Why the Jews Rejected Jesus - Free EBooks Library

By the time I was about two-thirds of the way through Klinghoffer’s book, two
things were solidly confirmed in my mind. First, it was Klinghoffer’s firm conviction that
the Jews throughout history were good religious people who were simply trying to live out
the Mosaic covenant, but, being highly outnumbered, were overrun by numerous political
and religious competitors, such as the Greeks, Romans, Christ, Paul, and the Catholic
Church, to name a few. All these competitors found that they could not live up to the high
moral standards of Judaism “for the practice of the commandments is a discipline unsuited
to the requirements of a mass religion” (p. 99), and therefore rejected the Mosaic law for an
easier path, a more worldly path, a path as we noted earlier was “the turning point in
Western history.”
Acts 15: The Crucial Turning Point
Klinghoffer claims that the detour began at the council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) when
“the early church jettisoned the observance of Jewish law” and “with the demands of the
faith whittled down to three [commandments]…having to do with food…the new church
was all set to accomplish what it did: over the course of some centuries, convert all of
Europe” (p. 99). It started when “Paul was contradicted and reviled by fellow Jews, leading
him to conclude that the future lay no longer with his own people.” Hence, “a split
developed within the church” which “could continue as it was under the leadership of
Jesus’s brother James: within the bounds of Torah law, requiring all converts also to be
observant Jews. Or it could take Paul’s more radical view of Jesus’s teaching.” Klinghoffer
then concludes:
“At a council meeting of elders in Jerusalem in the year 49, Paul made his case for
dropping Jewish law as a requirement for Christians. After much debate, James
5 Karl Keating once invited Medved to be the host speaker for a cruise sponsored by Catholic Answers
but his appearance was cancelled weeks before the cruise took place.
agreed – and the direction of Christian history was set. Had the Jews embraced
Jesus, therefore, followers of the church of James would have continued to be
obligated in the biblical commandments of circumcision, Sabbath…Thus, in every
respect, the Jesus movement might have remained a Jewish sect” etc. (p. 7).
If this incident wasn’t the backbone of his book (viz., Klinghoffer’s assertion on page 98
that in the council of Jerusalem “we have what is effectively the founding document of
Western civilization”) we could easily skip over it as simply a small case of tortured
exegesis and presumptuous conclusions. But Klinghoffer’s rendition of what happened is a
typical example of how badly he handles Scripture in the rest of his book, whether it’s his
own Hebrew bible or the New Testament, and how his misinformed reading of the text
leads him to make erroneous and often outrageous conclusions. These exegetical flaws will
be of paramount importance when Klinghoffer tries to negate from Scripture some
fundamental Christian doctrines, such as the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Virgin Birth.
First, there is no indication in the text that it was Paul who initiated or was alone in
“making the case for dropping Jewish law.” In the two instances that Paul speaks at the
council, he is merely retelling his experience of the “conversion of the Gentiles” (vr. 3)
wherein “God did signs and wonders among the Gentiles” (vr. 12), but which Klinghoffer,
for some odd reason, sees as “the heavy influence of Paul” from which a “faction in the
church was developing” (p. 98). But “signs and wonders” have nothing to do with