBC essay titled: “The Jewish People and the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible,” his signature neither makes it official Catholic teaching, nor did the pope give it any official standing in Catholic Church doctrine. That being said, the PBC’s statement that the “Jewish messianic wait is not in vain” is a typical example of the theological liberalism and biblical distortion for which that institution has become infamous. Cardinal Ratzinger himself cleared up the distortion when he was “asked if Jews must, or should, acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah” and “told an interviewer, ‘We believe that. The fact remains, however, that our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the Messiah of Israel.’”[15] Obviously, then, someone needs to tell the PBC that, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, the only “wait” Jews can have for a Messiah is Jesus Christ, otherwise, the wait is certainly “in vain.” As it stands, non-Christian Jews are not waiting for Jesus Christ. They are waiting for the G-D of Judaism who is anyone but Jesus Christ. The PBC’s attempt to slide this potential heretical statement by everyone’s notice was demonstrated by the fact that it was not publicized in its original Italian version. It made headlines only after that the Italian news agency ANSA printed a small report of it on a Wednesday in January 2002 after it was noticed in an Italian book store.
Isaiah 53
Klinghoffer then goes to work on the famous passage of Isaiah 53, which he says “has probably been adduced more often and with greater conviction in support of Jesus’s claim than any other passage” (p. 164). First Klinghoffer claims that neither the title “Messiah” nor “king” nor “son of David” nor “any other expression that would point to a messianic interpretation” appear in the passage. Of course, this objection only shows that when such expressions do appear in Scripture, Klinghoffer should perform due diligence and give them a messianic interpretation, but rarely does. As we noted, the word “Messiah” appears in Dan. 9:25-26, but Klinghoffer quickly tries to arrest any hint that it might apply to a savior, much less Christ, choosing rather, to say that it refers to “an egregious sinner,” all based on his fallacious lexical analysis of the Hebrew word karet. But let’s take Klinghoffer’s criterion of missing names and titles to heart. The word “God” does not appear in the book of Esther, yet Esther is the basis for one of the highest Jewish holydays, Purim, a feast to which Klinghoffer refers on page 53. Perhaps Klinghoffer should reject that holyday for the same reason he rejects the divine identity of the “servant” in Isaiah 53 – a missing name. The fact remains, Klinghoffer himself said that “scripture is cryptic” (p. 24), so it should come as no surprise that Isaiah might be a little more cryptic in chapter 53 than Klinghoffer is willing to admit. It would be better than resigning himself to conclude Isaiah 53 is “a most peculiar way for a writer to compose his work” (p. 167).
Irrespective of the cryptic element of Isaiah 53, Klinghoffer prefers the interpretation of Rabbi Solomon bar Isaac (aka Rashi, 1040-1105), i.e., that the “servant was none other than the Jewish people,” citing passages such as Is 41:8 (“Israel, my servant”) or Is 44:2 (“My servant, Jacob”). But the issue is not whether these particular passages refer to Israel (since they clearly do) but whether the “servant” of Isaiah 53 refers to Israel. Whereas Isaiah 53 does not specify “Messiah” or “son of David,” by the same token it doesn’t specify “Israel” either, yet Israel is conspicuously mentioned before and after chapter 53 (e.g., Is 52:12; 54:5). Obviously, Isaiah is avoiding the name “Israel” in chapter 53 as much as he is avoiding the name “Messiah” or “son of David” in Isaiah 52 and 54.
Klinghoffer tries to make a big issue of the fact that in Isaiah 53 many words are chosen which portray the servant as “sick” or a “victim of disease.” Although Klinghoffer agrees that such minutia “may seem like hairsplitting,” nevertheless, he concludes from his word study that “it’s natural to assume that Isaiah is speaking about a sick person, which Jesus was not” (p. 206). It would be “natural” only if the Hebrew words chosen referred exclusively to sickness. In Is 53:3, for example, the description: “a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity” is not in a context of physical maladies but of personal rejection and mental anguish, since vr. 3 reads: “He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, One of those from whom men hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem” (NAB). Hence, it is no surprise that “infirmity” is a Hebrew word (DLG) that is frequently used to refer to mental anguish or grief.[16] It is used again in Is 53:10: “the LORD was pleased to crush him in infirmity” or “grief.” What better crushing in grief could there be than when Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane pleading to the Father for another way, under such strain that his sweat poured out like great drops of blood, and which eventually led to the scourging at the pillar and the walk to Calvary? In fact, all the instances of Hebrew words that Klinghoffer questions in Isaiah 53 (except for vr. 3) are prophetically confined to the immediate events leading up to and including the crucifixion, not Christ’s prior experiences. In the end, of course, Klinghoffer has to admit that “there is enough ambiguity, enough veiled and cryptic language in the prophets, to allow the scripture to be so construed.” Klinghoffer just finds it “very hard to believe” (p. 210).
Is it any harder to believe than the sinful nation of Israel being the Messiah? Of the many things that are not “cryptic” in Isaiah 53, the passage speaks of an individual who “did no violence” and was “without deceit” (53:9), and can thus atone for the sins of the people by being sacrificed as a “guilt offering,” the antitype to the sacrifice of unblemished lambs in Leviticus. But how and when was Israel, the nation, ever “without deceit,” and when was it ever “without violence”? It was precisely for the Jews’ own sins that God allowed the nations to oppress them, a theme that is repeated ad nauseum in the Old Testament. How could sinful Israel ever serve as an unblemished sacrifice for atonement? In reality, Klinghoffer’s plea is just another case of how the Jews at large are oblivious to their own sins.
All in all, there is simply no instance in Jewish history that satisfies the numerous details of Isaiah 53, details not seen in any other “servant” passage.[17] In fact, Rashi’s interpretation is typical of the Messiah complex that the Jewish people have had in their collective psyche for most of their history. It is even evident in Klinghoffer’s own thesis, for like the servant of Isaiah 53 who was “despised and rejected,” he believes the despising and rejection of Judaism in the first century led to the flourishing of Western civilization. Perhaps it is also why some modern Jews interpret the Nazi internment as a case in which the Jews are the “suffering servant,” the “Messiah” that is sacrificed for the rest of the world (and which is the very reason their apologists chose the word “holocaust” for its memorial title),[18] but are now raised from the dead, as it were, to reoccupy the land of Palestine. Or perhaps it is why Rashi says, “that the peoples should be forgiven through the sufferings of Israel” or “At the End of Days…the gentile nations in particular that oppressed Israel…will express their dread and amazement at how they have ‘despised and rejected’ the ‘man of sorrows’…namely, the exalted nation of Israel” (p. 166). In essence, then, Klinghoffer and the Jews have given us a choice for who our Messiah is going to be: the nation of Israel or Jesus Christ. Sadly, it seems today that a lot of Jews are choosing the former over the latter.
The Person of Jesus
In order for Klinghoffer to reject Jesus as Messiah he must invariably attack Jesus as a person, and have a rebuttal for the teachings and acts that distinguished Jesus as divine. In doing so, Klinghoffer cannot posit, as the Muslims do, that Jesus was a good prophet, since the Muslims do not expect a Messiah. Klinghoffer, as a Jew, must attack Jesus as a complete fraud, worthy to be stoned under Jewish law for impersonating the coming Messiah. And, of course, this is what distinguishes Jews and Judaism from Islam and every other religion. Judaism must decide whether or not Jesus was the prophesied Messiah of the Old Covenant.[19] If he is not the Messiah, the Jew says, then Jesus is not merely deluded, he is evil, an anti-messiah or anti-christ. There is no other choice for Klinghoffer. As such, he must make a vicious attack upon Jesus to save face for Judaism. To do so, Klinghoffer declines the “ethical” Jesus of liberal Protestantism and the “apocalyptic” Jesus of “Jewish scholar Paula Fredriksen” for his own invention of Jesus as the “complicated person” or “the foxy, ambiguous Jesus” who he says “is the Jesus whom the Jews of his time period rejected, to the extent they could understand him” (pp. 42-43).
Not Much of A Sensation?
Klinghoffer’s other ploy is to portray Jesus as much less of a sensation than he really was. Hence, he claims Jesus began his ministry in Galilee because “if you were going to set up a new Jewish charismatic movement that departed…from biblical authenticity” (p. 43) Galilee was the place you would find your die-hard enthusiasts. Accordingly, instead of Jesus’ entrance into Galilee being a fulfillment of Isaiah 9:1-2 (as Matt. 4:12-17 says it is), Klinghoffer claims (thanks to the Historical Critical methodology he adopts throughout his book) that a sect of second or third generation “Christians” in the late first century merely made it look like Jesus was fulfilling Isaiah’s words. Countering even the Pharisees’ exclamation: “Look, the world has gone after him!” (John 7:31; 12:19), Klinghoffer says that “Jesus’s core following was small” and “Christians did not seem of enough significance as a population group to register [in Josephus] as a fifth philosophy” to the “Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and…the nationalists” (p. 46). He also claims that Jesus’ “public ministry lasted only a year or so” (p. 47) yet the Gospels are reasonably clear that it lasted for 3.5 years, an option Klinghoffer doesn’t even consider.
No Premeditation of Plotting Jesus’ Death?
In the face of the clear testimony in the Gospels concerning the murderous designs of the Jews against Jesus, Klinghoffer turns this around to say, “Their rejection of him arose not from a definite decision, but from a combination of simple unawareness of his activities and skepticism about the roles he was casting himself into” (p. 48). One wonders how many times Klinghoffer has to read in the Gospels that the Jews tried to kill Jesus before it sinks in that their rejection was done with malice aforethought. One need only read the sequence of conversations Jesus had with the Pharisees to see that they hated him with passion. He not only upset the façade of religious ritual with which they had surrounded themselves, he dared to claim he was the fulfillment of messianic prophecies. As John 5:18 says: “For this reason the Jews tried all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.” Ironically, Klinghoffer later admits that the Jews did, indeed, want to kill Jesus: “One thing is clear. To say that Jewish leaders were instrumental in getting Jesus killed is not anti-Semitic. Otherwise we would have to call the medieval Jewish sage Moses Maimonides anti-Semitic and the rabbis of the Talmud as well….the Romans, in bringing about Jesus’s death, were not acting alone” (p. 73).[20] So which is it?
From the Pharisee’ perspective, the reasons to have Jesus killed were plain. It is right before his entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday that the climax arrives. After getting the Pharisees to admit that the Messiah is the son of David, Jesus then asks them how David, under the inspiration of the Spirit, can say to the Messiah: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet” (Matt. 22:41-46). In other words, if David calls the Messiah “Lord,” then how is the Messiah also David’s son? That is a very logical question, but an impossible one to answer for a Jew who believes that Deut. 6:4 allows only One Person in the Godhead. This was the moment of truth for the Jews. They could not deny that David, under the Spirit’s direction, spoke of two “Lords,” both divine, both reigning together, one working for the other, and yet one of the Lords both pre-exists David and is a descendant of David. How can that be true except that the Messiah is both God and man? As it stood, Jesus demonstrated that their own Hebrew Scriptures prophesied, in one solitary line, that the Messiah had to be both God and man, and there THAT man stood right in front of them, the Man who had fulfilled not only Psalm 110:1, but all the prophecies of his coming in the Old Testament.[21] But the Jews simply could not admit this possibility, even though the logic of it stared them in the face. That is why, of course, Matthew concludes the chapter by saying: “And no one was able to answer him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask him another question.” At this point the Jews could either accept him and everything he claimed, or plan a secret plot for his death. There were no other practical choices. Jesus had set the perfect trap with the very Scriptures they so treasured. As he said to them in John 5:39: “You search the scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf.” It was the moment of no return. As we all know, it was here that the Pharisees and chief priests planned for Jesus’ demise – this time by inciting the Romans to get involved. Jesus knew this was coming, for he had prophesied it several times (e.g., Matt. 16:20-21). Because the Pharisees and chief priests had reached the hypocritical climax of their rejection of Jesus, it is in the next chapter, Matthew 23, that Jesus unleashes the Bible’s harshest tirade ever given to a group of religious adherents.
Casting Out Demons
Klinghoffer says the claim “what was unique about Jesus was that he could command demons without resorting to spells or magic” is really nothing special since “rabbinic wonderworkers” like “Hanina ben Dosa, a Galilean like Jesus whose deeds have been compared with the Christian savior’s.” Hence, “it is hard to see why a Jew would follow or reject Jesus because of his powers as an exorcist” (pp. 50-51). We wonder if Klinghoffer would say the same about his beloved Moses (Ex. 7:11). Should Pharaoh have been dissuaded against siding with Moses since Pharaoh’s magicians could perform some of the same miracles as Moses? Be that as it may, the New Testament never makes such a claim for Jesus. If Jesus were merely an exorcist, no one should have followed him. Even Jesus allowed people who were not of his immediate followers to do exorcisms (Mark 9:38-41).[22] It is the obstinate rejection of Jesus in the face of all his other tremendous deeds and divine teachings that makes the added dismissal of his exorcisms a sign of Jewish blindness. When the Pharisees were confronted with one of Jesus’ exorcisms they didn’t make any counter-appeal to Hanina ben Dosa or his contemporaries. They instead claimed Jesus was under the power of Satan, an accusation which earned them a place among those who committed the Unforgiveable Sin (Mark 3:20-29).
Interestingly enough, when it is to his seeming advantage to call upon Pharaoh’s magicians, Klinghoffer does so when he has to account for Jesus’ “catalog of miracles [which] is impressive.” To Klinghoffer, “a Jew who believed in the Hebrew scriptures would know that not all such acts…came from God” because “the Egyptians king’s magicians at first match the Jewish leader [Moses] miracle for miracle.” Hence “to ascribe magical powers to forces apart from God would not have strained the imagination of a Jew in Jesus’ day” (pp. 51-52). Perhaps – that is, if we use Klinghoffer’s shoddy exegesis of the incident in Egypt. First, the magicians, according to Klinghoffer’s own Hebrew bible, were not doing miracles “apart from God” but against God, hence they were under satanic forces, an evil personality well attested by the Hebrew bible (e.g., Gen. 3:1; 1Chr. 21:1; Job 1:6). They were certainly not acting as forerunner’s of Hanina ben Dosa. Second, and most important, the magicians may have “at first” matched Moses’ miracles, but they failed on every other occasion. Of the ten miracles Moses performed, the magicians only could do three (Ex. 7:11, 22; 8:7). In fact, after they could not duplicate subsequent miracles, the magicians were converted and finally saw Moses for who he really was, saying to Pharaoh: “This is the finger of God!” (Ex. 7:18-19, cf. 9:11). Hence, Klinghoffer’s conclusion does not match that of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas Klinghoffer says that knowledge of the magicians’ miracles would lead a Jew to “know that not all such acts…came from God” (and therefore Jesus’ miracles should not lead a Jew to accept Jesus), the Hebrew Scripture says the very opposite – the magicians saw Moses’ many and unrepeatable miracles as the reason to accept God!
The Resurrection
Klinghoffer also tries to dismiss the resurrection of Jesus. Even though he admits that he doesn’t “know of a sage of this [first] century to whom the rabbinic sources attribute the power of resurrection,” Klinghoffer goes on a desperate search to find a competing resurrection in Jewish literature and settles on one account, the story of Rabbi Rabbah who, being drunk, killed his friend, Rav Zeira, and the next day raised him from the dead. Since this is the only competition to Jesus’ resurrection that Klinghoffer can find, he casually concludes: “Unlike the Gospel writers, the Talmud doesn’t make a fuss about this” (p. 53). Perhaps the Talmud and other Jewish writers didn’t make a fuss about it for the simple fact that they argue amongst themselves whether the story is true, since “many other authorities interpret the passage as a mere allegory.”[23] Of course, even if it were true, why should they make a fuss about it, since Rav Zeira would have only died again, whereas Jesus lives forever? Why make a fuss if Rav Zeira was neither fulfilling prophecy nor atoning for the world’s sins?[24] Why make a fuss if Rav Zeira’s resurrection was a one-time event that left the rest of the world in their graves? Why make a fuss if Rabbi Rabbah’s feat shows an inconsistency in God’s favor by allowing a drunken man in sin (cf. Pro. 20:1; 31:4; Is. 5:11) to use God’s power and raise someone from the dead? Consequently, in Klinghoffer’s desperation to play down the resurrection of Jesus by comparing it to Rav Zeira, he only succeeds in elevating it that much more. His efforts are even more pathetic when he resorts to saying, “Perhaps the tomb wasn’t sealed as tightly as the Gospels say. Perhaps, like historians today, the Jews speculated that the ubiquitous wild dogs that haunted the city had got to the body. This would explain why archeologists have recovered almost no remains of crucified bodes from this time and place. They were torn apart and consumed by the dogs….We don’t know” (p. 77). Unfortunately, Klinghoffer’s book offers no counter-hypothesis to the “dog ate it” theory, such as “Perhaps the Gospels were correct and Jesus really did rise from the dead” to dispel the obvious bias that permeates his pages.
Praying in a Quorum
Time and time again Klinghoffer demonstrates the same blindness to God’s ways of which the Pharisees were guilty. In another instance Klinghoffer complains that “the oral Torah values sociability and thus calls upon the individual to pray in company with a minimum of ten men” but “Jesus advised his followers, ‘when you pray,’ to pray to yourself, ‘in secret’” (p. 57). As is usually the case when Klinghoffer goes on a nit-picking escapade, he avoids the context when it is not to his advantage. In this passage (Matt. 6:1-7), Jesus is not condemning Jewish quorums. After all, it was Jesus who taught Christians to pray together in groups (Matt. 18:19). Rather, in this particular context, Jesus is teaching against hypocrisy, a common trait among the Jewish religious leaders (e.g., verse 5: “When you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogue and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men”). Jesus said the same in Matt. 23:14: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, even while for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you shall receive greater condemnation.”
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
In many instances Klinghoffer’s attempts to obfuscate Jesus’ intent are clearly deliberate. For example, he says “the oral Torah laid great stress on honoring life by showing reverence to those who have passed away, not allowing their bodies to lie out like carrion….Jesus had no patience for it. To a man who had just lost his father and hadn’t yet attended to the burial, he said, ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead’” (p. 57). Obviously, Klinghoffer wants to portray Jesus as an uncaring, impetuous renegade who trampled all over the Mosaic law, at the same time he hides from the reader the moral import of the passage. First, Jesus did not deny the man’s desire to bury his dead father. He merely told the man to give that responsibility to others. Surely the man’s wife, his other children or the townspeople would see that the father was properly buried. Second, the context concerns the man’s commitment as a disciple of Jesus. Jesus is now leaving the vicinity (vr. 18) and the man must decide whether he will go with Jesus. Is he truly committed or do the concerns of the world still rule his motivations? Additionally, after having partially traveled through Israel, Jesus knew of the destitute spiritual condition of its inhabitants (see vrs. 10-12).[25] As such, he did not want the man to be unduly influenced, and more or less reveals this concern when he labels the people as “dead,” that is, spiritually dead. This, most likely, is the reason Klinghoffer doesn’t like the passage, for Jesus is making a social commentary on the spiritually decrepit state of Israel. But Klinghoffer, in his blindness, actually thinks it is Jesus who is spiritually decrepit.
Jesus’ Reluctance to Claim Himself the Messiah
Klinghoffer then claims that “nowhere…is there a reference to Jesus’s saying he was the Messiah. Maybe that’s because he didn’t. In the traditions that later were written down as the Gospels, Jesus is cagey. Never in a public setting does he volunteer to identify himself as ‘the Christ’” (p. 60). Although Klinghoffer admits that, in answer to Caiaphas’ question to Jesus, “Are you the Messiah?” that Jesus answers clearly in the affirmative with “I am” (Mark 14:62), and does the same with the Samaritan woman “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:25-26), he still complains that “Jesus was never so direct, much less in his public preaching. Why?”…. “Hence the foxiness, the reluctance to go public. He was pleased by the idea, but not entirely confident that it was true” (pp. 61-62). Whereas Klinghoffer interprets Jesus’ “reluctance” with doubt about whether Jesus believed he was the Messiah, it never crosses Klinghoffer’s mind that the real answer is in the very next chapter of John’s Gospel, for there we find that the Jewish leaders were on a relentless mission to kill Jesus before his time, precisely because he had been claiming to be equal with God and thus the Messiah! (cf. John 5:8; 7:1, 25; 8:40).[26] As the savior, Jesus had a mission to perform, and it was his purpose to minimize instigating the Jewish leaders until he was ready to be sacrificed. Thus, it is not by happenstance that much of John’s Gospel is placed at the tail end of that mission.
Of course, when the New Testament is rather clear about Jesus’ divinity, Klinghoffer tries to downplay it by resorting to the Historical Critical theory that his divinity was merely added to the New Testament by second or third generation Christians. Hence, he claims, “This suggests that the equation of Jesus with God is an artifact of decades long after Jesus died” or “Clearly the idea of the divine Jesus is the product of an intellectual evolution” (pp. 67-68). So, for such clear passages as Matt. 28:19 (“baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”), Klinghoffer says this merely “reflects relatively advanced Christian thinking and was not part of the original Gospel text” (p. 68), yet he offers his reader no proof for such a crucial textual assertion. Similarly, when Jesus says “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), Klinghoffer tries to escape its obvious impact by saying “It is hard to believe that he did say that” (p. 69) based simply on the fact that Matthew, Mark and Luke do not mention it, thus making his reader believe that unless a statement is recorded by a preponderance of writers, it is ineligible as a truth statement. Perhaps Klinghoffer also believes that passages in which the Pharisees are attributed as having recognized Jesus’ claim to divinity (e.g., John 5:18: “This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he…called God his Father, making himself equal with God”) were also added by later anonymous plagiarizers. At other times Klinghoffer seems to admit the force of the New Testament passage since he offers no further comment: “John’s Gospel advances another step with its magisterial opening sentence, giving Jesus as God’s divine ‘Word,’ or Logos, somehow identical with Him… ‘and the Word was God” (p. 68). When he deals with Paul’s description of Jesus (2Cor. 4:4: “the likeness of God” and Col. 1:15: “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation”) he chooses passages that were not intended to elaborate upon the divinity of Jesus as much as Jesus’ human side serving its part in His mediating role. When Paul wants to discuss the divinity of Jesus, he is more direct, as he is, for example, in Titus 2:13: “looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus” (cf., Titus 3:4: “God our Savior” and Titus 3:6: “Jesus Christ our Savior” and Isaiah 45:21: “a righteous God and Savior”), which is among the many passages teaching Christ’s divinity that Klinghoffer does not mention.
The Attack on St. Paul
Klinghoffer saves an even more vicious attack for the Apostle Paul, for it is his thesis that “Paul’s conception of Jesus Christ was the very turning point of Western history” (p. 97). Where Jesus “inspired” a departure from the Sinai covenant, Klinghoffer says Paul put the nails into the coffin. So Klinghoffer does his best to portray Paul as a bumbling, stumbling, pseudo-intellectual, and even more sinisterly, “a faker who didn’t understand the faith he so passionately critiqued” (p. 115). Klinghoffer claims Paul “was among those who could not read Hebrew” simply because “whenever he cites from the Bible, it is evident that he was consulting the Greek translation, the Septuagint, which does not always adhere to an accurate rendering of the original meaning” (p. 96). The truth is, Paul switches back and forth between the Hebrew and the Septuagint (LXX), and it is always for theological reasons. Klinghoffer would have known this had he examined just a few of Paul’s quotes in detail. Paul also had two audiences to satisfy: the Alexandrian Jews who knew Greek and little or no Hebrew, and the Palestinian Jews who knew Hebrew and little or no Greek. As for accuracy, we noted earlier that we do not know if the Hebrew is the more accurate, since our only extant copies come from the Masoretes of the 10th century AD, whereas the LXX was written mostly in the 3rd and 2nd century BC.
Klinghoffer continues: “With Paul, the hints that he was not what he claimed to be were right on the surface….Take his claim to be the son of Pharisees….Or consider the boast that his family came from the tribe of Benjamin….This is hard to believe simply because sometime after the return from the Babylonian exile in 536 BCE, such tribal distinctions were lost” (pp. 95-96). If they were lost, why does Ezra 6:17-20 mention the Levites, a northern tribe dispersed almost 200 years earlier? Why does Neh. 11:4-36 distinguish between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin? Why does 2Macc 3:4, written in 124 BC, hundreds of years after Nehemiah, mention a “Simon of the tribe of Benjamin”? If lost, how could the Levitical priesthood, and thus the authenticity of Israel, have survived without knowing who was really a bona fide priest to continue the temple cult? Accordingly, Luke 1:5 tells us Zacharias was one such priest and his wife Elizabeth was from the “daughter of Aaron.” Luke 2:36 tells us that Anna was from the tribe of Asher, yet Asher was a northern tribe already in the Diaspora. Unfortunately, Klinghoffer does not address these anomalies.
Acts 15
Klinghoffer claims that the detour began at the council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) when “the early church jettisoned the observance of Jewish law” and “with the demands of the faith whittled down to three [commandments]…having to do with food…the new church was all set to accomplish what it did: over the course of some centuries, convert all of Europe” (p. 99). It started when “Paul was contradicted and reviled by fellow Jews, leading him to conclude that the future lay no longer with his own people.” Hence, “a split developed within the church” which “could continue as it was under the leadership of Jesus’s brother James: within the bounds of Torah law, requiring all converts also to be observant Jews. Or it could take Paul’s more radical view of Jesus’s teaching.” Klinghoffer then concludes:
“At a council meeting of elders in Jerusalem in the year 49, Paul made his case for dropping Jewish law as a requirement for Christians. After much debate, James agreed – and the direction of Christian history was set. Had the Jews embraced Jesus, therefore, followers of the church of James would have continued to be obligated in the biblical commandments of circumcision, Sabbath…Thus, in every respect, the Jesus movement might have remained a Jewish sect” etc. (p. 7).
If this incident wasn’t the backbone of his book (viz., Klinghoffer’s assertion on page 98 that in the council of Jerusalem “we have what is effectively the founding document of Western civilization”) we could easily skip over it as simply a small case of tortured exegesis and presumptuous conclusions. But Klinghoffer’s rendition of what happened is a typical example of how badly he handles Scripture in the rest of his book, whether it’s his own Hebrew bible or the New Testament, and how his misinformed reading of the text leads him to make erroneous and often outrageous conclusions. These exegetical flaws will be of paramount importance when Klinghoffer tries to negate from Scripture some fundamental Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Virgin Birth.
First, there is no indication in the text that it was Paul who initiated or was alone in “making the case for dropping Jewish law.” In the two instances that Paul speaks at the council, he is merely retelling his experience of the “conversion of the Gentiles” (vr. 3) wherein “God did signs and wonders among the Gentiles” (vr. 12), but which Klinghoffer, for some odd reason, sees as “the heavy influence of Paul” from which a “faction in the church was developing” (p. 98). But “signs and wonders” have nothing to do with circumcision and there was no evidence of a “faction” created by Paul. The text (Acts 15:6) is clear that, if there was a faction, it was the Pharisees at the council who introduced the controversial subject of circumcision: “But some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees rose up, and said, ‘It is necessary to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses.’” After their challenge, the text says all “the apostles and the elders were gathered together to consider this matter.” Paul has no distinction at the council in this regard.
Second, there is no indication in the text that James was initially siding with the practice of circumcision for new Gentile converts, hence, there is no evident rivalry between James and Paul. Klinghoffer is creating clerical opponents who don’t exist. In another place, Klinghoffer claims “At a council meeting in Jerusalem, the leader of the church, James, strikes a compromise…” (p. 94). But in actuality, James is not “the leader of the church” and he isn’t the one who decides whether circumcision will be practiced by Christians. That duty was fulfilled by Peter, and Peter alone, a person that, amazingly enough, Klinghoffer completely leaves out of his analysis! As Acts 15:7-11 gives us the blow-by-blow:
“And after there had been much debate, Peter rose and said to them, ‘Brethren, you know that in the early days God made choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you make trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we shall be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will."
In fact, since Peter is the final decision maker on whether circumcision will continue, this is the very reason the Catholic Church has invested its identity in Peter as the first pope, since he singly led the Church in Acts 15 to make the doctrinal decision as to what will be believed and practiced in the Catholic faith. It was not up to James or Paul. In fact, the only mention of James’ role in the council is that he immediately acceded to Peter’s decision; backed it up with a quote from Amos; and then made a pastoral recommendation in order to implement Peter’s decision, namely, that the Church might want to keep a few dietary laws, yet not as a “compromise” but as a gesture of sensitivity to the Jews so as not to greatly offend those who were strictly kosher (vrs. 13-21). It was the rest of the apostles and elders, not James, who approved his recommendation and subsequently decided to write letters to all the churches informing them of the council’s decision. Moreover, it is only at that time that Paul makes the council’s decision his own, and subsequently he is sent out by the apostles and elders as a missionary against circumcision. All in all, Klinghoffer’s attempt to put Paul and James into a Hegelian synthesis that will determine the weal or woe of the future Church is simply non-existent. Klinghoffer’s historiography certainly makes for good drama for getting a book published, but it does no favors for the demands of factual history. Unfortunately for Klinghoffer, the absence of any conflict between Paul and James, and the presence of a unilateral decision by Peter, destroys the major thesis of his book at the same time that it vindicates the Catholic paradigm of leadership.
Was Jesus Coming “Soon”?
Klinghoffer, inserting the word “soon” before he quotes from Paul’s words from 1Thess 4:16: “the Lord himself will descend from heaven” (p. 97), works off the image of Paul as one who mistakenly thought the end of the world was coming in the first century AD, which supposedly accounts for his zeal to convert as many Jews as possible before the end. If Klinghoffer had read from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians he would have seen that his assessment of the first letter is incorrect, since Paul corrects the Thessalonians’ own mistaken notion of a quick end to the world (see 2Thess 2:1-11). Of course, those of us who believe Paul was divinely inspired would necessarily understand that the Holy Spirit would not lead him to put mistaken notions in Holy Writ.
Klinghoffer’s big beef, as we said, is with Paul’s theological insistence that “we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive” (p. 108). Here Klinghoffer goes right for the jugular, for he argues against Paul’s rationale for the “discharge,” which was nothing less than the very core of Paul’s teaching. He writes:
The first alien premise was that from a Jew who seeks God through the medium of the commandments, ‘under the law,’ God requires nothing less than perfection. What was needed in order to be ‘saved’ was absolute, total conformity with the law. Paul taught, ‘For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written [in Deuteronomy 27:26], ‘Cursed be every one who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them.’’ The second repugnant premise was that under the economy of the law, God can’t, or won’t, freely forgive the penitent sinner. From these postulates there logically followed the need for some sort of intervention from heaven, the circumventing of the law. This was accomplished through the death of Christ, which offered a new route to salvation. As Moore argues, this was Paul’s ‘predetermined conclusion,’ but the apostle ‘can hardly have expected the argument to have effect with Jews, who would deny both premises.’
For one thing, Paul had misunderstood the verse just quoted from Deuteronomy….The Hebrew word that he took to mean ‘abide by’ really means ‘uphold.’ In other words, the Jew was expected to uphold all the Torah’s commandments, affirming they were God’s will. But there was no expectation of perfect conformity in his actions. The rabbis made this clear (pp. 110-111).
Did Paul misunderstand Deut. 27:26 or is Klinghoffer misunderstanding it? First, for the record, in Gal. 3:10 Paul is quoting Deut. 27:26 from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew, but the meaning is virtually the same.[27] In the Hebrew version, the word in question is QUM (MEW) in the Hiphil imperfect. It is one of the more frequently used words in the Hebrew Bible, appearing over 450 times. Yes, it can mean “uphold,” but it can also mean “perform.”[28] The context will help determine what shade of meaning is being employed in a given verse. But for the sake of argument, let’s just say it means “uphold,” “confirm,” or “establish” in Deut. 27:26. In that case, the remainder of the sentence specifies the only way the law can be “upheld.” One must “do them,” that is, do the laws (the “doing” here represented by the Qal infinitive Z]\RL, which makes it an unending requirement). Unfortunately, Klinghoffer forgot to mention that part of the grammatical structure. He makes it sound as if the only thing the Jews had to do was wave their hand at God and acknowledge that the laws existed or, as he puts it, “affirming that they were God’s will,” without giving God any commitment to fully obey them or even be required to fully obey them. Again, this was precisely the problem with the Jew. He was more interested in the institution of law than he was in honestly obeying the law, and this was St. Paul’s chief complaint against them as well.[29]
Klinghoffer’s second objection is as follows:
As for God’s attitude of strictness toward those ‘under the law,’ that idea was explicitly contradicted by the Hebrew scriptures themselves. The Psalms speak of this with special eloquence: ‘God has not treated us according to our sin, nor repaid us according to our iniquities’ [Ps. 103:10]. ‘And do not enter into strict judgment with your servant, for no living creature would be vindicated before You’ [Ps. 143:2]. Obviously the Psalmist, traditionally held to be King David, would not have prayed this way if God’s standard operating procedure was indeed to hold humans to ‘strict judgment.’ Elsewhere David cried out, ‘Let me fall into the Lord’s hand, for His mercies are abundant; but let me now fall into the hand of man’ [1Chr. 21:13](p. 111).
But all that this proves for Klinghoffer is that David, not the Jews at large, did not fall under the strict judgment of God. It is the same reason that the 7000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal in Elijah’s day had not come under strict judgment; or why Joshua and Caleb did not come under strict judgment and thus were the only ones who could enter Canaan out of the millions of adult Jews who left Egypt. David had repented of his sins. The Psalms are filled with his total love of God and remorse for his own sins and shortcomings. The Psalms are also filled with David’s constant battle against his Jewish enemies trying to trip him up. Even his own sons turned against him. This is precisely why St. Paul contrasts David’s repentance over against the Jews at large who did not repent and insisted that doing ‘works of the law’ was the way to please God (cf. Rom. 3:28 to 4:8; Gal. 5:1-4). The upshot is this: it is only through repentance of one’s sins and unfeigned faith in God that one can experience the mercies of God. If one does not repent yet feigns faith in God by following a regimen of external rituals, he is a hypocrite. He will receive no mercy from God. Law provides no mercy. It is an uncompromising and exacting judge. If you do not follow its precepts to the letter, it has no choice but to condemn you. Law, by itself, will condemn you for the slightest transgression against its decrees. Law is impersonal. It doesn’t care whether you almost obeyed or whether you were weak one day but tried your best. It has no room for pity and mercy, nor can it have room. If one lives by the law, he will die by the law. Only a personal being, who possesses mercy and compassion, could possibly forgive transgressions.
But personal beings don’t give their forgiveness cheaply. The transgressor must show humility and repentance. And in the case of God, he is so very great that there must first be a sufficient atonement to appease Him for all past sins so that He will be willing to offer forgiveness. At this point Klinghoffer has another objection:
…the anonymous Letter to the Hebrews…An extended polemic against Judaism, it asserted that ‘without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.’ God needed blood, as in blood sacrifice, foremost the blood of the crucified Jesus, His sacrificed Son….the idea that penitence was not enough would have comes as a surprise to the large majority of first-century Jews, who lived in the Diaspora and therefore had no regular access to the Temple rites. In not availing themselves of these rites at all times, they were relying on scripture, which taught that forgiveness could be secured without sacrifice. King Solomon had said that when the Jews were in exile from their land, without a Temple, they ‘should repent…saying, ‘We have sinned; we have been iniquitous; we have been wicked,’ and they will return to You with all their heart and with all their soul…May You hear their prayer and their supplication from Heaven…and forgive Your people who sinned against you.’ [1Kgs. 8:47-50] (p. 111)
The first problem with Klinghoffer’s analysis is that he has made the exception into the rule. Obviously, if the Jews are in exile they cannot do sacrifices, but Solomon, the very king that did more sacrifices than anyone, is certainly not making the general rule that “forgiveness could be secured without sacrifice.” In fact, the very first thing that the returning Jewish captives from Babylon did was to reestablish the cultic sacrifices, since that was the normal means through which sins could be atoned, at least temporally. Second, the very fact that God may forgive them in the future is because Solomon prayed this mighty prayer of intercession to God, which was based on the very Temple which he built that offered sacrifices for sin. The same thing happened when Israel was about to enter Canaan. Moses told them that it wasn’t for their righteousness that God was allowing them to take possession, but because of the (a) wickedness of the nations in Canaan, and (b) because He had made a promise to Abraham (Deut. 9:5-6). Along those lines, we don’t even have an indication in the Hebrew Bible that the Jews in captivity had, indeed, called upon God for forgiveness. We only have the promise of God that the captivity would last no more than 70 years (cf. Jer. 25:11; Dan. 9:2). Third, it is obvious that the Jews in captivity cannot depend on the law to provide the basis upon which they could come back to Israel or to forgive their sins, for the law offered no forgiveness. It would have to be a direct appeal to God, based on His compassion, the very thing Solomon acknowledged (1Kgs. 8:50).
As it stands, Klinghoffer has not shown any evidence that sacrifices were unnecessary or incidental for the forgiveness of sins. In fact, the very passage to which Klinghoffer appeals for forgiveness without sacrifice (1 Chronicles 21) is one of the most heart-wrenching narratives of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible. To begin, God allows David to choose one of three punishments: three years of famine; three months of being chased by enemies; or three days of the sword of God. David decides on the third, since he believes it better to fall into God’s hands rather than man’s. Accordingly, God sends the avenging angel with a plague that begins by killing 70,000 men. The slaughter is so severe that God becomes grieved and commands the angel to cease. David then sees the angel rise between heaven and earth. Not knowing precisely what is happening, David pleads to the angel that he not come down again. In answering, the angel commands David to build an altar to the Lord for sacrifice, in order to stop the plague. David goes to the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite and pays him 600 shekels of gold for the animals to sacrifice. Thus, “David built an altar to the Lord there and sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. He called on the Lord, and the Lord answered him with fire from heaven on the altar of burnt offering. Then the Lord spoke to the angel, and he put his sword back into its sheath” (1Chr. 21:26-27). As David hoped for, God has mercy and compassion on him. Yet David is not presumptuous toward God. He does not know if the angel will come back to continue the plague. When David admits his guilt for ordering the census and pleads to God not to destroy people who are innocent of his folly, God does not automatically rescind the plague, but tells David to offer a sacrifice. We should add that the prerogative of sacrificing to appease God’s anger remains true, however, only because David was very close to God and lived a righteous life, as we also saw with Moses (1Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22; Ex. 32-33; Deut. 9:18-20).[30]
If it takes that much sacrifice to appease God for David’s one sin of taking a census when he shouldn’t have, how much more sacrifice would it take to appease God’s wrath for the sins of the whole world since the beginning of time? As St. Paul said, the blood of bulls and goats could never appease God sufficiently. They could only do so on a temporary basis. It is the very reason the High Priest had to go continually into the Holy of Holies, year in and year out, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Only the most supreme sacrifice by an unblemished victim could atone for the world’s sins, which was accomplished by the very person prophesied by those cultic sacrifices, Jesus Christ. As such, He needed to enter only once (Heb. 9:12-14). Once he is in the Holy of Holies, he never goes out of it, and thus he can re-present His one sacrifice to the Father, what we today call the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (Heb. 9:23-24).
Jewish “Foci” Out of Focus
Finally, quoting the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, Klinghoffer concludes:
“the Jewish soul was unique in two ways. First by its nature it sees God as at once ‘beyond the grasp of man, and yet…present in an immediate relationship with these human beings who are absolutely incommensurable with him.’ Second, also by nature the Jewish soul feels the worlds, in a remarkably visceral way, as unredeemed….Taken together, these ‘foci of the Jewish soul’ tend to rule out an acceptance of Jesus as Messiah. The first precludes a belief in the Incarnation, God walking as a man on earth, a foreign concept that violates what the Jew knows about the transcendent yet immediately present God. The second precludes the Christian opinion that the Messiah has already come to redeem the world….Because of this twofold essence of the Jewish soul…Jews alike feel the same reaction, the same refusal, the same instinctive turning away. In a word: No” (p. 217).
So the rationale for the Jew in not accepting Christ is that God is so great that he could not have become a man. But as we have seen, it is precisely the greatness of God that the Jew does not understand and that leads him to reject Christ. The Christian religion says God is so very great that we cannot presume to have an “immediate relationship” with Him in the face of our sins that separate us from Him. In fact, the Jews were told the same thing at Sinai. If they even tried to touch the mountain that Moses climbed to get the Commandments, they would be put to death on the spot (Ex 19:12). God is so great, so holy, so totally-other, that we cannot expect intimacy from Him without first preserving His honor and appeasing His anger for sin to the degree He requires. Yet it is precisely the presumption that no such supreme sacrifice is needed which is at the core of the Judaistic religion. The Jew believes the “immediate relationship” is a right, an inheritance, an entitlement, given at Sinai simply because they are Jews. Sacrifice for the Jew is merely an act of appreciation, not an act of redemption. As for Klinghoffer’s second “foci,” it is precisely because this supreme sacrifice was a necessity that the Messiah’s mission had to come in two stages: one which appeased God for the sins of man and one that inaugurated the complete fruits of that appeasement for all eternity. But if the Jew cannot see the need for the divine sacrifice, then he will be forever hampered with the futile “foci of the Jewish soul” that will leave him wandering in Sinai’s desert instead of meeting God on Sinai’s mountain. It is my hope that Mr. Klinghoffer will choose Christ, just as Moses did:
By faith Moses…considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he looked to the reward” (Heb. 11:24-26).
[1] The usage of almah in Pro. 30:19 also refers to a virgin. In this passage, “the way of a man with a maid (almah),” who is assumed to be a virgin since she is unmarried, is contrasted in the next verse, Pro. 30:20, with an “adulterous woman (isha)” who is understood as married but having sexual relations with other men. The usage of almah in Song. 1:3 leads to the same conclusion, since in the context the maidens are attracted to the loving man of Solomon’s Song, implying they are refraining from sexual relations with him so that the loving man can be intimate with his one and only lover. The above passages also show that almah refers to more than identifying a girl or young woman. Almah has procreative overtones, referring in the main to a young woman who has the potential of engaging in sexual relations but who has refrained for one reason or another. This connotation, of course, would also fit the Blessed Virgin Mary who, tradition holds, took a vow of celibacy. The above analysis is confirmed by the fact that the LXX translates the Hebrew almah with the Greek parthenos (parqevnoV) (“virgin”) in both Gen. 24:43 and Is. 7:14, showing that the Alexandrian Jews understood the latter term to be identical with the former. Moreover, the LXX rendering includes the Greek article hJ in the phrase hJ parqevnoV as does Matthew, following the article D in the Hebrew of Is. 7:14 DNLRD (ha-almah). Hence, the “sign” is not merely “a virgin,” that is, she is not any young woman who shall conceive by normal means, but “the virgin.” The stature engendered by the article coincides with the testimony of the greatness of her offspring (cf. Mic. 5:3; Is. 8:8; 9:5-6; 11:1-10).
[2] Num. 27:3-8: “’Our father died in the desert. Although he did not join those who banded together against the LORD (in Korah's band), he died for his own sin without leaving any sons. But why should our father's name be withdrawn from his clan merely because he had no son? Let us, therefore, have property among our father's kinsmen.’ When Moses laid their case before the Lord, the Lord said to him, "The plea of Zelophehad's daughters is just; you shall give them hereditary property among their father's kinsmen, letting their father's heritage pass on to them. Therefore, tell the Israelites: If a man dies without leaving a son, you shall let his heritage pass on to his daughter”; Num 36:2-4: “The Lord commanded you, my lord, to apportion the land by lot among the Israelites; and you, my lord, were also commanded by the Lord to give the heritage of our kinsman Zelophehad to his daughters. But if they marry into one of the other Israelite tribes, their heritage will be withdrawn from our ancestral heritage and will be added to that of the tribe into which they marry; thus the heritage that fell to us by lot will be diminished.”
[3] Many Fathers and medieval theologians understood Scripture to be teaching multiple senses and fulfillments of the same literal text. The more prominent advocates of this hermeneutic are: Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory the Great. Augustine has a lengthy discussion supporting its use in Confessions, Bk 12, Chs. 22, 30, 31 and On Christian Doctrine, Bk 3, Ch 27. Medievals theologians such as Bernard, Cano, Bañez, Molina, Cajetan, Lapide, et al, advanced the same hermeneutic. Aquinas gives a full treatment supporting it in the Summa Theologica (Bk 1, Q. 1, A. 10) and De Potentia (4:1). A preponderance of Klinghoffer’s objections to the New Testament fulfilling Old Testament prophecy centers around his failure to recognize the existence dual fulfillments (e.g., his claim on pp. 79-80 that Isaiah 6:9-13 only applies to Israel before 721 BC and thus cannot be used by Jesus in Matt. 13:14-15).
[4] The Hebrew puts a waw-disjunctive (E) between the two nouns “ass” (XENG) and “colt” (XIR), in addition to giving each noun the preposition “on” (LR). There would be no better way to distinguish between the mother ass and her male colt in Hebrew.
[5] Some say, for example, that anything Christ would have offered in the way of sacrifice would have been sufficient, since, as the saying goes, “just one drop of blood would have had infinite value.” This is a fallacious concept, for one drop of blood would not have resulted in the death of Christ. It was the death of Christ alone that was needed for the atonement, and nothing less would have been satisfactory, a condition predetermined by God himself in Scripture.
[6] The Catholic Encyclopedia: “...Redemption has reference to both God and man. On God’s part, it is the acceptation of satisfactory amends whereby the Divine honor is repaired and the Divine wrath appeased.... “Satisfaction, or the payment of a debt in full, means, in the moral order, an acceptable reparation of honor offered to the person offended and, of course, implies a penal and painful work” (1911 edition , vol. 12, p. 678). Augustine: “But what is meant by ‘justified in His blood’?....Was it indeed so, that when God the Father was wroth with us, He saw the death of His Son for us, and was appeased towards us? Was then His Son already so far appeased towards us, that He even deigned to die for us; while the Father was still so far wroth, that except His Son died for us, He would not be appeased?” (On the Trinity, Book XIII, Ch. 11). Thomas Aquinas: “This is properly the effect of a sacrifice, that through it God is appeased, as even man is ready to forgive an injury done unto him by accepting a gift which is offered to him...And so in the same way, what Christ suffered was so great a good that, on account of that good found in human nature, God has been appeased over all the offenses of mankind” (Summa Theo. III, Q. 49, Art. 4; See also ST 1a, 2ae, 87, 1-6; 3, 48, 2; De Veritate, 28, 2). The Catechism of Trent: “...our heavenly Father, oftentimes grievously offended by our crimes, might be turned away from wrath to mercy” (CCT, p. 255). Ludwig Ott: “By atonement in general is understood the satisfaction of a demand. In the narrower sense it is taken to mean the reparation of an insult: satisfactio nihil aliud est quam injuriae alteri illatae compensatio (Roman Catechism, II, 5, 59). This occurs through a voluntary performance which outweighs the injustice done...Thus Christ’s atonement was, through its intrinsic value, sufficient to counterbalance the infinite insult offered to God, which is inherent in sin” (pp. 186, 188). See my book, Not By Bread Alone, pp. 19-62 for more detailed information.
[10] Instead of providing financially for old age parents, the Pharisees taught that a man could lock up his money by making contributions to the temple (Corban). The Pharisees would benefit from these contributions, since they ran the temple.
[11] Klinghoffer’s translation of this passage is a bit overdone. The Hebrew, literally reads: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one” or “Jehovah our Elohim, Jehovah is one.” (Additionally, “Elohim” is in the masculine plural construct form, Eloheynu, suggesting a plurality in itself). As Keil notes: “The idea is not, Jehovah our God is one God, but ‘one Jehovah’….Hence what is predicated here of Jehovah (Jehovah one) does not relate to the unity of God, but simply states that it is to Him alone that the name Jehovah rightfully belongs, that He is the one absolute God, to whom no other Elohim can be compared” (Keil-Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, The Pentateuch, p. 323).
[12] The form is the Hebrew tetragrammaton DEDI (Jehovah or Yahweh) immediately preceding the Hebrew word for “one” (i.e., “Jehovah one”).
[13] Klinghoffer later attempts to divorce Dan. 9:25-26 from any relation to Christ by arguing against Jewish convert Michael L. Brown’s view in Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus that the 70 weeks (490 years) of the prophecy ends in 63 AD. Klinghoffer objects saying that in Dan. 9:25-26 the “anointed one dies after the year 63…But Jesus died around the year 30” (p. 208), therefore Jesus was not the Messiah. But Klinghoffer fails to give us the starting date for Brown’s 490 years, except to say that it “begins with the return of Daniel’s compatriots to the holy land to rebuild Jerusalem.” Starting from 458 BC when Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem and adds 483 years (the 62 weeks + 7 weeks of Dan. 9:25), subtracting 1 year for no year 0, equals 26 AD. It is after 26 AD that Jesus is “cut off” (crucified) in 33 AD, the traditional year of Christ’s crucifixion (or even Klinghoffer’s 30 AD). Moreover, if one starts from 458 BC and adds the 490 years of Dan. 9:24 (subtracting 1 year for no year 0), it comes to 33 AD, the year of Christ’s crucifixion. See my book The Apocalypse of St. John, pp. 354-359 for more information.
, June 27, 1971, “On New Laws Regulating the Pontifical Biblical Commission.” See for a brief and revealing history of the Pontifical Biblical Commission by noted scholar Monsignor John F. McCarthy at http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=4679 (
[15] As stated in “The Wait is Over: Jews’ Messiah Now Kosher” in The Jewish Week, Jan. 25, 2002, by Eric J. Greenberg.
[16] 1Sam. 22:8; Eccl. 5:13, 16; Is 17:11; 57:10; Amos 6:6. The word appears over 100 times in the OT.
[17] Klinghoffer cites Abraham Ibn Ezra and his claim that Isaiah 53 could not refer to Christ since “Isaiah spoke of the servant’s reward – the latter would ‘see his seed,’ that is, have children; ‘prolong his days,’ that is, live a long life; and ‘divide the spoil with the strong,’ a reference to divvying up the booty of war (53:10,12). Jesus did none of these things” (p. 166). But this is where the Jew always gets trapped, constantly looking for earthly, human, physical or national fulfillments. Christ’s “seed” was fulfilled heavenly, divinely, spiritually and eternally (cf. Ps. 22:30; Mt. 12:50; Gal. 3:29). Christ’s days were “prolonged” because he rose from the dead to live eternally in heaven. He “divided the spoil,” ironically, at the very time the Pharisees were accusing him of being under the power of Beelzebub (cf. Lk. 11:14-22; Mt. 12:22-29; Eph. 4:8; Ps. 68:18). Klinghoffer’s alternative is that Is. 53:12 merely means that the Jews were “willing to die” but didn’t actually die (pp. 81-82). The text in Hebrew says otherwise: “he poured out to death (ZENL) his life or his soul (E[TP). Other statements in Isaiah 53 confirm that it was a real physical death, e.g., vr. 8: “he was cut off from the land of the living” and vr. 9: “His grave was assigned to be with wicked men, and with a rich man in his death.”
[18] “Holocaust” is originally derived from the Hebrew DLRD OLAH and was normally translated as “burnt offering” (e.g., Lev. 1:4; Num. 6:11). OLAH literally means “that which goes up,” referring to the smoke of the offering that ascends to heaven. Incense used in Catholic churches has the same intent. Greek adopted a similar word, HOLOKAUTOMA (Heb. 10:6-8; Mk. 12:33).
[19] Klinghoffer says: “What are the key points that a reasonably informed Jew would have kept in mind in evaluating Jesus and, later, the early church? Judaism of the first century…can be boiled down to four points: that scripture is cryptic, that God is One, that religious commandments are the eternal essence of Judaism, and that a Davidic messiah may be expected” (p. 24).
[20] Klinghoffer also admits what many other Jews deny today, that “the Talmudic text was long ago censored and excised for fear of Christian anger, along with the related passage in Mishneh Torah [Maimonides’ acceptance of the Talmud’s version of the Crucifixion in Sanhedrin] but can now be found in very small Hebrew type in the back of some editions of the Talmud.” Klinghoffer admits that the Talmud says Jesus “sentence was that he should be stoned to death, then hung up briefly on a wooden scaffold….shaped like a T” for the “charges against him” such as “he performed magic, enticed, and led astray Israel” (p. 73).
[21] Gen. 3:15; 49:10; Num. 24:17; Deut. 18:15; Psalms 2:7; 16:10-11; 22:15-17; 22:18; 34:20; 35:19; 68:18; 69:4; Isaiah 6:10; 7:14; 9:6; 11:1f; 40:10-11; 50:6; 53:1-12; Jeremiah 19:1-13; 23:5; Micah 5:2; Zechariah 11:13; 12:10; Malachi 3:1, to name a few.
[24] Later Klinghoffer tries to accuse the New Testament of having no Hebrew scriptures to back up its claim that the Messiah would die and be raised on the third day (e.g., Lk. 24:46). Klinghoffer says the Christian appeal to Hos. 6:1-2 (“on the third day he will raise us up”) “violates the obvious meaning of the text.” This objection has no merit if there is a dual meaning to the text (cf. Hos. 6:1-2; Lk. 13:32), a not uncommon feature of Old Testament prophecy. In addition, Jonah 1:17 is quoted by Jesus to verify the length of time he would be in the grave (cf. Matt. 12:39-40). Of course, in such cases, Klinghoffer would conveniently insist that the “Hebrew Scriptures” must be “stated plainly” (p. 86) as opposed to what a “reasonably informed Jew” of the first century would see as “Scripture is cryptic” (p. 24).
[25] “When Jesus heard him, he marveled, and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’”
[26] John 5:18: “the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God”; John 7:1: “After this Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him”; John 7:25: “Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, ‘Is not this the man whom they seek to kill?’”; John 8:40: “but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God; this is not what Abraham did.”
[27] The LXX’s Greek is: EpiktavratoV pa:V a[nqrwpoV o{V oujk ejmmevnei ejn pa:si toi:V lovgoiV tou: novmou touvtou poih:sai aujtouvV. The Greek adds “all” (pa:si) but the Hebrew grammatical structure implies it without it having to be denoted.
[28] Gen. 26:3; Deut. 9:5; 1Sm. 3:12; 15:11, 13; 1Kg. 6:12; 8:20; 12:15; 2Kg. 23:3, 24; 2Chr. 6:10; 10:15; Neh. 5:13; 9:8; Jer. 11:5; 23:20; 28:6; 29:10; 30:24; 33:14; 34:18; 35:16.
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