Concept

Judaism

Intro

Judaism is the faith of the Jewish people, and it is the oldest of the three religions that trace themselves back to Abraham. Christianity and Islam both grew out of soil that Judaism prepared. Roughly 15 million people worldwide identify as Jews, about half of them in the modern state of Israel and most of the rest in the United States.

At its center is a claim about a covenant. The God who made everything chose one family, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and bound himself to them by promise. He rescued them out of slavery in Egypt, gave them his law at Mount Sinai through Moses, and settled them in a land. In return they were to keep his commandments and be a light to the nations. Jews recite the heart of this every morning and evening: Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one (Deuteronomy 6:4).

What most people mean by "Judaism" today is more precisely called rabbinic Judaism. That matters, because the religion changed shape in a way Christians often miss. For roughly a thousand years, the center of Jewish worship was a temple in Jerusalem where priests offered animal sacrifices for sin. The Romans burned that temple to the ground in AD 70 and it has never been rebuilt. The sacrificial system stopped that year and has not resumed. What replaced it was the work of the rabbis: prayer in place of offering, study of Torah as an act of worship, repentance and charity as the means of atonement, and a vast body of oral tradition eventually written down as the Mishnah and the Talmud.

So a Jew today and a Jew in the time of Jesus do not practice the same religion in the same way. Both love the same Scriptures. But the Judaism a Christian meets in the twenty-first century is a tradition built after the temple fell, shaped by the rabbis of the second through sixth centuries, and codified in law books written across the medieval period.

Christians and Jews share the entire Old Testament, which Jews call the Tanakh. They disagree about one man. Christians say Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah promised in those Scriptures and God in the flesh. Judaism says he was neither. That single disagreement generates almost every argument between the two faiths.

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

In full

Judaism is the covenantal monotheism of the Jewish people, grounded in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), mediated in its dominant modern form through the rabbinic tradition of the Mishnah, the two Talmuds, the midrashic corpus, and the medieval halakhic codes. It is at once a religion, an ethnicity, a legal system, and a peoplehood, and any account that reduces it to only one of those four distorts it.

For Christian apologetics the operative distinctions are these:

1. Biblical Israel vs rabbinic Judaism. The religion described in the Torah is a temple-centered, sacrificial, priestly, land-bound covenant order. Rabbinic Judaism is the post-AD-70 reconstruction of Jewish life without temple, altar, priesthood, or sacrifice. The reconstruction was a genuine achievement of religious genius under catastrophic conditions, and it is also a substitution that the Torah itself does not authorize. Christian apologetics engages rabbinic Judaism, not biblical Israel, and should be explicit about which it is addressing.

2. Israel's election is irrevocable. Christian engagement operates under Romans 9 to 11, which grants that the covenants, the adoption, the glory, the giving of the law, the service of God, the promises, and the patriarchs belong to Israel, and that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). Replacement theology in its hard form, in which the Church simply supplants Israel and the promises to the Jewish people are void, is not the position this codex defends. See Israel and the Church.

3. The disagreement is intramural, not interreligious in the ordinary sense. A Christian and a Muslim argue about which book is revelation. A Christian and a Jew agree on thirty-nine books and argue about how those books resolve. This is a family argument over a shared inheritance, and it is conducted on shared texts, in the original languages, with both sides appealing to the same prophets. That is why the arguments in this cluster are built almost entirely from Hebrew grammar, Second Temple sources, Targum, Talmud, and medieval rabbinic commentary rather than from the New Testament.

4. The moral weight of the history is real. Christendom's treatment of Jews across seventeen centuries, forced disputations, expulsions, blood libels, ghettos, pogroms, and the Shoah, is a genuine and grievous historical record, and much of it was carried out with Christian language on its lips. No Christian apologetic to a Jewish interlocutor is credible that does not reckon with it honestly and first. See The Jewish Defense for the posture this requires.

Origins and history

Biblical period

Jewish self-understanding begins with Abraham, called out of Ur to a land God would show him, given a covenant of land, seed, and universal blessing (Genesis 12:1-3; Genesis 15; Genesis 17). The line runs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's twelve sons, who become the twelve tribes.

The formative event is the Exodus, the deliverance from Egyptian slavery, followed by the Sinai covenant in which God gives Israel the Torah through Moses (Exodus 19 to 24). The law comprises what later Jewish tradition counts as 613 commandments, governing worship, diet, purity, agriculture, justice, sexual ethics, and the festival calendar.

After conquest and settlement came the period of the judges, then the united monarchy under Saul, David, and Solomon. David receives a dynastic covenant: his throne will be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-16). This promise generates the messianic expectation that later becomes the central point of Jewish-Christian dispute. Solomon builds the First Temple in Jerusalem.

The kingdom divided after Solomon into Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom in 722 BC. Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BC and deported the population. The Babylonian exile is the crucible in which much of what we recognize as Judaism took form: synagogue worship in the absence of the temple, the consolidation of Scripture, and a hardened monotheism.

Cyrus of Persia permitted the return in 538 BC. The Second Temple was completed around 516 BC, later massively expanded by Herod the Great beginning around 20 BC.

Second Temple period

The centuries between the testaments produced the Judaism into which Jesus was born, and it was strikingly diverse. Josephus describes three main parties, the Pharisees (popular, devoted to oral tradition, believing in resurrection and angels), the Sadducees (priestly and aristocratic, temple-centered, rejecting resurrection and the oral law), and the Essenes (a separatist purity movement widely associated with the Qumran settlement and the Dead Sea Scrolls). Add the Zealots, the Samaritans, the Therapeutae in Egypt, the enormous Greek-speaking diaspora that read the Septuagint rather than Hebrew, and the apocalyptic movements attested in 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, and the picture is of many Judaisms rather than one.

This matters apologetically. The claim that there was a single normative Judaism in the first century, against which Jesus and the apostles can be measured as deviants, is not supportable on the sources. Messianic expectation in particular was various: a Davidic king, a priestly messiah, two messiahs (as at Qumran, 1QS 9:11), a heavenly Son of Man figure (Daniel 7:13-14; 1 Enoch 37 to 71), a divine-agent redeemer (11QMelchizedek). See Two Powers in Heaven.

The catastrophe and the rabbinic reconstruction

The First Jewish Revolt against Rome ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Second Temple in AD 70. The Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132 to 135) ended with a second and more comprehensive catastrophe, the barring of Jews from Jerusalem, and the renaming of the province Syria Palaestina.

Tradition credits Yochanan ben Zakkai with obtaining Roman permission to establish an academy at Yavneh (Jamnia), which becomes the seedbed of rabbinic Judaism. The famous exchange preserved in Avot de-Rabbi Natan 4 has him consoling Rabbi Joshua over the ruined temple by citing Hosea 6:6, I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and declaring that acts of loving-kindness now atone. This is the pivot on which the entire post-temple system turns, and it is the historical origin of the modern Jewish position that blood atonement is not required. See Blood Atonement Not Required Objection Defeater.

The literary output of the reconstruction:

• Mishnah, redacted around AD 200 under Judah ha-Nasi, six orders of legal material.
• Tosefta, a supplementary collection of comparable date.
• Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud, commentary on the Mishnah completed around AD 400.
• Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), the far more authoritative of the two, completed roughly AD 500 to 600 in the Babylonian academies of Sura and Pumbedita.
• Midrash, homiletical and exegetical collections including Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, Pesikta Rabbati, and the Tanhuma literature, spanning roughly the fourth through the eleventh centuries.
• Targumim, Aramaic renderings of Scripture used in synagogue, notably Targum Onkelos on the Torah and Targum Jonathan on the Prophets.

Medieval period

The Geonim of Babylonia led world Jewry through roughly the seventh to eleventh centuries. Then the centers shifted west.

• Rashi (Shlomo Yitzchaki, 1040 to 1105, Troyes) wrote the commentary on Torah and Talmud that remains the standard entry point for both. His reading of Isaiah 53 as a corporate reference to Israel became the dominant Jewish interpretation, though it was not the dominant one before him. See Isaiah 53 Is About Israel Objection Defeater.
• Maimonides (Rambam, 1138 to 1204) produced the Mishneh Torah (a complete halakhic code, c. 1180), the Guide for the Perplexed, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith set out in his commentary on Mishnah Sanhedrin chapter 10. His formulation of divine unity introduced the word yachid (absolutely single) into the creed, a term the Shema itself does not use. See Trinity Violates the Shema Objection Defeater.
• Nachmanides (Ramban, 1194 to 1270) was compelled to defend Judaism at the Disputation of Barcelona in 1263 before James I of Aragon, against the Dominican convert Pablo Christiani.
• Joseph Karo produced the Shulchan Aruch (1565), which with Moses Isserles's Ashkenazi glosses remains the working code of Orthodox practice.

The forced disputations of the medieval period (Paris 1240, Barcelona 1263, Tortosa 1413 to 1414) are a permanent stain. They were not free debates. Jewish participants argued under duress, with Talmud burnings and expulsions as live consequences. A modern Christian who wants a hearing should know this history and should say plainly that these events were an abuse of the gospel they claimed to serve.

Modern period

The Hasidic revival began with the Baal Shem Tov in eighteenth-century Ukraine, met opposition from the Vilna Gaon and the Mitnagdim, and reshaped Eastern European piety. The Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) from the late eighteenth century produced the denominational split that persists today. Zionism, articulated politically by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, culminated in the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Between those lies the Shoah, the murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, which destroyed the Eastern European heartland of Jewish life and permanently reshaped Jewish theology, demography, and the relationship with Christendom.

Core scriptures

Tanakh

Tanakh is an acronym for the three divisions:

• Torah (Instruction), the five books of Moses.
• Nevi'im (Prophets), the Former Prophets (Joshua through Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve).
• Ketuvim (Writings), Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five scrolls, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles.

These are the same thirty-nine books Protestants call the Old Testament, differently ordered and counted as twenty-four. Note the placement of Daniel among the Writings rather than the Prophets, which occasionally features in argument about Daniel's status and date.

The received Hebrew text is the Masoretic Text, fixed by the Masoretes of Tiberias between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries, with the Aleppo Codex (c. 930) and Leningrad Codex (1008) as the great witnesses. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a millennium older, confirm its substantial stability while also preserving variant readings that occasionally support the Septuagint against it. Both facts matter in argument, and honest apologetics uses both.

Oral Torah

Rabbinic Judaism holds that at Sinai, Moses received not only the written Torah but an Oral Torah, transmitted through an unbroken chain (Pirkei Avot 1:1: Moses to Joshua to the elders to the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly) and eventually committed to writing in the Mishnah and Talmud. On this view the written text cannot be rightly understood apart from the oral tradition, since the Torah nowhere defines what "work" on the Sabbath means, how to slaughter an animal, or what the phylactery texts are.

This is a load-bearing claim, and it is the one that most Christian argument has to engage before anything else, because it controls how every other text will be read. See Oral Torah Is Binding Objection Defeater.

The Karaite movement, which arose in the eighth or ninth century and survives in small numbers today, rejects the Oral Torah and accepts only the written Tanakh. Its existence is evidence that the oral-law claim was contested from within Judaism itself.

Core doctrines

Judaism has no creed with the binding status of the Nicene Creed, and Jewish thinkers frequently note that it is a religion of practice more than of dogma. The nearest thing to a creed is Maimonides's Thirteen Principles, recited liturgically in the Yigdal hymn and the Ani Ma'amin:

1. God exists.
2. God is one and unique.
3. God is incorporeal.
4. God is eternal.
5. Prayer is to be directed to God alone.
6. The words of the prophets are true.
7. Moses's prophecy is the highest.
8. The Torah was given to Moses.
9. The Torah is immutable.
10. God knows all human deeds and thoughts.
11. God rewards and punishes.
12. The Messiah will come.
13. The dead will be resurrected.

Principles 2, 3, 8, 9, and 12 carry the weight in Jewish-Christian dispute. Note that Maimonides is a twelfth-century author, and that several of his principles are framed with the Christian and Muslim claims of his own era in view. His formulations are not a neutral summary of biblical religion; they are polemical theology, and they may be engaged as such.

Other load-bearing commitments:

• Election and covenant. Israel is chosen, not for privilege but for vocation.
• Torah as the center of life. Study is worship. Halakha governs the day.
• Teshuvah (repentance, literally "return") as the means of atonement in the absence of the temple, joined with prayer (tefillah) and charity (tzedakah), on the basis of the Yom Kippur liturgy and Hosea 6:6.
• Absence of original sin in the Augustinian sense, replaced by the doctrine of the yetzer hara and yetzer hatov, the evil and good inclinations, with moral capacity intact.
• This-worldly focus. Olam ha-ba (the world to come) is affirmed but underdeveloped relative to Christian eschatology, and Judaism is markedly reticent about the afterlife.
• The Messiah as human king, a descendant of David who will regather the exiles, rebuild the temple, and bring universal peace and knowledge of God. Maimonides sets these criteria out in Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Melachim 11. See Jesus Failed the Messianic Job Description Objection Defeater.

Branches

• Orthodox. Holds Torah, written and oral, to be divinely given and binding. Spans Modern Orthodoxy (engaged with secular society and the state of Israel) through Haredi and Hasidic communities. Roughly 9 percent of American Jews, and rising sharply as a share because of birth rates, but a large majority of Israel's religiously observant population.
• Conservative (Masorti). Holds halakha binding but historically developing, subject to rabbinic legislation.
• Reform (Progressive). Holds the ethical and prophetic content binding and ritual law as optional and individually appropriated. The largest American movement.
• Reconstructionist. Following Mordecai Kaplan, treats Judaism as an evolving civilization rather than a revealed law.
• Karaite. Written Tanakh only, no Oral Torah. Small, concentrated in Israel.
• Messianic Jews. Ethnically Jewish believers in Jesus as Messiah who retain Jewish practice and identity. Every non-messianic branch of Judaism rejects the category as a form of Christianity rather than a branch of Judaism, and Israeli law under the Law of Return has been read the same way. Christian usage should be aware that the term is contested and that using it casually in conversation with a rabbinic Jew reads as a provocation.

The counter-missionary organizations that generate most of the arguments this codex answers (Jews for Judaism, Outreach Judaism) draw on Orthodox and Conservative sources and target Messianic Jewish and evangelical outreach specifically. See Counter-Missionary Movement.

Christian apologetic engagement

Points of contact

• The entire Old Testament as inspired Scripture.
• Strict monotheism. Christian trinitarianism claims to be a form of monotheism, not a departure from it. See Trinity, Monotheism.
• Creation from nothing, a personal God who acts in history, the reality of covenant, the moral law, the prophets, the resurrection of the dead, and a coming messianic age.
• Jesus, all twelve apostles, and Paul were Jews operating inside Second Temple Judaism. Christianity did not arrive from outside the tradition; it began as a movement within it.
• A shared moral vocabulary of justice, mercy, the image of God, and the dignity of the poor.

Points of divergence

The counter-missionary encounter

Most Christians meet Jewish objections not from a rabbi in a study but from a well-prepared lay interlocutor who has read Tovia Singer or Gerald Sigal, or watched a Jews for Judaism video. The objections come in a standard sequence and each has an answer built on Hebrew and rabbinic sources rather than on New Testament assertion. The full map is at The Jewish Defense.

Demographics

Core world Jewish population is roughly 15 to 16 million, the largest concentrations being Israel (approximately 7.2 million) and the United States (approximately 6 million), with France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Russia, and Germany following. The Shoah reduced world Jewry from about 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1945, and the global total has still not returned to its pre-war level. Roughly a fifth to a quarter of American Jews describe themselves as having no religion while retaining Jewish identity, which is a datum worth holding in mind: a great deal of Jewish-Christian conversation is with secular Jews for whom the rabbinic arguments are inherited rather than held.

Notable figures in Jewish-Christian dialogue and apologetics

Christian and Messianic side: Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho, c. 155 to 160, the earliest sustained engagement); Michael L. Brown (Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, 5 vols., Baker 2000 to 2010, the standard reference); Michael Rydelnik (The Messianic Hope, B&H 2010); Walter Kaiser (The Messiah in the Old Testament, Zondervan 1995); Arnold Fruchtenbaum; David Baron (Rays of Messiah's Glory, 1886); Alfred Edersheim (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 1883).

Jewish counter-missionary side: Tovia Singer (Let's Get Biblical, Outreach Judaism); Gerald Sigal (The Jew and the Christian Missionary, Ktav 1981); Michael Skobac (Jews for Judaism Canada); and in the medieval period Nachmanides (Vikuach, the Barcelona disputation account) and the Sefer Nizzahon Vetus.

Academic: Alan F. Segal (Two Powers in Heaven, Brill 1977); Daniel Boyarin (Border Lines, Penn 2004; The Jewish Gospels, New Press 2012); Jacob Neusner; E. P. Sanders; Amy-Jill Levine; Larry Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ, Eerdmans 2003); Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the God of Israel, Eerdmans 2008).

See also

• The Jewish Defense, the master apologetics navigator for Christian engagement with Jewish objections, with the full defeater map.
• Counter-Missionary Movement, the organizations, figures, and standard argument sequence behind most contemporary objections.
• Two Powers in Heaven, the pre-Christian Jewish binitarian stream that makes the incarnation intelligible within Judaism's own categories.
• Trinity, the Christian doctrine of God that Jewish objection targets.
• Christians Not Under Mosaic Law, the covenantal argument on Torah observance.
• Messianic Prophecy and Two-Stage Messianic Prophecy, the hermeneutic that answers the failed-Messiah objection.
• Israel and the Church, the covenantal relationship and why hard replacement theology is rejected here.
• Islam and The Muslim Defense, the parallel Abrahamic engagement.
• Hebrew Israelites and The Hebrew Israelite Defense, a movement that makes claims about Jewish identity and must not be confused with Judaism.
• Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint, the Second Temple textual witnesses that carry much of the argumentative load.