Book Review

I'm mostly finished with David Klinghoffer's book "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus." I know David slightly, and we had a chance to talk to his wife a bit this past weekend, which was really nice.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the book, largely because so many of my 5 regular readers are not only Christians, but deeply committed to their faith. I suspect this would be a tough book for most Christians to read. David says a lot of things that I think will come across badly to people convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. But it's an important book, and I think people openminded enough to read it thoughtfully will learn something. They'll definitely learn a lot about Judaism, and I suspect they'll learn a bit about their own faith.

His basic thesis is this, near as I understand it. The Jews rejected Jesus, and that rejection was critical to the development of the Western world. Without that rejection, Christianity would have remained a minority version of Judaism, and not created Western Europe as we know it. The reasons for the rejection are many, and I'll leave you to read the book to get the full effect. The most critical rejection, David says, is not the rejection of Jesus during his own lifetime, but the rejection of Paul and his development of Christian ideas and beliefs.

The critical issue for me is that much has been said about Jews throughout history by Christians (leaving aside for the moment things Jews have said about Christians.) Most of it seems to come from two things: 1) Christianity's basic ignorance of Judaism and its traditions; & 2) Christianity's refusal (not always, but often) to acknowledge Judaism's right to exist and its importance to its practitioners.

The first issue, as David indicates, was not true at the beginning. All the practitioners of Jesus' religion were themselves Jews, and would have had more than passing familiarity with the basics of Judaism. As Paul opened the faith up to non-Jews, that familiarity ended. Judaism quickly faded from Christianity's worldview, which I think led in large part to the second issue. David goes into it all, so I won't, but there's been tremendous pressure on Jews to give up their faith. How would a Christian react to being told to drop their faith and the faith of their fathers?

Anyway, there's a lot in the book, and I recommend it highly for anyone interested in the history of faith, and the history of the interaction between the two most prominent monotheistic religions.