Klinghoffer on Judaism, Christianity, and the Elephant in the Room

March 15, 2005

David Klinghoffer recalled a letter he had received from a prominent evangelical Christian and pro-Israel activist. It was an invitation for Klinghoffer -- author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History (Doubleday) -- to come over for a kosher dinner, and to discuss a matter that had been on the gentleman's mind for a long time.

"He said, 'I know you've written about this, so I'm asking you if you would discuss why you don't believe in Jesus,'" Klinghoffer, an orthodox Jew, remembered during a recent interview with BTW. Although the man works with Jews in his activism, other Christians had told him never to raise that question with Jews because it might be offensive. "There's been this growing friendship between conservative Christians and Jews, so when these two groups get together, there's often this unspoken, unaddressed tension, this elephant in the room."

In his book, Klinghoffer -- a columnist for the Jewish Forward and the author also of The Discovery of God (Doubleday) and The Lord Will Gather Me In (The Free Press) -- attempts to usher this elephant out of the room.

In his latest book, Klinghoffer addresses the Jewish-Christian debate over the Jews' rejection of Jesus; discusses why Jews had valid reason to be skeptical of Jesus; reveals that the ancient Jews, according to the Talmud, claim that they accepted some responsibility for Jesus' crucifixion (even though Romans were the only people who had the power to crucify someone in Roman Palestine); and tackles other provocative issues.

In addition, Klinghoffer attempts to show that, had Jews accepted Christ, the eventual development of Western civilization, including the founding of the U.S., wouldn't have been possible. He acknowledged that a key difference between Jews and Christians is that Jews don't believe in Jesus the way Christians do, yet he believes that many Jews don't understand why.

"Probably the biggest reason why," he explained, "is Christianity asks Jews to give up the terms of our relationship with G-d, namely the commandments, which are the way a Jew relates to G-d, so, to become a Christian means giving up your relationship with G-d as Jews understand it. That's a simple way of explaining it."

Crucial to Klinghoffer's thesis is that while Jesus accepted the written Torah, he did not accept the oral Torah, the vast body of orally conveyed information that explains what the Torah means. "The written doesn't make sense without the oral," he said. "The Bible requires some sort of an explanatory tradition to make sense because it is so cryptic."

The Jews never rejected Jesus' claim to be the Messiah because he never publicly taught that he was, Klinghoffer pointed out. Instead, they rejected his claim to interpret the law on his own authority.

The author told BTW that this whole area of study had been on his mind since he was in high school. Several years ago, he began digging into the subject deeply and found that one text leads to another.

"What's really fascinating about Bible research is how it's kind of all one organic whole, that the commentary in one verse can lead you to others," Klinghoffer said. Word meanings are not always obvious in the Torah and that the way you figure out what a word really means is by noticing how it is used in other parts of the Torah, he said. "When you're researching, it's almost like you're decoding, and the Talmud is essentially an attempt to decode the Torah."

When Klinghoffer pointed out that the Talmud accepts responsibility for Jesus' execution, "I don't mean to say, however, that they had him executed. Historically, the Jews didn't have the power of capital punishment at that time. The only party that had the power to execute anyone in Roman Palestine was Rome. But what historians do say is that the Jewish priesthood of the time probably alerted the Roman authorities to see what Jesus was up to."

Meanwhile, he continued, the Talmud ascribes responsibility for Jesus' execution not to the Jews collectively but to certain Jews who lived at that time. Klinghoffer also mentioned that the Jewish leaders of Jesus' time weren't admired in the Talmud. "The chief priests are regarded as corrupt. They're not heroes to us [the Jewish people]." Either way, he continued, the available history of that period is not totally complete. "No one really knows what exactly happened," he added.

Klinghoffer began discussing the idea for Why the Jews Rejected Jesus with his editor in September 2003, before he had heard that Mel Gibson had decided to make the film The Passion of the Christ. "It made me uncomfortable to watch the film because, obviously, in that story there are some Jews who don't come off so well, but I certainly can't say it's anti-Semitic when our own Talmud ascribes greater responsibility to certain Jews at that time than the gospels do," he said.

Klinghoffer added: "If you were to say that Gibson is an anti-Semite, you would have to say that the rabbis of the Talmud are also anti-Semites, and that [the famous medieval Jewish sage] Moses Maimonides, who accepted the same version of history, is also anti-Semitic."

When asked what he thought about the way some of the Jews are portrayed in The Passion, Klinghoffer responded, "I wouldn't say it's the greatest movie ever made. Are there villains who are Jewish in the movie? Yes; but did that make the movie anti-Semitic? No."

Klinghoffer said that there we would be no Western civilization as we know it had the Jews embraced Jesus in greater numbers. "The reason is that the early church made a crucial decision, in the year 49 C.E., to jettison the observance of Jewish law. That decision was made in the context of Jews overwhelmingly and violently rejecting Paul's preaching. And Paul says himself, explicitly, that because the Jews rejected him he was now going to go to the Gentiles, and the Church made a decision that, from now on, people who got involved in this new faith would not be required to keep kosher, would not be required to have ritual circumcision, to keep laws of family purity -- all those things were no longer going to be required of new believers in Jesus. And, had those things actually been required, there's no way Christianity would have taken off as it did and spread so quickly across Europe. The religion would have remained a small Jewish sect and would never have become a world religion."

Despite the debates brought up in his book, Klinghoffer noted he is optimistic about Jewish-Christian relations. "Another reason I wrote the book is that, for the first time, these two faiths have the maturity, I think, to be able to discuss what separates them, while at the same time appreciating what they have in common, which in many ways is more than what they disagree about -- especially now when both religions are faced with a common foe, the religion of secularism, which hates Judaism as much as it hates Christianity." --Jeff Perlah

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