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(“Meet Donald Trump’s lawyer: A Messianic Jew who hates BDS,” Haaretz, July 19).
One of the few points of agreement between the Early Church Fathers shaping Christian doctrine and the Jewish Sages in the Talmudic era was the impossibility of being a Jew and a Christian at the same time. One was either one or the other.
“Messianic Jew” is also a profoundly dishonest term because every Jew is messianic. Belief in the Messiah is one of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. “Messianic Jew” is also dishonest because it is not about belief in a, so far, nameless, future messiah, but Mr. Yeshua ben Yosef who in the year 30 CE was one of 250,000 Jews crucified in the Jewish wars for national liberation against Rome.
Sekulow is not a new fandangle of a “Messianic Jew” but just an old-fashioned Jewish apostate who has converted to Christianity; he is hardly the first over thousands of years. As my professor of Religion, an ordained Episcopal minister, at Columbia University once lectured in a course on Christianity’s Greek-language stories appended to the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), “The Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah for precisely the right reasons. He did not fit the Jewish understanding of the role, which is different from Christianity’s definition.”
And it is no accident that Jay Sekulow began life as a Reform Jew before falling into this fallacy. These “Jews for Jesus” types are just another manifestation among many of the death of non-observant American Jewry, which makes of the effort to certify their heterodox movements as kosher in Israel simply suicidal. They are not producing the next generation of Jews.
Read Phantom Nation: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace and learn. Available only via Amazon because it is so politically incorrect.
