Let’s Stop Evangelizing Already
TLDR; Jesus isn’t the Jewish messiah. He never was and never will be. It’s been extensively covered by great rabbis and addressed in my dissertation.
Check out Aryeh Kaplan’s rebuttal of Jesus here [FREE DOWNLOAD].
You won’t like the rest of this post if this is an issue for you, but I recommend challenging your ability to engage with different perspectives by reading what I have to say on the matter.
The community I live in was recently bombarded with mailer books targeted to Jewish names with the expressed intent to convert Jews to Christianity. This is a standard thing that churches do, and it’s time for it to stop. Your efforts are pushing people away from respectful dialogue.
When a Jew walks into a conversation where the other side wants to convert them, then there is no mutual respect for each other’s beliefs. As long as there is a “superiority” such as Old vs New when it comes to testaments and covenants, then there is no room for just getting along.
You may want to shout from your proverbial mountaintops, but as we’ve covered before, your self-perceived attempts of generosity and saving lives only comes across as selfish, disrespectful, and aggressive.
No matter how peaceful your approach is, no one likes to be told they’re going to the [imaginary] landscape of hell.
Christian attempts to evangelize the Jewish people are at best insulting and short-sighted and at worse intentional and anti-Semitic.
Evangelism has been around more than generations – it’s been around since the advent of Christianity itself. Before then, there were two main perceptions of religion: let others be or force it on them. In fact, the Crusader era of Christianity was very much about forcing it on someone. Convert, or die. Unsurprisingly, numerous Jews died. It’s better for us to die than embrace a false religious that is utterly unpalatable to the Jews.
Christianity may fall under a flavor of Noachide laws and acceptable for non-Jews, but it just doesn’t work for Jews. In fact, the ability of Christianity to be Noachide is problematic in the first place, if a Christian insists on trinitarian nature and their path being the only path to the Creator.
There are communities and organizations that embrace evangelism as a necessity to their way of life and faith practice. However, just as it was inappropriate throughout all of history, so too it is inappropriate now. Whether it’s the age of science, atheism, or what-have-you, the human race is diverse and full of finding their own ways to worship something (anything really).
After all, the Jewish approach is that come one day, everyone will recognize HaShem is the Creator and bow in service. Isn’t there a Christian variant of that too? Spoiler alert: there is.
PSA: the rest of this post digresses from asking evangelism to stop and gets into origins. Due to the nature of the content, some may need to have a drink to take some CBD (Welcome to Portland!) before they continue.
Where does the concept of evangelism come from? What’s the source?
The notion of hell is one made of pagan origins related to the Underworld…
And the epic war of cosmic proportions related to Zeus and hades…
And the godhead related to the other brothers of Zeus…
And the half-man half-god related to Hercules, et al…
And salvation by pledging allegiance to a person or nation…
I’m seeing a pattern here…
Pattern or not, early Christianity (before it’s objectification by Rome and still a very very weird semi-Jewish sect) didn’t embrace any of these things.
No hell.
No battle (other than our own battle to be better than before).
No polytheism.
No half-breeds mucking about.
And, especially, no evangelism.
If early Christianity had any root in Judaism at all, these beliefs simply didn’t originally exist. These views were not existent in any Jewish-related Christian sect. They arrived after the sect took a far turn from Judaism and made its own religion and philosophy. The more Greek influence, the more Greek narrative…
And now for the icing on the cake, Judaism is actually anti-evangelism and anti-conversion. Sure, people can convert. I did. But it’s not for everyone. In fact, it’s a very high and hard path to walk. That’s why there is a general morality found in the seven laws given to Noah and all mankind.
And it would be much easier to get over our differences and move on to healing the world if we stopped trying to prove who’s right and just wait to see what the ending says. Just sayin’…