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[edit] Reclaiming the truth

There is a great opportunity for Jewish anti-missionaries to retrieve tens of thousands of Jews from Christian cults. This great opportunity, however, is being completely overlooked. What is this opportunity? The opportunity to cut Christianity off at its root.

About two thousand years ago, a Jew named Yehoshua, יהושע, was born in the Land of Israel. This Jew grew up in a Torah observant household, and was educated in the ways and eternal wisdom of his people, the dual Torah. He grew and received instruction from great teachers of the time. Himself then ready to teach, he amazed the Jews of the Land loyal to Hashem with compelling insights into the dual Torah. These insights were not inventions, for they had always been inherent in the infinite depths of Torah. They were revelations, but revelations entirely in logical consonance with the dual Torah of Mosheh. Ribi Yehoshua encouraged his people to accept the yoke of Torah, and to wholeheartedly follow the commandments of Hashem.

There were groups of Jews at this time in league with foreign invaders, as had been the case in the days of Yehudah HaMakabi. These Jews were in places of high influence and power. They controlled the Beit HaMikdash, and sat in the Sanhedrin HaGadol. They had the ear of the putative king, himself in tribute to Rome. They were corrupt and were owned not by the love of Torah but by the love of the worldly wealth they obtained through their alliance with the foreigners. These wicked officials were opposed by righteous Jews who safeguarded the dual Torah and exhorted the Jews of the Land to follow the path known to Mosheh and other Torah giants throughout history. Ribi Yehoshua was one of their number.

When the wicked officials heard of Ribi Yehoshua, they became concerned. He was a charismatic teacher, able to assemble thousands at a time to hear his words of Torah. The wicked officials knew that Torah demanded that the Jews reject the ways of the foreign invaders, and knew that their great wealth and power was secured only through violations of Torah. What if Ribi Yehoshua were to rally enough followers of Torah to throw them, the wicked priests, down to defeat? The officials opposed to Torah conspired with the Roman invaders to have Ribi Yehoshua killed. As the wicked have done to righteous and Torah-observant Jews throughout centuries, so they did to Ribi Yehoshua.

Years later, news of this Ribi Yehoshua spread throughout the world. Some non-Jews schooled in the ways of their idolatrous ancestors and ignorant of the wisdom of the dual Torah took the story of Ribi Yehoshua and manufactured a look-alike to take his place. (For a discussion of how look-alikes are manufactured and an intellectual basis for stating that Ribi Yehoshua and Jesus are not the same, see the work of theorists such as, e.g., Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and The Logic of Sense; Paul Patton; and Deleuze and Space edited by Buchanan and Lambert.) They named this look-alike Jesus. They said he was a god, ח”ו. They wrote stories about him and inserted their false views into true historical accounts of Ribi Yehoshua. Torah-faithful Jews thankfully rejected this counterfeit. But as centuries wore on, memory of the historically-real Ribi Yehoshua faded from the Torah-faithful community. They accepted the non-Jewish account and conflated the Ribi with the Jesus-image. In doing so they wrongfully, albeit innocently, ascribed iniquity to a Torah-observant Jew.

It is high time for anti-missionaries to stop allowing the Jesus-image manufactured by non-Jews to define a Torah-faithful teacher. It is time to claim Ribi Yehoshua as part of the Torah tradition. In doing this, anti-missionaries can completely undercut Christian fables, and show them to rest upon nothingness.

Ribi Yehoshua believed and taught only according to the infinite wisdom of Torah. So what if the Christians say that Jesus said something contrary to Torah? If some non-Jews made up a religion about Rabbi Menachem Schneerson זצ”ל, that he was a god, ח”ו, would that nullify the historical fact that he strove to follow Torah all the days of his life? Whatever your views of his movement, you would not accept such a story by non-Jews by denying Rabbi Schneerson's love of and faithfulness to Torah and deeming him an apostate to Torah. Since when do Torah Jews take the words of idolators at face-value? In the past 200 years, volume after volume of studies by highly intelligent scholars, both secular and religious, have shown that the Jesus put forth by Christians never existed. Rather, they show that a Torah-teaching Ribi Yehoshua did exist! As Rabbi Jacob Emden זצ”ל has clearly stated:

[T]he writers of the Gospels never meant to say that the Nazarene came to abolish Judaism, but only that he came to establish a religion for the Gentiles from that time onward. Nor was it new, but actually ancient; they being the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, which were forgotten. The Apostles of the Nazarene then established them anew. However, those born as Jews, or circumcised as converts to Judaism (Ex. 12:49: one law shall be to him that is home-born, and unto the stranger) are obligated to observe all commandments of the Torah without exception. (qtd. in Falk, ch. 1; see http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/falk1a.html)

Rabbi Harvey Falk has asserted that Ribi Yehoshua was one of the Prushim. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, שליט”א, has corroborated the work of Gil Student (see here and here) showing that nowhere in the Talmud is there any reference to the historical Ribi Yehoshua being wicked. I have listed a small selection of these studies below.

Now is the time for Torah-faithful Jews everywhere to claim Ribi Yehoshua as one of their own, to deny Christians from further tainting his memory. By doing this thousands of Jews will abandon Christianity without having to abandon their respect for Ribi Yehoshua, non-Jews will come to learn truth, and the world will come immensely closer to the realization of the Aleinu.

For more information about how the Torah-faithful Jewish community can reclaim Ribi Yehoshua while upholding Torah fundamentals (e.g., אני מאמין), contact the Netzarim in Ra'ananah, Israel.

Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewish of Jesus. (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003).
Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee. (St. Mary's Plain: SCM, 2003).
Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981).
E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981).