The Distortion

2000 Years of Misrepresenting the Relationship Between Jesus the Messiah and the Jewish People

Dr. John Fischer, Dr. Patrice Fischer

• Publisher: Messianic Jewish Communications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781880226810
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Distortion describes how misunderstandings began, how they continued through the last two millennia, what it has cost, not only the Jewish people, but also the Church.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1	Are the Gospels Reliable?
	Dr. John Fischer

Chapter 2	Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic?
	Dr. John Fischer

Chapter 3	Has the Church Been Anti-Semitic?
	Dr. John Fischer

Chapter 4	A Battle of Religious World Views
	Dr. Patrice Fischer

Chapter 5	A Modern Script for the Passion Story
	Dr. Patrice Fischer

Chapter 6	Cinematic Choices That Could Lead to Anti-Semitic Conclusions
	Dr. Patrice Fischer

Chapter 7	God’s Master Plan for Humanity
	Dr. John Fischer

Chapter 8	Have the Jewish People Responded to God’s Plan?
	Dr. John Fischer

Chapter 9	Does It Matter?
	Dr. Patrice Fischer

Chapter 10	What You Can Do to End the Distortion
	Dr. Patrice Fischer

Bibliography

Introduction

In its March 19, 2004 edition, the St. Petersburg Times reported the following story. It seems that a married couple in Statesboro, Georgia, got into an argument after watching Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ. When they left the theater, they were locked in vigorous debate. Then, after they got home, the argument turned violent. The two were charged with simple battery after they called the police on each other. According to the police report, the wife suffered injuries on her face and arm, while her husband had a stab wound on his hand, the result of a pair of scissors; his shirt had been ripped off. He had also punched a hole in their wall. As the wife said, “It was the dumbest thing we’ve ever done” (“‘Passion’ Stirs Couple to Battle”).

Not all responses to the movie have been that passionate. However, the film has been controversial, raising the emotional level of interfaith discussions. In the process, recently formed inter-religious friendships have become strained, and old wounds among Jews and Christians have been reopened. Others have been left simply shaking their heads in amazement and confusion.

One recently married interfaith couple experienced some of these emotions first-hand, after seeing the film together. The Jewish wife was very deeply disturbed by the movie’s presentation of the events, and its treatment of the Jews who were part of it, even though she could not quite put her finger on what bothered her. The Christian husband was greatly moved by the film, and could not understand his wife’s concern. They simply could not appreciate each other’s perspectives. Their situation illustrates some of the broader, more substantial issues that the movie has brought to the forefront once again.

How can a story that purports to be the greatest demonstration of God’s compassion for humankind, the most stirring example of sacrificial love, become the source of such anguish and pain? And, how could this story, so Jewish at its core, have become an instrument of hatred—as it indeed has—over centuries of human history?

But this is not just an ancient story; it is a modern story as well. On April 5, 2004, the Associated Press reported on the response to the showing of The Passion in Cairo, Egypt. A 21-year-old Muslim woman from Jordan came out of the theater in tears. She told the reporter the movie “unmasked the Jews’ lies, and I hope that everybody, everywhere, turns against the Jews” (Abou El-Magd).

As odd as it might sound, for the past 2000 years, the truth about the real relationship between Jesus the Messiah and the Jewish people has in fact been distorted. This distortion has led to all sorts of tragedies and travesties. This book was written to explain how it happened, using Gibson’s film as the most recent example. It then offers some encouraging thoughts and suggestions.

We want to establish the credibility of the Gospels as originally written so people will know that these documents actually can be trusted. Chapter 1 answers the question, “Are the Gospels Reliable?”

Chapter 2, “Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic?” addresses one of the assumptions that is often heard. In reality, when reading many versions of the Newer Testament, one might get the impression that the gospel writers, themselves Jews, were somehow anti-Jewish. Yet, that just doesn’t make any sense. This fallacy has painfully caused death and destruction to many Jewish people. This chapter shows that the Gospels are not anti-Semitic.

Although a sensitive question, “Has the Church Been Anti-Semitic?” needs to be answered if this book is to honestly trace the impact of the last 2000 years of the distortion. It’s not that all Christians have deliberately wanted to harm Jews, it’s just that we need to present the background for some awful—and often violent—acts against the people of the Messiah. Chapter 3 addresses this issue.

Using the preceding chapters as background, Chapter 4, “A Battle of Religious World Views,” shows why a movie such as The Passion of the Christ has been so controversial in the Jewish community. Because of the immense popularity of this film, we have chosen it as an example of how centuries of misrepresentation have impacted the culture of our times. The disparity between Jewish and Christian responses to this movie demonstrates the depth of the divide that has developed because of the misrepresentations discussed in this book.

Because Gibson is a “Traditional Catholic,” it is important to be aware of the influence his brand of Catholicism had on his understanding of the Newer Testament. In addition to the writings of two nuns and their “visions,” the interpretations of the Passion Plays of the Middle Ages significantly affected Mr. Gibson’s filmmaking decisions. This is why we have included Chapter 5, “A Modern Script for the Passion Story.”

Given that the distortion is nearly 2000 years old, it was almost inevitable that Gibson, especially having the additional influence of his particular religious perspective, would make certain potentially damaging decisions. Chapter 6, “Cinematic Choices That Could Lead to Anti-Semitic Conclusions” offers several surprising examples of the results of these decisions.

Having established that misrepresentations of the gospel have existed for two millennia, Chapter 7 sets the record straight. This chapter explains how the death of Yeshua (Jesus) was actually part of God’s master plan, put in motion from the beginning of humanity—a plan that began with God’s people, Israel, and then expanded to the rest of the world.

Chapter 8 shows that God’s plan, the promise he made to the people of Israel and brought to completion in the atoning death of Yeshua, rooted itself deeply first among his own people. And so, the chapter answers the question, “Have the Jewish People Responded to God’s Plan?”

Chapter 9, “Does It Matter?” shows that even though God does have a master plan, the fact that some people haven’t followed it has cost his Jewish people much. The fact is, the distortion of the plan has led to awful horror for the Jews ands significant loss to Christians.

Our final chapter, Chapter 10, offers ways to help end the distortion.

Note: Throughout this book, we have chosen to use the terms “Older” and “Newer” when referring to the “Old” and “New” Testaments. What is called the “Old” Testament isn’t “old” in the sense that it is obsolete or that the study of it provides neither blessing nor instruction. It is “old” only in that it is chronologically “older” than the “newer” part of the Bible. It is still relevant and offers as much today as it did in Yeshua’s day, 2000 years ago, before the distortion began. Rav Shaul (Rabbi Saul, the apostle Paul) wrote of it even before the “Newer” Testament was codified:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is valuable for teaching truth, convicting of sin, correcting faults and training in right living; thus anyone who belongs to God may be fully equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:16–17)

Chapter 1

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Are the Gospels Reliable?

Articles or books on the Gospels sometimes include statements such as the following:

Scholars have argued that the gospel writers, writing many decades after the events they are describing, have tailored the details of Jesus’ life to fit their own circumstances or theological agenda, so then the actual facts of his life and the details of his teachings, cannot be accurately known. The story then is really a second-century reflection of a first-century world. The Bible may say Yeshua walked on water or healed the sick, but he probably didn’t.

How reasonable is this approach? Rabbi Berel Wein reflected on this issue.

I have always found it difficult to understand how people, millennia after the fact, are able to interpret and reach conclusions about the ancients, conclusions that were not evident at that time to contemporaries who knew them and also escaped the attention of scholars who pored over and continually commented on the Bible and its heroes over the past many centuries. To me, it smacks of arrogance. (31)

While the rabbi’s comments are very much to the point, this remains an important subject. Therefore, it needs to be dealt with in some detail. The discussion can be broken down into two parts.

Are the Gospels Later Documents, Written in the Second Century Long After the Events Took Place?

This perspective is often assumed in articles and frequently taught in universities. In other words, the Gospels are thought to be legends or inventions of second-century Christians. As it turns out, this imaginative reconstruction of the origins of the Gospels runs into several obstacles.

While there are numerous later manuscript copies of the Newer Testament, some are, in fact, quite early. The renowned papyrologist Carsten Peter Thiede closely examined several early manuscript fragments of the Gospels to determine their date of composition (Eyewitness to Jesus). Using paleographic considerations such as writing style and document format, he discovered that the Magdalen Papyrus (a fragment of Matthew) probably dates to about the year 70 C.E. He also noted that a typical Jewish shorthand convention in referring to God’s sacred name was used by the copyist in referring to Yeshua as “Lord.” This would be a rather striking indication of the manuscript’s Jewish origins and of its earliness, and so helps confirm Thiede’s assessment of the date of the manuscript. Jewish features of Christian beliefs quickly evaporated in the very early centuries. He also examined fragments of manuscripts of Luke and Mark. The Luke fragment was found in a Paris library and appears to be written between 63 and 67 C.E. The Mark fragment, 7Q5, was one of the Dead Sea scroll fragments found at the Qumran community. It can be quite accurately dated to 68 C.E.

In addition to Thiede’s work and analysis, there is a fragmentary papyrus of John’s gospel, the John Rylands manuscript. This text dates to about 110 C.E. Then, there are the numerous quotations of the Newer Testament by the early church leaders, called the Church Fathers. With the exception of a small handful of verses, the entire Newer Testament is quoted by these leaders by about 250 C.E., some 36,000 plus quotations in all. Much of this quoting comes from Clement of Rome before the year 100 C.E. What this all means is that if copies of the Gospels exist from as early as 63–110 C.E., the original documents must have been written considerably earlier than those who hold to a later writing imagine.

In ancient times, the process of writing, circulating, deteriorating, and copying of documents was a complex and extended process. Once an important document had been written, if it was broadly significant enough, it was then circulated widely among those groups to whom it was relevant. Examples of this process are mentioned in the Newer Testament itself. In Colossians 4:16 the rabbi, Rav Shaul, instructs his students in Colosse to pass his letter to them along to his students in Laodicea, and to get his letter from his Laodicean students and read that themselves. Revelation 2 and 3 contains indications that this document was intended to be read and circulated along the entire trade route from Ephesus to Laodicea. During this process of circulation, the documents eventually began to deteriorate. The deterioration of a significant document then launched its copying. Now, the copying of a document was a rather lengthy and costly procedure in and of itself. Everything was carefully copied by hand by specially trained copyists called scribes. Then, the copies entered the circulation process. Given the long span of time that was involved in the circulation, deterioration, copying, and recirculation of ancient documents, copy dates of 63–110 C.E. yield composition dates for the Gospels which are rather early.

Appropriately, the former Oxford scholar John Wenham argues in his book Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke that these three Gospels were written prior to 55 C.E. He came to this conclusion independent of, and prior to, Thiede’s work. He derived his assessment from a close textual, intertextual, and contextual examination of the Gospels themselves. The Cambridge University scholar, J.A.T. Robinson, similarly argued for an early date for the entire Newer Testament in Redating the New Testament. His analysis led him to a date before 70 C.E. for the composition of all these books. He also developed evidence for John being the earliest gospel to be written (The Priority of John). It should be noted that Robinson’s entire scholarly work on the Bible has moved in decidedly non-conservative directions both theologically and historically. Hence, his early dating of the gospel texts is especially significant. Some of the issues that both Wenham and Robinson discuss are the glaring absence of references or allusions to important episodes in the early life of Yeshua’s community of followers. The destruction of the Temple; the deaths of James, Peter, and Rav Shaul; and the persecution under Nero were all highly significant events to this emerging Messianic Jewish movement. Yet, no mention is made of them.

The work of Thiede, and the analysis of Robinson, Wenham, and others are further corroborated from another source. William F. Albright was the foremost archaeologist of the Near East during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. From his studies he concluded: “In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and the eighties of the first century A.D.” (Albright, Christianity Today 18). Elsewhere, he stated: “We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about 80 A.D.” (Albright, Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands 136). Coming as he does from an entirely different field of scholarship, Albright’s evaluation is even stronger additional reinforcement of the early date of composition for the Gospels.

Now, for a very important pertinent consideration, the ramifications of the Jewish nature of the gospel records. The fact that there is a clear Jewish thrust to, and Jewish structure underlying, the Gospels, helps make the case for an early writing of these documents. Numerous scholars have noted this fact. (Bowman, Carrington, Drury, Fischer, Goulder, Guilding, Roth, et al.) Matthew paints Yeshua against the backdrop of Moses and Daniel. Mark has him as a rabbi and as a prophet following in the footsteps of Elijah and Elisha. Luke presents him as the priest-king who reflects not only David, but Joseph as well. John pictures him in the light of the Jewish holidays and as a more modern version of both Esther and Judah Maccabee.

There is also the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents