As Rabbi Michael J. Cook, the Sol and Arlene Bronstein Professor in Judeo-Christian Studies at Hebrew Union College, writes in his book, Modern Jews Engage the New Testament, Messianic Jews “represent themselves as modern-day counterparts of first-century Jewish-Christian followers of Jesus, who, as it were, went underground for almost two millenia only to resurface recently as today’s Jewish messianics! This is sophistry.”
Based on these groups’ own admission of belief in the trinity, the atoning qualities of Christ’s blood, and his resurrection from the dead, “these descriptions are not the religion of Jesus but the later religion about him, so it is absurd to present this ‘Yeshua’ as the Jewish Messiah,” Cook writes. (emphasis in original)
From a ritualistic perspective, Cook goes on, “these messianics are, in a minor way, ‘Judaizers’ of sorts (i.e., objectionable to Pauline Christianity— the issues with Paul, however, were of greater gravity: circumcision and the dietary laws). However, they actually become further removed from the historical Jesus by the ostensible devotion to Jewish holidays, liturgy, artifacts, and motifs whose modern manifestations originated only after Jesus died and were created by leadership of a rabbinic Judaism that, on arising post-70 CE, rejected Christianity. How, then, are such manners of observance—unknown to Jesus and created by Jewish leaders who rejected Christians—supposed to make someone a more authentic Jew?” (emphasis in original)
Sociologically, Cook goes on, “it is specious to reason that, throughout history, there have always been rivulets of Jews who accept Jesus, and that today’s messianics perpetuate these, when the outside monies they now attract started burgeoning only suddenly in the 1970s, as the turn of the millenium neared, with its recurring hope for the Second Coming and even the end of the world.” When, he asks, “in previous history have rivulets of Jewish messianics received such largesse?” He concludes, “Today the mask is coming off: publications disseminated by Christian missionary groups increasingly are admitting that messianics are their offshoots, not derivatives from past Jewish-Christians.” (emphasis in original)
Cook goes on the quote from conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager and his 1989 essay, “Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Jew for Jesus’?” Jews who become messianic, writes Cook, quoting Prager, “are ‘probably the only people in the world who take on the beliefs of another religion yet deny that they have converted to that religion’!” At the same time, Christians who join messianic groups in the belief that they are replicating an original religion as practiced by Jesus “find that their theology is identical to what they had been practicing all along.”
These people may be sincere, Cook concludes, but (again, quoting Prager), “‘it is quite possible to be both sincere and deceitful'” because Jews who believe in Jesus as their savior “‘do not acknowledge that they have become Christians'” and “because Christians who profess Judaism fail to acknowledge that, to do so, they must forgo belief in Jesus’ divinity.”
Cook also debunks Messianic claims that they are perpetuating a religion practiced by Jesus’s original followers. That “Jesus movement,” he writes, faded, and “exerted little impact on the Christianity that endured.” Rather, he posits that they are followers of the Pauline movement that “became the nucleus of a Christianity that endured.”
