The Jew And The Christian Missionary

Guest Reviewer: Shlomoh Sherman
SPEAKING of Books
The Jew And The Christian Missionary: A Jewish Response To Missionary Christianity
by Gerald Sigal
KTAY

Ostensibly as part of the ongoing movement to save Jewish souls, Gerald Sigal has written a coherent document which is a collection of arguments designed to refute the claims of those Christian missionaries who engage in active proselytism among Jews. These arguments concentrate on Christological interpretations of verses from the Tanach as well as on certain Christian dogma based on verses found in the New Testament.

Most of these arguments are not new. They have been addressed in disputations over the past two thousand years by many of our best qualified rabbinic minds, and successfully. Sigal's "Jewish-Christian Argument is in the tradition of such a VICUACH, a historical religious disputation. He easily knocks down the "logic" of the classical Christian interpretation of the Tanach and masterfully traces the historical development of such Christian concepts as the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection of Jesus.

Sigal apparently has not yet come to realize that in this day and age, a VICUACH is perhaps the most inappropriate and futile way of dealing with the problem. He supposedly deals with missionaries, but nowhere do we find him attempting to deal with the missionized, the very individuals who are supposed to benefit from his work.

From this reviewer's point of view, it is doubtful that a book which dwells on the fact that the concepts of the Trinity and Jesus as the son of G-d and intermediary between G-d and man ultimately stem from the idea of the Phenolic logos of Hellenistic Judaism will either interest or influence those religiously ignorant Jews who are searching for a path to God

In brief, Sigal's work is much too cerebral. Anyone familiar with the psychodynamics of the Christian missionary approach realizes that, in the final analysis, interpretation of Biblical verses is not what ultimately leads a Jew to accept Jesus.

The Jew And The Christian Missionary might have hit closer to the mark had it instead exposed the fallacious missionary proposition that the Jew who accepts Jesus is really accepting a "purer, more fulfilling form of Judaism." This might have been done by contrasting the beauty and depth of authentic Torah Judaism with the shallowness of Hebrew Christianity, and by demonstrating at length from Jewish sources how much the Almighty loves the Jew and wishes him to live his life in an authentic Jewish way.