The following is a reproduction of my 1997 doctoral dissertation demonstrating that modern “Messianic Jewish Congregations” are actually evangelical Christian congregations, not Jewish.
As such it represents my perspective in 1997 before my return to a Jewish way of life in 1999. Please see my Wanderings 1967-2025 for context.
Both the 2000 print version and 2012 ePub are available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Messianic-Jewish-Congregations-Business-Gentiles-ebook/dp/B0097GFOTK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0
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Background
My father once told me the story of a Jewish man who visited a Christian church. Among the many activities that were strange to him, he took a special interest in the procedures that surrounded the collection of numerous monetary offerings. On leaving the church service on that occasion the Jewish man asked his Gentile friend a significant theological question: “If Jesus was Jewish, the apostles were Jewish, and the early Church was Jewish, then who sold this business to the Gentiles in the first place?”
Though this story is meant to be humorous, it highlights a significant issue for the Jew who enters a Christian setting. A Jewish follower of Jesus finds little that is familiar in the church, little that can serve as a reference point for further encounter. In my own case, my father tried to give me a traditional Jewish upbringing and religious education. When, at the age of twenty, I became a believer in Jesus as Messiah, I strained to find reference points in Christianity that were in any way familiar to me.
At that time (1969), there were few options open to a Jewish believer. As a product of the sixties counter-culture, I was encouraged to “leave everything behind” and revel in my “born-again” status. I was to forget what I had been in the “flesh” and focus on “who I was in Christ.” I most eagerly jettisoned my radical political beliefs, my Beatles albums, and my drug paraphernalia, along with my Jewish upbringing. At best, I could count my earthly credits as “loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:9). I was a “new creation” and I looked with great anticipation toward my practical incorporation into the Body of Christ, the visible Church. I was now part of a community where there was neither Jew nor Gentile.
I was disappointed to discover that most of my new Christian friends had adopted wholesale an expression of the Christian life that did not seem to match the New Testament pattern about which I had read. In fact, it seemed as if they had clipped their image of Jesus and the Church out of the Jewish New Testament and pasted both onto a Gentile backdrop. The resultant pastiche bore little resemblance to what I was reading about in the New Testament. Although I forced myself to adapt to what seemed very foreign, it was with a sense of mourning that I abandoned my Jewish heritage that suddenly had new meaning for me. However, I submitted myself to my pastors and teachers, and set aside all that I had been in order to apprehend what I had become in Christ.
How would it have been different if I had been shown a way to express my new faith in Christ in a Jewish context? What would it have been like for me if I had not been the only Jewish believer in Jesus in the fellowship? What would it have been like to have at the same time explored what it meant to be in Christ and have discovered the true meaning of what it was to be a Jew?
. . . CONTINUE READING CHAPTER 1
Messianic Jewish Congregations - Table of Contents
Wandering Jew - Table of Contents
