Similarities............."

ALFRED EDERSHEIM (1825 – 1889) was born in Vienna to Jewish parents and was converted to Christianity as a young man while studying in England. One of the leading authorities of his time regarding the doctrines and practices of Judaism in the centuries preceding and during the early Christian era, he was recommended to me by a friend nearly ten years ago. I purchased a copy of his work, “The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah”, but found it so “deep” that, for the most part, it served me merely as a reference piece. It was not until, as so often happens with my library, it was loaned and lost that I became aware of just how much it fed me; so, in purchasing a second copy, this time I’ve sat down to earnestly pursue a journey through it from its beginning. The volume is actually five books in one and, at present, I am about to complete the eighth chapter. That only leaves me EIGHTY-eight to go. While I realize that any author is able to gather “facts” merely from those sources which support his own point of view, yet I find myself both amused and fed by the historical picture Mr Edershein paints of God’s “chosen people”. In so many ways, what he describes, as far as I’m concerned, is but a mirrored image of the Church………………

The singularity of the Jew is found in Mr. Edersheim’s statement that “without their religion, they had no history; and without their history, no religion”. The passion of such people was determined, in his view, by the idea that, while as a nation the vast majority of which was dispersed over the whole inhabited earth, yet its heart beat in Jerusalem and thence the life-blood passed to its most distant members”. The Eastern Orthodox Jew is presented as being absorbed with his study of the Law and the thought that “God created the world on account of Israel, it having been in His plans not only before anything had actually been created, but even before every other creative thought”. Though “their good deeds should be few, yet by cumulating them from among all the people, they would appear great in the end and God would exact payment for their sins as a man does from his friends, a little at a time”. On the other hand, the Western “Hellenistic” Jew, finding himself so greatly distanced from the core of what they held to be sacred, began to be more concerned with “the future of the world” rather than the homeland. More and more, while the substance of their faith remained tied to the basic elements of a common creed, yet their tendency to find the ancient documents “full of symbolism” separated the two camps………….
..
It was Chaim Potok’s fictional account of “The Chosen” that first awakened me to the reality of the modern-day Jews, though tied together with “the old school” by an ethnic thread no matter where dispersion may have rooted them elsewhere, were as “denominationally” divided in their doctrines as Christianity is within its own ranks. The whole scenario concerning BOTH religious factors, for that matter, long ago settled in my mind as but giving evidence, not so much as to “their” being blind to the Messiah having already, at least in part, fulfilled prophecy, but to just how much humanity in its entirety can make a mess out of God’s grace. What Jesus brought unto the world was not another book to be sliced, diced, and then reinvented to be used as some point to govern who and what we are. He renewed the possibility for a man to once again “walk in the garden” with his Creator. He broke down the walls of the sanctuary and extended unto every hungry heart the opportunity to step behind the veil and touch the hem of His garment. Now, even as it always has been, salvation is not determined by what “thus sayeth the ecclesiastical institution”, but by the thirst in each and every individual to know God for themself. Let it be acknowledged that, even having experienced the “second birth”, a man can yet “have eyes and see not”……………..