Finding Messiah

A Journey into the Jewishness of the Gospel

Jennifer M. Rosner

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514003244
• eBook ISBN: 9781514003251
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Jesus was Jewish, and his Jewish identity informed every aspect of his work, words, and witness. He came as the Messiah of Israel, God's covenant people, and he spoke the language of God's faithfulness to this people. So why does it seem that Judaism has little to do with our Christian discipleship today?

Jennifer Rosner, a scholar of Jewish-Christian relations, takes us on a personal and corporate journey into the Jewish roots of Christian faith and practice. Understanding Judaism—and the way in which Judaism and Christianity became separate religions—is essential for a rich and holistic Christian identity. As a follower of Jesus who was raised in a Jewish home and who continues to live a Jewish life, Rosner has seen firsthand how a Christian faith can become impoverished when divorced from its Jewish roots. Finding Messiah follows Rosner's own journey in rediscovering the role of Judaism and God's covenant with Israel in Christian life and practice. When we begin to understand Christianity's indelible relationship to Judaism, key aspects of the Christian faith come alive and the wonder of the gospel becomes clear in new and powerful ways.

Jesus' Judaism provides the foundation for the church that is built upon his name. Rediscover the Jewish Jesus, and in so doing, experience a deeper and richer faith than ever before.

1

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

The parting of the ways was more between mainstream Christianity and Jewish Christianity than simply between Christianity as a single whole and rabbinic Judaism.

JAMES DUNN

We made it!” my sister-in-law Leila exclaimed as we pulled into the parking garage of my new apartment complex in Pasadena, marking the end of our week-long cross-country girls’ trip.

I shut off the car. “Yep, I guess this is my new home.” I tried to keep my voice light, but in truth I was feeling overwhelmed. Soon, my three constant companions of the past seven days (Leila and two close friends) would return to their familiar lives in Northern California, while I began the exciting but undeniably daunting process of starting over again in a new city.

Having finished my MDiv at Yale, I was now back in California to begin working on my PhD at Fuller Theological Seminary. My years at Yale had gifted me with a profound love for Christian theology (especially that of Karl Barth), yet toward the end of my time there, a startling realization had begun to crystallize: my deep and abiding Christian faith had almost completely eclipsed the Judaism of my heritage and upbringing. I felt like I had lost an anchoring piece of my identity, and I didn’t know what it looked like to get it back.

I was raised in a Jewish home in Northern California, where my parents had moved one week after getting married. They were both raised in Los Angeles, my mom in the Reform Jewish movement and my dad in the Conservative Jewish movement.1 As I grew up, my mom worked hard to preserve Jewish traditions and practices in our home while my dad dedicated himself to instilling in my brother and me a solid and grounding faith in God.

The spirituality of my parents didn’t always line up, as my dad was also influenced by the New Age movement and held a certain suspicion of organized religion. My mom was agnostic until well into their marriage, but the rhythms of Jewish life were an anchoring part of her identity. We never got plugged into the local Jewish community, which both of my parents found to be too liberal.

My sense of Jewish identity was sturdy, even if I wasn’t always sure what that meant or implied. My undergraduate years at Cal Poly, a large public state university, became a time of deep searching, and it “just so happened” that most of my friends in college were Christians. I found myself increasingly considering the claims of Christianity while being in part unable to connect with the more secular Hillel (Jewish student group) on my college campus.

I had chosen Cal Poly largely because that’s where my brother was studying, and I look back fondly at our weekly sibling dinner nights where we would share about our lives and friendships, our faith and fears. My last year in college, through a series of powerful events, the claims of Jesus became undeniable and I yielded my life to following him. Remarkably, sparked by a short-lived dating relationship with my Christian roommate, my brother also came to faith in Jesus in college. At the time, I had no idea what belief in Jesus meant for my Jewishness, so I simply buried it.

I became deeply involved with a Vineyard church plant and seldom spoke of my Jewish upbringing and identity. My bachelor’s degree is in political science, and I had planned to go to law school like many of the students in my department. However, upon stumbling into faith in Jesus, I was immediately awakened to a profound fascination with theology that led me to divinity school instead. During my years at Yale I had felt like a kid in a candy shop, reveling in church history, systematic theology, and biblical languages.

But now, I was faced with a new dilemma. As my long-ignored Jewish identity started clamoring for attention, I began to wonder how on earth I could be both Jewish and Christian. These tensions would rise to the fore during my doctoral program.

Upon arriving at Fuller, I once again commenced the tiresome process of trying to find a new church home. For a year, I schlepped all the way across Los Angeles to attend Bel Air Presbyterian Church. After that, I spent six months attending a little Evangelical Free church whose white building stood on a shady residential street that was walking distance from my apartment. And, just like in New Haven, I once again ended up at an Episcopal church.

This particular Episcopal church—St. James’ in South Pasadena—had as its associate priest a Palestinian Christian named Sari. I spent two years attending St. James’, and I will forever be grateful for the friendship that I developed with Sari and his family, which became the font of much deeply enriching conversation, coteaching, and building our own small but strong bridge across the chasm that often divides Jews and Arabs.

I probably would have stayed at St. James’ a lot longer had a quiet yet persistent subplot not begun developing in my life. My first year at Fuller, I nonchalantly revealed to my doctoral adviser, Howard Loewen, that I was Jewish. At Yale, my experience of theology was that it didn’t much matter who was doing the theologizing, it just mattered that it was solid and innovative. But the particulars of my spiritual identity were about to take on new meaning.

“You’re Jewish?” marveled Howard following my reveal, eyes slightly wide. “That matters. You must meet my friend Mark Kinzer.” What I would discover throughout the remainder of my doctoral program was that Mark Kinzer is one of the leading voices in the contemporary Messianic Jewish movement (which is largely composed of followers of Jesus committed to preserving Jewish identity), and that who I am matters profoundly in the way that I approach Christian theology.

About a month later, I sat at a corner table in a local coffee shop across from Mark Kinzer, who was in town for a conference and who assured me that there were lots of other people “like us” out there. One such person was Stuart Dauermann, who at the time led a Messianic Jewish congregation (something I had never even heard of) in Beverly Hills.

A number of things happened over the next several years. I began attending Stuart’s congregation and, even amid the awkwardness and unfamiliarity of another new faith community, something about the Jewish rhythms touched deep inside my soul. It became abundantly clear to me why no church or denomination had ever quite felt like “home” to me. Messianic Jewish congregations can be complex places, as any in-between existence is. But in a flash, I knew that this in-between life lived alongside other Jewish followers of Jesus was my spiritual home.

The second thing that happened was that my own inner struggle to find my way as a newly self-identified Messianic Jew spilled over into my academic work. I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on the ways in which the mutually exclusive categories bequeathed to us by the parting of the ways are being called into question in certain circles in our own day.2 And just like that, I was hooked. I knew it would be my life’s passion to break open the common misperceptions about Judaism and Christianity and the gap between them.

While most people are aware that Jesus was Jewish (as were the apostles), the significance and implications of this identity marker are often left unexplored. These founders of Christianity worshiped in the Jerusalem temple, lived in booths during the holiday of Sukkot, and upheld the statutes of the Torah. They were wholly committed to the Jewish faith, and this context influenced how the apostles understood who Jesus was and what following him entailed. The eventual parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity was a complex process whereby each developing religious community sought to distance itself from the other, the result being two entirely separate religions. I don’t think Jesus’ first followers saw this coming.

The New Testament seeks to envision and build a community where both Jews and Gentiles follow Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, side by side. As we see in Acts 10, Peter is astonished that the Spirit comes on Gentiles just as the Spirit came upon Jews in Acts 2. “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right,” Peter marvels in Acts 10:34-35. Apparently, even Jesus’ inner circle did not realize the full impact of his coming up until this point.

The rest of the book of Acts describes the process of how this early Jesus-following community sought to forge the way forward. Do Gentile followers of Jesus need to take on Jewish practices? No, according to the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. Do Jews continue to uphold the rituals and traditions that had set their community apart for centuries? Yes, according to Acts 21.

What begins to take shape is a group of believers who are united in Spirit and faith, while living out that faith in divergent ways. Jews living as Jews, Gentiles living as Gentiles, and the dividing wall between the two being torn down in the body of Messiah (Ephesians 2:14).

After all, isn’t this what the long prophesied messianic era was to be all about? Israel and the nations living in harmony with one another rather than warring against each other, as we see so often throughout the pages of the Old Testament? As theologian Kendall Soulen explains, Jesus finally brings about “an economy of mutual blessing” between Jews and non-Jews, creating in his body a lasting and profound peace.3

But this beautiful harmony is exactly what got erased in the parting of the ways. The increasingly Gentile church adopted a zero-tolerance policy for Jews maintaining their Jewish identity (à la Ignatius), which paradoxically became antithetical to following Jesus. Meanwhile, the Jewish community—now led by the rabbis in the absence of the temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70—worked to stomp out the possibility of Jesus-believers in their midst.

After the two Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire (the first in AD 66–73, during which the temple was destroyed, and the second in AD 132–136, which ended with the Romans exiling the Jews from the city of Jerusalem), it became a liability for Gentile Christians to identify with Judaism. In fact, the main desire was to distance Christianity (which was becoming increasingly favorable to the Empire) from the Judaism that proved so problematic to the Romans. As is often the case with negative iden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Richard J. Mouw
• Introduction: On Being Monstrous
• 1 The Parting of the Ways
• 2 The Excluded Middle
• 3 Lost in Translation
• 4 Jesus and Ritual Purity
• 5 “The Land I Will Show You”
• 6 Bodies
• 7 Sin and the Fall
• 8 Sabbath
• 9 The Spirit
• 10 Sacred Days
• 11 God’s Ex-Wife
• 12 Paul
• 13 A Way Forward
• Epilogue: The Jewish Gospel
• Acknowledgments
• Questions for Reflection or Discussion
• Glossary of Jewish and Hebrew Terms
• Notes
• Praise for Finding Messiah
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright