Questions for Orthodox Jews
By Jean Vuilleumier
The Jew and the Christian Have the Same Old Testament — Why Should They Keep So Separate? As a lover of mankind, Jews included, I would like to ask all open-minded, orthodox Jews a few questions. Why should there not be an exchange of views between Jew and Christian? Why should misunderstandings keep them aloof from each other? Christians have for 1,900 years scattered the knowledge of the true God, the God of the Jews, to all parts of the world. They have brought millions of former idolaters to exchange their gods of gold, silver, and stone for the God of Abraham and Moses, the God who created the heaven and the earth. They have translated into scores of tongues, and printed, and scattered into every land, the sacred writings of the Jewish prophets. Why, then, should Jews and Christians not seek to come closer to each other? Of course, their modes of worship and their beliefs are widely separated. But why should it be so when both have planted the tree of their faith on the same soil, the Old Testament, which, we claim, contains all the principles and laws of the Christian religion, as well as the prophecies and types of its system of salvation? Do we not derive all we know about creation, the Flood, the origin of sin, and the history of God’s dealings with mankind for four thousand years, from your Old Testament Hebrew writings? Have we not in common, as the purest expression of the moral law, the sublime134precepts of the Ten Commandments spoken on Mount Sinai and written on the tables of stone? Do we not all believe, even with the heathen, that atonement must be made for the sin of man, although we may differ as to how God intends that this atonement should be effected,—whether by the blood of animal sacrifices, or by a higher sacrifice, of which all the victims of Israel’s ceremonial law were only a type? Do we not all believe in the advent of a Messiah, the Prince of peace, who shall sit on the throne of David, who shall be King over all the earth, and who shall establish His kingdom with justice and righteousness forever? THE MESSIAH AND THE PROPHETS
The only really fundamental difference between the two religions is as to whether the Messiah should first have appeared as a man among men to die for the sins of the world, or not. We Christians claim that He should, according to the Hebrew prophets. We claim that Isaiah, chapters 7, 9, 53, 61, states that fact in unmistakable terms; that Daniel, chapter 9, predicted that the Messiah should appear as man within the seventieth week of years—490 years—from the date of the restoration of Jerusalem under the Persian kings, after the Babylonian exile. This restoration, according to Ezra 7, began in 457 B. C., so that the Messiah, the Anointed One, must have appeared on earth between A. D. 27 and 34. The first of these two dates was the very year when Jesus of Nazareth was baptized and anointed with the Holy Spirit. He was put to death for the sins of the world three and a half years later, in the middle of the seventieth week. Then, according to the same prophecy, the city of Jerusalem and the temple were to be desolated by a cruel army, nevermore to be restored. All of this came to pass, to the very letter, less than forty years after the crucifixion of Christ. With all these startling facts before us, I make bold to ask if we, as Christians, would not be guilty of sinful indifference were we not to make some efforts to bring them before our Jewish neighbors. Yea, more, is it not a duty on the part of the orthodox Jew to study into these things, with the result either of becoming a Christian himself, or else of telling us plainly why his nation—once the favorite of Heaven, once the object of the most wonderful miracles—has been, ever since the days of the Nazarene, without a country, without sacrifices, without prophets, without miracles? The greatest miracle in the history of that nation is the fact that it is a wandering, scattered, yet unmixed people among all the peoples of the earth.