# Jews Do Not Need Jesus Objection Defeater ## Intro This objection is different from the others in the cluster, because it is frequently made by Christians. The claim: Jews are already in covenant with God through Sinai. That covenant is eternal, God does not break his word, and it has never been revoked. Gentiles come to the God of Israel through Jesus; Jews are already there. Evangelizing Jews is therefore unnecessary at best, and after the Shoah it is something worse, a continuation by gentler means of a project that ended in the camps. The pastoral pressure behind this is real and should not be dismissed. A great deal of it comes from Christians who watched the twentieth century and concluded that the safest thing their tradition could do for Jewish people was stop asking anything of them. The answer turns on a single passage, and it is a Jewish one. [Jeremiah 31:31](/codex/jeremiah-31-31/): *"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a **new covenant** with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah."* Not with the nations. With Israel and Judah, by name. And verse 32 says what kind of covenant it is: *"**Not according to the covenant** that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; **which my covenant they brake**."* So the prophet who is supposed to guarantee that Sinai is sufficient forever says two things the objection cannot absorb. Sinai was broken. And something else is coming, addressed to the same people, of a different kind. Christianity's claim is not that this promise was taken from Israel and given to someone else. It is that Israel's Messiah opened it, and Gentiles were brought in afterward, which is what Abraham was told would happen in the first place. ## Cheatsheet **The 30-second reply:** > [Jeremiah 31:31](/codex/jeremiah-31-31/) says God will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It is addressed to Jews. Verse 32 says it will not be like the covenant made at the Exodus, and says why: that covenant was broken. So the prophet is the one telling you Sinai was not the last word. Now, the thing I have to say first, and mean: what Christians did to Jews for seventeen centuries was a betrayal of the gospel they claimed to carry, and forced disputations and forced baptisms and everything after them are indefensible. What I will not do is fix that by removing you from the scope of the good news. Paul was a Jew who said he could wish himself accursed for the sake of his kinsmen. That is not indifference dressed as respect. **The 6 fast facts:** 1. **[Jeremiah 31:31](/codex/jeremiah-31-31/) names the addressees.** "The house of Israel, and the house of Judah." 2. **[Jeremiah 31:32](/codex/jeremiah-31-32/) says the new covenant is not like Sinai**, and that Sinai was broken. 3. **The Noahide laws are a rabbinic construct**, derived at b. Sanhedrin 56a, and they concern Gentiles. They say nothing about whether Jews need anything. 4. **[Ezekiel 36:26-27](/codex/ezekiel-36-26-27/) promises the same thing**: a new heart, a new spirit, and God's Spirit within. 5. **[Romans 1:16](/codex/romans-1-16/) says the gospel is "to the Jew first."** Written by a Jew. 6. **[Romans 10:1](/codex/romans-10-1/)**: "my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved." Also written by a Jew, about his own people. **The 4 strongest counter-moves:** - *"Who is the new covenant of [Jeremiah 31](/codex/jeremiah-31/) made with?"* Ask it, and let the answer be given. The verse names Jews. - *"Verse 32 says the covenant they broke. Which covenant?"* Sinai. The prophet says so. - *"Do you want a special exemption?"* Most Orthodox Jews do not. They think Christianity is false, not that it is true-for-Gentiles. The dual-covenant position is usually offered by Christians and declined by Jews. - *"What would it mean to believe something is true and withhold it from one group of people?"* The question answers itself, and it should be asked gently. **Concessions to make freely:** - **The history is exactly as bad as the objection says.** Forced disputations, forced baptisms, expulsion, ghettos, blood libels, pogroms, and the Shoah in the heart of Christian Europe among people catechized in contempt. Say this without qualification and before anything else. - **Coercive mission is repudiated entirely.** Not moderated. Repudiated. Any evangelism backed by state power, social pressure, deception, or targeting of the vulnerable is a betrayal, and Christians should say so in their own name. - **Israel's election is irrevocable.** [Romans 11:29](/codex/romans-11-29/). Nothing here argues that God has finished with the Jewish people, and hard replacement theology is rejected. See [Israel and the Church](/codex/israel-and-the-church/). - ***Dabru Emet* (2000) is a serious document** and its signatories were serious scholars. Christian engagement should read it rather than caricature it. - **The cost of conversion is real.** In many Jewish families it means losing everyone, and for a people repeatedly threatened with extinction that is not a small thing to ask. Treating it lightly is a cruelty. - **Mark Kinzer's postmissionary position is an argued alternative**, not a evasion, and it comes from within Messianic Judaism. It deserves engagement rather than dismissal. - **Christian conduct is the reason this objection has force.** If the Church had behaved differently for seventeen centuries, the question would be theological rather than moral. **What NOT to defend:** - Do not defend any historical missionary coercion, anywhere, under any framing. - Do not say the Shoah was permitted for a reason. There is no Christian entitlement to that sentence. - Do not treat this as a debate to win. The objection is frequently raised by people carrying grief. - Do not describe Jewish evangelism as "targeting." The vocabulary matters and that word has a history. - Do not claim Judaism holds no covenant with God. It does, and the New Testament says so in the present tense at [Romans 9:4](/codex/romans-9-4/). **The closing line:** > *"I understand why you would rather I left this alone, and I understand what my tradition did to make that the reasonable request. So let me be clear about what I am not asking. I am not asking you to stop being Jewish. Every apostle was a Jew. I am not asking on behalf of a Church that has earned your trust, because it has not. What I am saying is that Jeremiah promised a new covenant to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, and that if I believe it has come, the one thing I cannot do out of respect for you is keep it to myself."* ## In full Defeater for the claim: *"Jews are already in an unbroken and sufficient covenant with God through Sinai. Gentiles need Jesus; Jews do not. Christian evangelism of Jews is therefore theologically unnecessary and, after the Shoah, morally indefensible."* The addressees and terms of the New Covenant promise, the prophets' own account of the Sinai covenant as broken, the rabbinic and Gentile-facing character of the Noahide framework, the apostolic practice of preaching to Jews first, and the distinction between repudiating a method and abandoning a message do not warrant the dual-covenant position. The objection is unusual in this cluster because its most influential proponents have been Christian theologians rather than Jewish ones. Paul van Buren, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and much of post-Shoah mainline Protestant and Catholic theology moved toward a two-covenant model, and the 2002 United States Catholic conference document on covenant and mission generated a public controversy about exactly this. Jewish interlocutors raise it too, but often in the sharper form: not "we have our own route" but "your route is false and your asking is an insult." The defeat structure is **five-pronged**. 1. **The New Covenant is promised to Jews, by name, and is not like Sinai.** [Jeremiah 31:31-34](/codex/jeremiah-31-31-34/) is the passage on which the whole question turns, and every clause matters. **31:31**: "I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah." The addressees are Jewish. **31:32**: "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them." Two claims: the coming covenant differs in kind from Sinai, and Sinai was broken. **31:33**: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts." The Torah is internalized rather than merely repeated. **31:34**: "They shall teach no more every man his neighbour... for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Universal knowledge of God and definitive forgiveness. Whatever else this passage does, it forecloses the claim that Sinai is the final and sufficient word to Israel, because it is Israel's own prophet saying otherwise. See [Jeremiah 31 New Covenant Objection Defeater](/codex/jeremiah-31-new-covenant-objection-defeater/) for the full treatment. 2. **Ezekiel says the same thing in different vocabulary.** [Ezekiel 36:25-27](/codex/ezekiel-36-25-27/): "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean... A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh... And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes." The problem being addressed is not a lack of law but an inability to keep it, and the remedy is an internal transformation God performs. The two prophets converge on a promise of something Sinai did not supply. 3. **The Noahide framework does not answer the question.** The seven Noahide commandments (b. Sanhedrin 56a, derived by the sages from [Genesis 2:16](/codex/genesis-2-16/) and 9:4) govern what is required of **Gentiles**. They are a rabbinic construct rather than a covenant the Torah names, and they are frequently invoked in this discussion as though they settled the Jewish question, which they do not touch. Where the objection deploys them, it is answering a question nobody asked: whether Gentiles may be righteous without becoming Jews. Christianity agrees that Gentiles need not become Jews. The dispute is elsewhere. 4. **The apostolic practice was to preach to Jews first, and it was carried out by Jews.** [Romans 1:16](/codex/romans-1-16/): "the gospel of Christ... is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." [Romans 9:1-3](/codex/romans-9-1-3/): "I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." [Romans 10:1](/codex/romans-10-1/): "my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved." Acts records the pattern city by city, with Paul entering the synagogue first at Salamis, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Thessalonica, Berea, Corinth, and Ephesus. None of this is a Gentile institution deciding to convert Jews. It is a Jewish movement addressing its own people, and its central figure's grief for them is recorded in the text. 5. **Repudiating the method does not require abandoning the message, and conflating the two is the objection's central move.** The historical record is indefensible and Christians should say so first, in their own name, without the passive voice. What follows from it is a set of hard prohibitions: no coercion, no state power, no deception, no targeting of the vulnerable or the isolated, no pressure toward a decision that may cost someone their family, no treatment of Jewish suffering as leverage. What does not follow is that the claim itself should be withheld. A person who believes something is true and keeps it from one group of people out of deference has not honored that group; he has excluded them from a conversation he thinks is the most important one there is. **The pastoral instinct behind dual-covenant theology is good and its result is a form of condescension.** The defeater is targeted. It does not claim that Judaism has no covenant with God, that Israel's election is revoked, that the historical grievance is exaggerated, or that any coercive method may be defended. It claims that the prophets promised Israel a covenant beyond Sinai, that the apostles addressed Jews first, and that the correct response to a shameful history is to fix the conduct rather than to shrink the message. ## Grammar and hermeneutics The objection turns on whether the Sinai covenant is textually presented as final and unbroken, which is a question the Hebrew answers. - **[Jeremiah 31:31](/codex/jeremiah-31-31/) uses *berit chadashah*, and *chadash* means new rather than renewed.** The adjective is the ordinary word for new, used of a new house ([Deuteronomy 20:5](/codex/deuteronomy-20-5/)), a new king ([Exodus 1:8](/codex/exodus-1-8/)), a new song ([Psalm 96:1](/codex/psalms-96-1/)), and new grain ([Leviticus 26:10](/codex/leviticus-26-10/)). Hebrew has vocabulary for renewal and restoration, and the passage does not use it. Some interpreters argue for a renewal sense on contextual grounds, and that argument has to be made from context rather than from the word. - **[Jeremiah 31:32](/codex/jeremiah-31-32/) has a comparative negation with a stated ground.** *Lo ka-berit asher karati et avotam*, "not like the covenant which I cut with their fathers." The particle *ke*, "like," makes the statement one of dissimilarity in kind. The relative clause that follows supplies the reason: *asher hemmah heferu et beriti*, "which they, for their part, broke my covenant." The verb *hefer*, Hiphil of *parar*, means to break, annul, or render void, and it is used of covenant-breaking throughout ([Genesis 17:14](/codex/genesis-17-14/), [Leviticus 26:15](/codex/leviticus-26-15/), [Deuteronomy 31:16](/codex/deuteronomy-31-16/), [Isaiah 24:5](/codex/isaiah-24-5/)). The pronoun *hemmah* is emphatic: they are the ones who broke it. - **The addressees are marked twice with *bayit*.** *Et beit yisrael ve-et beit yehudah*. Both houses, named separately, which is the standard Jeremianic way of designating the whole people after the division. There is no textual room to read the promise as directed elsewhere. - **31:34's forgiveness clause is unconditional and definitive.** *Ki eslach la-avonam u-le-chattatam lo ezkor od*, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more." The verb *salach* is used in the Hebrew Bible only with God as subject. The construction *lo ezkor od*, "I will not remember again," is the language of a completed and irreversible act, which requires an atonement adequate to it. - **[Jeremiah 31:35-37](/codex/jeremiah-31-35-37/) guarantees Israel's perpetuity in the same breath.** If the fixed order of sun, moon, and stars departs, "then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever"; if heaven can be measured, "I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done." This is the passage's own guard against a replacement reading, and it is decisive: the same oracle that announces a new covenant guarantees that the people it is made with will never cease. Both halves must be held. - **Genre and reading-order.** [Jeremiah 30](/codex/jeremiah-30/) to 33 is the Book of Consolation, a distinct unit of restoration oracles following the judgment material. Its horizon is the return from exile and beyond it, and its promises are addressed to a people under judgment who are told that judgment is not the end. Reading 31:31-34 apart from 31:35-37 produces either a supersessionist misreading or the dual-covenant one, depending on which half is dropped. On the ordinary force of *chadash*, the comparative negation of 31:32 with its emphatic statement that Israel broke the Sinai covenant, the double *bayit* addressee, the unconditional forgiveness clause, and the perpetuity guarantee three verses later, the text promises Israel a covenant beyond Sinai while guaranteeing Israel's permanence. Neither the claim that Sinai suffices nor the claim that Israel is replaced survives the passage read whole. ## Argument structure | | Premise | Notes | |---|---|---| | **P1** | **Jeremiah 31:31-34 promises a new covenant to Israel and Judah that is expressly unlike Sinai.** *Berit chadashah*, addressed to both houses by name, "not according to the covenant" of the Exodus, "which my covenant they brake," with the law internalized and sin definitively forgiven. Israel's own prophet forecloses the sufficiency-of-Sinai claim. | Textual argument from the promise | | **P2** | **Ezekiel 36:25-27 converges on the same promise.** Clean water, a new heart, a new spirit, God's Spirit within, causing obedience. The diagnosed problem is inability rather than ignorance of the law. | Prophetic convergence | | **P3** | **The Noahide framework governs Gentiles and does not address the Jewish question.** Derived at b. Sanhedrin 56a from Genesis 2:16 and 9:4, it is a rabbinic construct concerning what is required of non-Jews. Christianity already agrees that Gentiles need not become Jews. | Category correction | | **P4** | **The apostolic pattern was to Jews first, and it was Jewish.** Romans 1:16; Romans 9:1-3 (Paul wishing himself accursed for his kinsmen); Romans 10:1 (praying for Israel's salvation); the synagogue-first pattern throughout Acts. | Apostolic-practice argument | | **P5** | **Repudiating the method does not entail abandoning the message.** The historical record requires unreserved repudiation of coercion, state power, deception, and pressure. It does not entail withholding a claim believed to be true from one group of people, which is exclusion rather than respect. | Moral-structure argument | | **C** | **The dual-covenant position is not warranted.** **The defeater concedes the full weight of the historical record, repudiates coercive mission without qualification, affirms Israel's irrevocable election, and grants that the personal cost of conversion is real and serious.** What it denies is that the prophets present Sinai as final, and that the correct remedy for a shameful history is a smaller gospel. | | ## Master objections to the whole argument **MO1: "After Auschwitz, a Christian asking Jews to convert is continuing the project by other means. Whatever your exegesis says, the act has a meaning your intentions cannot control."** - Four responses. (a) **The moral seriousness of this is granted completely, and it is the objection that should be answered first and longest.** (b) **The meaning of an act is partly constituted by its conduct**, and the conduct is what Christians control: no coercion, no institutional power, no pressure, no exploitation of isolation or grief, and an explicit repudiation of the record offered before anything is asked. That is a different act from what was done historically, and the difference is not merely intentional. (c) **The alternative has its own moral content.** Deciding that one people, uniquely, should not be told what one believes to be the most important thing there is, is not neutrality. (d) **The Christians who died refusing that project should be named**, not as a credit balance but because the tradition contains them: Bonhoeffer, the Confessing Church's Barmen minority, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Jan Karski's Catholic contacts, and the many who hid Jews and were killed for it. **MO2: "[Romans 11:29](/codex/romans-11-29/) says the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. That is your own text and it settles it: the covenant stands, so nothing further is needed."** - Three responses. (a) **The verse is affirmed here and is the frame the whole cluster operates under.** (b) **It does not say what the objection needs.** Paul writes 11:29 in a chapter arguing that Israel's stumbling is not final and that a remnant exists **now**, having written in the previous chapter that his prayer is for Israel's salvation. The same author holds both, so the irrevocable calling cannot mean that nothing further is in view; on Paul's own account it means the opposite, that God is not finished. (c) **The chapter's warning runs the other way.** [Romans 11:18-21](/codex/romans-11-18-21/) warns the Gentile reader against boasting over the natural branches, which is a warning against Christian arrogance, not an instruction to withhold the message. **MO3: "[Jeremiah 31](/codex/jeremiah-31/) is unfulfilled. Nobody needs to teach his neighbour to know the LORD? Everyone from the least to the greatest knows him? Sin remembered no more? Look around. The new covenant has not come, so your appeal to it proves nothing."** - Three responses. (a) **This is the strongest textual objection and it is correct that the conditions are not visibly fulfilled.** (b) **It is the same two-stage structure at issue throughout this cluster**, and it is answered the same way: the prophets routinely place inaugurated and consummated realities in one plane, as [Isaiah 61:1-2](/codex/isaiah-61-1-2/) does within a single sentence. See [Jesus Failed the Messianic Job Description Objection Defeater](/codex/jesus-failed-the-messianic-job-description-objection-defeater/). (c) **The objection cuts against the position it defends.** If [Jeremiah 31](/codex/jeremiah-31/) is entirely future, then the covenant Israel currently stands in is Sinai, which the same passage says was broken and which the objection needs to be intact and sufficient. Whichever way the passage is read, the dual-covenant position loses something. **MO4: "Judaism does not want your exemption and does not want your gospel. Framing your evangelism as respect for Jews is a Christian conversation with itself."** - Three responses. (a) **The first half is accurate and is worth Christians hearing.** Most Orthodox Jews do not hold that Christianity is true-for-Gentiles; they hold that it is false. The dual-covenant position is largely a Christian construction, and Jewish interlocutors frequently find it patronizing from the other direction. (b) **That observation supports this page rather than the objection.** If Jews are not asking for an exemption, then Christians granting one are making a decision on their behalf. (c) **The second half is a fair check on tone.** The purpose of this defeater is not to justify a program but to answer a specific claim about Sinai's sufficiency, and if the conversation is unwelcome, the correct response is to stop talking, not to argue harder. **MO5: "Mark Kinzer's postmissionary Messianic Judaism accepts Jesus and rejects evangelizing Jews. Your own side contains the position you are calling incoherent."** - Three responses. (a) **Kinzer's position is serious, comes from inside Messianic Judaism, and should be engaged rather than caricatured.** His argument is that the Jewish people's covenantal standing and the Jewish believers' communal calling together imply a different posture, not that Jesus is unnecessary. (b) **The difference is narrower than the objection suggests.** Kinzer does not hold a dual-covenant soteriology in the van Buren sense; he holds a bilateral ecclesiology in which the Jewish people's ongoing covenant is honored. This defeater targets the claim that Jews need nothing beyond Sinai, which Kinzer does not make. (c) **Internal disagreement is not a defect.** That serious Christians differ on posture while agreeing on Christ is what one would expect on a question this morally loaded. ## Premise 1, the New Covenant is promised to Jews and is unlike Sinai ### Affirmative case 1. **The addressees are named.** [Jeremiah 31:31](/codex/jeremiah-31-31/): "the house of Israel, and the house of Judah." 2. **The dissimilarity is stated.** 31:32: "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers." 3. **Sinai is said to have been broken.** 31:32: "which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them." 4. **The mechanism is internal.** 31:33: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts." 5. **The outcome is universal knowledge and definitive forgiveness.** 31:34. 6. **The passage guarantees Israel's perpetuity three verses later.** 31:35-37, which is the guard against reading it as replacement. ### Anticipated objections 1. *"*Chadashah* can mean renewed. The new moon is *chodesh*, the same root, and it is the old moon renewed."* 2. *"The covenant is 'with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.' You have just proved it is not with the Church."* 3. *"Sinai being broken by Israel does not annul it. [Leviticus 26:44](/codex/leviticus-26-44/) says that even in exile God will not break his covenant with them."* ### Rebuttals 1. **The root argument is real and it does not decide the case.** *Chodesh* and *chadash* share a root, and renewal is within the semantic field. But *chadash* as an adjective is used of things that did not previously exist in that form: a new house, a new king, a new song. And the decisive datum is not the adjective but 31:32's *lo ka-berit*, "not like the covenant," which states dissimilarity explicitly and cannot be read as renewal of the same thing. 2. **Conceded and affirmed.** The promise is to Israel and Judah, and Christianity's claim is not that it was transferred. The claim is that Israel's Messiah opened it and Gentiles were grafted in, which is the Abrahamic promise of [Genesis 12:3](/codex/genesis-12-3/) reaching its stated end. See [Israel and the Church](/codex/israel-and-the-church/). 3. **[Leviticus 26:44](/codex/leviticus-26-44/) is the best counter-text and both verses must be held.** God will not utterly cast them away or break his covenant *from his side*, which is exactly what [Jeremiah 31:35-37](/codex/jeremiah-31-35-37/) also guarantees. [Jeremiah 31:32](/codex/jeremiah-31-32/) says Israel broke it from theirs. A covenant that one party has broken and the other will not abandon is precisely the situation that calls for a new covenant of a different kind, which is what 31:31 announces. ## Premise 4, the apostolic pattern was to Jews first ### Affirmative case 1. **[Romans 1:16](/codex/romans-1-16/) states the order explicitly.** "To the Jew first, and also to the Greek." 2. **[Romans 9:1-3](/codex/romans-9-1-3/) records the motive.** Paul's continual sorrow and willingness to be accursed for his kinsmen's sake. 3. **[Romans 10:1](/codex/romans-10-1/) records the prayer.** "My heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved." 4. **Acts records the practice.** Synagogue first at Salamis, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Thessalonica, Berea, Corinth, and Ephesus. 5. **The actors were Jews.** Every apostle, and Paul himself, describing his own lineage at [Philippians 3:5](/codex/philippians-3-5/) and [Romans 11:1](/codex/romans-11-1/). ### Anticipated objections 1. *"These are Christian texts. You cannot use them to establish anything against a Jewish interlocutor."* 2. *"Paul's mission was to Gentiles by his own account. [Galatians 2:7-9](/codex/galatians-2-7-9/) divides the field, Peter to the circumcised and Paul to the uncircumcised."* 3. *"First-century apostolic practice does not bind twenty-first-century Christians who have seen what the intervening centuries produced."* ### Rebuttals 1. **They are cited to establish what Christianity claims about its own obligation, which is a legitimate use.** The objection under defeat is partly a claim about Christian theology, that Christians ought not to evangelize Jews, and the texts governing Christian obligation are the relevant evidence for that. No claim is being made that a Jewish interlocutor should accept them as authoritative. 2. **The division at [Galatians 2](/codex/galatians-2/) is real and it is a division of primary sphere, not an exclusion.** Paul's own practice throughout Acts is synagogue-first, and [Romans 1:16](/codex/romans-1-16/) and 10:1 are written by the apostle to the Gentiles about Israel. Peter's assignment to the circumcised, on the objection's own logic, is itself an apostolic mission to Jews. 3. **This is the strongest form and it is answered at MO1.** What the intervening centuries require is a change in conduct so thorough that it amounts to a different act. What they do not establish is that the message itself is the problem, since the message was originally carried by Jews to Jews without any of the apparatus that made it monstrous later. ## Live-cite kit **Scripture** - [Jeremiah 31:31-34](/codex/jeremiah-31-31-34/), read whole, with 31:35-37 immediately after it. - [Jeremiah 31:32](/codex/jeremiah-31-32/) in particular: "not according to the covenant... which my covenant they brake." - [Ezekiel 36:25-27](/codex/ezekiel-36-25-27/), the new heart and the Spirit within. - [Leviticus 26:44](/codex/leviticus-26-44/), conceded openly and held alongside. - [Romans 1:16](/codex/romans-1-16/); [Romans 9:1-5](/codex/romans-9-1-5/); [Romans 10:1](/codex/romans-10-1/); [Romans 11:1](/codex/romans-11-1/), [11](/codex/romans-11-11/):18-21, 11:29. - [Genesis 12:3](/codex/genesis-12-3/), the Gentile inclusion promised from the start. **Jewish sources** - b. Sanhedrin 56a, the seven Noahide commandments and their derivation. - *Dabru Emet* (2000), the Jewish statement on Christians and Christianity. **Scholarly and documentary** - *Nostra Aetate* (1965), on the Jews remaining "most dear to God, for the sake of their fathers." - R. Kendall Soulen, *The God of Israel and Christian Theology* (Fortress, 1996). - Paul van Buren, *A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality* (1980 to 1988), the position under answer. - Mark S. Kinzer, *Postmissionary Messianic Judaism* (Brazos, 2005), the internal alternative. - Michael L. Brown, *Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus*, vol. 1 (Baker, 2000). **Aphorism** - "The prophet who promised the new covenant addressed it to you." - "Sinai was broken. Jeremiah says so, not Paul." - "Withholding it is not respect. It is exclusion with better manners." ## Tactical notes - **Say the history first, unprompted, in your own name, and without the passive voice.** Not "mistakes were made." "Christians did this." Everything downstream depends on it. - **Then ask the Jeremiah question rather than asserting it.** "Who is the new covenant made with?" - **Do not use the word 'targeting.'** Its history in this context is ugly and it will end the conversation. - **Distinguish the Christian dual-covenant theologian from the Jewish interlocutor.** They are making different arguments with different stakes, and answering one while thinking of the other produces confusion. - **Concede that most Jews do not want the exemption.** It is true, it is disarming, and it reframes the dual-covenant position as a Christian decision made about Jews rather than with them. - **Never argue about the Shoah.** If it is raised, receive it. Do not answer it with theodicy, and do not treat it as a debating point in either direction. - **Be willing to stop.** If the conversation is unwelcome, stopping is the argument. Continuing to press proves the objection's point about what Christian mission is. - **What NOT to defend:** any historical coercion; any providential account of the Shoah; the claim that Judaism has no covenant; the framing of Jewish people as a mission field. ## See also - [Israel and the Church](/codex/israel-and-the-church/), the covenantal frame: fulfillment without forfeiture, and why both hard supersessionism and dual-covenant theology are rejected. - [Jeremiah 31 New Covenant Objection Defeater](/codex/jeremiah-31-new-covenant-objection-defeater/), the full treatment of the passage this page turns on. - [Christians Not Under Mosaic Law](/codex/christians-not-under-mosaic-law/), the complementary argument on the Mosaic administration. - [Blood Atonement Not Required Objection Defeater](/codex/blood-atonement-not-required-objection-defeater/), on what the forgiveness clause of [Jeremiah 31:34](/codex/jeremiah-31-34/) requires. - [Jesus Failed the Messianic Job Description Objection Defeater](/codex/jesus-failed-the-messianic-job-description-objection-defeater/), on the two-stage structure invoked at MO3. - [The Jewish Defense](/codex/the-jewish-defense/), the navigator, whose deployment guidance covers posture in detail. - [Judaism](/codex/judaism/) and [Counter-Missionary Movement](/codex/counter-missionary-movement/), the cluster hubs. - [Evangelism](/codex/evangelism/), the wider practice.
## Common questions this page answers **Q: Do Jewish people need to believe in Jesus to be saved?** The position defended here is yes, and it is held alongside an unreserved repudiation of every coercive means by which that claim has historically been pressed. The textual case rests on [Jeremiah 31:31-34](/codex/jeremiah-31-31-34/), where God promises a **new covenant** explicitly "with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah," and says it will be "not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers... which my covenant they brake." Israel's own prophet says Sinai was broken and that something else is coming. [Ezekiel 36:25-27](/codex/ezekiel-36-25-27/) promises the same thing in different terms. And Paul, himself a Jew, wrote that the gospel is "to the Jew first" ([Romans 1:16](/codex/romans-1-16/)), said he could wish himself accursed for the sake of his kinsmen ([Romans 9:3](/codex/romans-9-3/)), and prayed for Israel's salvation ([Romans 10:1](/codex/romans-10-1/)). What must be repudiated is the method: forced disputations, forced baptisms, state power, deception, and pressure are betrayals of the message they claimed to carry. **Q: What is dual-covenant theology?** It is the position that Jews are saved through the Sinai covenant and Gentiles through Christ, so that the two peoples stand in two valid covenants and Jewish evangelism is unnecessary or wrong. Its most influential modern proponents have been Christian rather than Jewish theologians, including Paul van Buren and much of post-Shoah mainline Protestant and Catholic thought, and it generated public controversy in 2002 over a United States Catholic document on covenant and mission. Its pastoral motivation is real and creditable: a tradition that watched the twentieth century concluding that the safest thing it could do for Jewish people was to ask nothing of them. The difficulty is textual. The prophets do not present Sinai as final, and the apostolic writings that Christians treat as authoritative preach to Jews first and grieve over Jewish unbelief. **Q: Isn't [Jeremiah 31](/codex/jeremiah-31/)'s new covenant made with Israel, not the Church?** Yes, and that is conceded without qualification. The verse names "the house of Israel, and the house of Judah." Christianity's claim is not that the promise was taken from Israel and transferred elsewhere but that Israel's Messiah opened it and Gentiles were brought in afterward, which is what Abraham was told would happen when God said that in his seed all the families of the earth would be blessed ([Genesis 12:3](/codex/genesis-12-3/)). The passage guards against a replacement reading itself: three verses later, at 31:35-37, God guarantees that Israel will not cease to be a nation before him unless the fixed order of sun and moon departs. Both halves have to be held. Read whole, the oracle promises Israel a covenant beyond Sinai while guaranteeing Israel's permanence, which defeats hard supersessionism and the sufficiency-of-Sinai claim at the same time. **Q: What are the Noahide laws, and do they answer this?** The seven Noahide commandments are a rabbinic construct derived at b. Sanhedrin 56a from [Genesis 2:16](/codex/genesis-2-16/) and 9:4, setting out what is required of Gentiles: prohibitions of idolatry, blasphemy, murder, sexual immorality, theft, and eating flesh from a living animal, together with the establishment of courts. They are frequently invoked in this discussion as though they resolved it, and they do not touch it. They concern Gentiles, and Christianity already agrees that Gentiles need not become Jews in order to be right with the God of Israel. The question at issue is whether the Sinai covenant is final and sufficient for Jews, and the Noahide framework says nothing about that. **Q: Is evangelizing Jews antisemitic after the Holocaust?** The moral force of the question is real and deserves to be answered rather than deflected. What Christians did to Jews across seventeen centuries, and what happened in Christian Europe to a people whose neighbours had been catechized in contempt for them, makes the request to leave the subject alone entirely reasonable. The answer offered here has two parts. First, the conduct must change so completely that the act is a different act: no coercion, no institutional or state power, no deception, no exploitation of isolation or grief, no pressure toward a decision that may cost someone their family, and an explicit repudiation of the historical record given before anything is asked. Second, the alternative is not neutral. Deciding that one people uniquely should not be told what one believes to be the most important thing there is is a form of exclusion, however gently meant. It is worth adding that most Jewish interlocutors do not request the exemption; the dual-covenant position is largely a Christian construction, made about Jews rather than with them.