What about Messianic Jews?

Question 09045.

Messianic Jews are Jewish people who have come to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and who continue to live as Jews, often worshipping in congregations that keep the Sabbath, mark the biblical feasts and use Hebrew in their services. Some evangelicals regard the movement with suspicion, as though a believer who keeps Passover has half gone back to Moses. Others romanticise it and want to import its practices wholesale into Gentile churches.

I think both reactions miss the mark, and I want to work through this carefully. The question touches Jewish evangelism, Christian liberty and the whole matter of what happened to Jewish identity when the church began.

Who Messianic Jews Are

The modern movement grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, though Jewish believers in Jesus have existed continuously since the first century and there were Hebrew Christian societies in Britain in the nineteenth century. What changed was the decision to stop assimilating. Earlier generations of Jewish converts were usually expected to become culturally Gentile, take a new name, join a Protestant denomination and leave their heritage at the door.

Messianic Jews declined that bargain. They argued that a Jew who believes in Jesus becomes a completed Jew rather than a former one, and that there is no biblical requirement to abandon Jewish identity in order to follow the Jewish Messiah. Congregations formed, worship developed a Hebraic character, and the movement now numbers somewhere in the hundreds of thousands worldwide.

In Israel itself, believing Jewish congregations have grown from a handful of families in 1948 to well over a hundred fellowships today. That is a small number in a nation of nine million, but it is not nothing, and it is more than existed in the land at any point in the previous eighteen centuries.

The Book of Acts Is on Their Side

The strongest argument for the movement is simply that the first church was made up of Messianic Jews and nobody thought it strange. Thousands of Jewish believers in Jerusalem are described in Acts 21:20 as all zealous for the law, and James reports this to Paul as good news rather than as a problem to be corrected.

Paul himself circumcised Timothy, took a Nazirite vow, kept feasts and told the Corinthians that to the Jews he became as a Jew. This is the same Paul who wrote Galatians. He would not permit Gentiles to be circumcised as a condition of salvation, and he would not permit anyone to say that keeping the law justified. But Jewish believers continuing to live as Jews was a different question entirely, and he never forbade it.

The council in Acts 15 settles the matter from the other direction. The question there was whether Gentiles had to become Jews. It was never whether Jews had to stop being Jewish. That the church later assumed the opposite says more about how thoroughly Gentile it became than about anything in the text.

Where I Warmly Affirm the Movement

I affirm Messianic Jews wholeheartedly on several counts. Their existence is a standing witness that the gospel is for the Jew first, as Paul says in Romans 1:16, and that Jewish evangelism has not been quietly cancelled by two thousand years of Christian failure towards Jewish people.

They also read the Old Testament with an ear most of us lack. When a Messianic believer explains what Passover meant in his family before he believed, and then what the same meal means now, something opens up in the text that no commentary quite delivers. The feasts of Leviticus 23 stop being an archaeology lesson and start looking like a calendar of what God has done and will do.

And they are often better at Jewish evangelism than we are, for obvious reasons. A Jewish person who hears the gospel from a Gentile minister may hear an invitation to change tribes. Hearing it from another Jew removes that particular obstacle entirely.

Where I Have Real Concerns

My concerns are not about Jewish practice as culture. They are about what happens when practice hardens into requirement. Some parts of the movement have drifted towards teaching that Torah observance is obligatory for Jewish believers, and occasionally that Gentile believers would be better Christians if they kept it too. That is precisely the road Galatians closes.

A second concern is separation. Where a Messianic congregation begins to function as a parallel church that does not fellowship with Gentile believers, something has gone wrong with Ephesians 2. The dividing wall has been broken down, and rebuilding it as a matter of preference is a poor use of freedom.

A third is that a few groups on the fringe have moved into serious error, including doubts about the deity of Jesus in an effort to sound less objectionable to the wider Jewish community. That is not a criticism of the movement as a whole, which is largely orthodox, but it is a reason to ask questions rather than assume.

The Liberty Question

Romans 14 is the passage that governs this, and it is remarkably relevant. One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. Paul refuses to legislate, and he forbids both parties from despising the other.

So a Jewish believer who keeps Sabbath and Passover is doing something Scripture permits, and I have no business telling him he is being legalistic. A Gentile believer who does none of these things is equally free, and no Messianic congregation has any business telling him he is missing out on something essential.

The line falls exactly where Paul drew it. Practice as devotion, remembrance and heritage is liberty. Practice as necessity, merit or a mark of superior spirituality is bondage. The same seder can be either, depending on what is believed about it.

What About Gentile Christians Adopting Jewish Practice?

This has become common, particularly the Passover seder held in evangelical churches around Easter. I have no objection in principle, and I have found such evenings genuinely instructive when they are done as teaching rather than as re-enactment.

My caution is about motive. If a congregation takes up Hebrew names for God, blows a shofar and keeps the feasts because it believes this makes its worship more authentic or more powerful, it has quietly adopted the idea that Gentile Christianity is second-rate. That is the reverse of the first-century error but it is the same error. The one new man of Ephesians 2 is neither a Gentile church with Jewish decoration nor a Jewish church with Gentile visitors.

There is also a courtesy question that Christians rarely consider. Borrowing another community’s most sacred meal and repurposing it can look like appropriation from the outside, however warmly it is meant. Ask a Messianic friend to lead it, and ask him honestly what he thinks.

The Bigger Picture

Behind all this sits the conviction I hold about Israel’s future. If God has not finished with the Jewish people, and Romans 11 says He has not, then the existence of believing Jewish congregations in this age is exactly the kind of thing you would expect. Paul speaks of a remnant chosen by grace at the present time (Romans 11:5), and Messianic Jews are that remnant made visible.

That does not make them a separate category of Christian. In the body of Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek in terms of standing, access or inheritance. But it does mean that when a Jewish person believes, something is happening that carries a weight beyond the individual conversion, because it is a foretaste of what Scripture says will one day be national.

My reasoning on that larger question sits in my article on whether Israel is the same as the church, and it is worth reading alongside this one.

The Question of Terminology

Words carry weight here and they are worth handling carefully. Some Messianic Jews object to the word convert, since it implies leaving one religion for another rather than receiving the Messiah promised to their own people. Some prefer completed Jew or fulfilled Jew. Others are content with Jewish Christian, and a few dislike Messianic Jews as a label because it has been claimed by groups they would not want to be associated with.

My practice is to ask what a person prefers and then use it. That is ordinary courtesy rather than theological compromise. What I would not do is describe a Jewish believer as a former Jew, because nothing in the New Testament suggests that faith in the Messiah cancels ethnicity. Paul introduces himself as an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin, in the present tense, decades after the Damascus road.

The wider Jewish community, it should be said, generally does not accept Messianic Jews as Jewish at all, and Israeli courts have ruled that faith in Jesus disqualifies a person from automatic citizenship under the Law of Return. That is a real and painful cost, and it is worth knowing about before assuming this is a comfortable middle position for anyone. Paul knew something of it, as Romans 9:3 makes plain.

Supporting the Work Wisely

If a congregation wants to support the gospel among Jewish people, some discernment is needed, because the field contains a wide range of organisations. Some Messianic Jews work through established mission agencies with decades of accountability behind them. Others operate independently, and a few groups that use the language of Messianic Jews are effectively fundraising operations trading on Western Christian enthusiasm for Israel.

The questions to ask are ordinary ones. Who holds this organisation accountable? Are its finances published? Does it plant and strengthen congregations, or does it chiefly produce material for donors abroad? Does it hold the deity of Jesus and salvation by grace through faith without ambiguity? Any group serving Messianic Jews well will answer all four without hesitation. My article on parachurch ministry sets out the wider principles for supporting work outside the local church.

So, now what?

If you have never met a Jewish believer in Jesus, look for the opportunity. Ask what it cost. For many Messianic Jews the cost has been family, community and sometimes a great deal more, and hearing that will do something to your own sense of what following Jesus is worth.

And examine how your church prays for Jewish people. Many congregations pray for missionaries in a dozen countries and never once pray for Israel or for Jewish neighbours in their own town. Paul’s heart’s desire and prayer to God for them was that they might be saved. Could you say the same of yours?

Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

Romans 10:1 (ESV)