Why Do Christians Worship A Jew?

Jesus was to the brim a Jew, not incidentally or as a matter of temporal accident a Jew, but a Jew by faith, by temperament, and by spiritual ambition; a Jew in his relentless ethicising, in his love of quibbling and legalistics, in his fondness - to the point of tiresomeness sometimes - for extended metaphors and sermons wrapped in parables, and in the apocalyptic urgency of his teaching.

It is a question of the deepest interest, how Christians have been able to maintain two parallel but entirely contradictory attitudes toward Jews. The one, as described above, the effect of which has been to remove Jews from the sphere of the human altogether. The other, full of piety and respect, expressed in reverence for the Jewish Bible, in tender pilgrimages to the Jewish places of Jesus's birth and upbringing, and even, in some quarters, in the fond adoption of Old Testament names for their offspring.

Jesus's Jewishness is as essential to Christianity as it is embarrassing. To Christians, Jesus was the Messiah - itself a Jewish concept - whose coming had been foretold in Jewish scripture for centuries. It is Jewish history that Jesus fulfills

Messiah does not mean son of God. Nor did Jesus ever claim to be the son of God. The idea would have been nonsense to him. The God of the Jews is indivisible, capable of refulgence - a shekhina, a shining presence - but not incarnation. The long-awaited Messiah (the word simply means "anointed one") would prepare the way for God, not assume the title of a God. He was to be an eschatological prophet, a preacher of the end of days, a soldier of liberation in the royal line of King David.