 Messianic Judaism is a complex phenomenon. The origins go back to the late 1800s, both in Russia and in England. And there were two streams that fed into the early days of this movement when it was called Hebrew Christianity. And one stream were Jews who had converted to Christianity that did not want to fully assimilate into the Gentile churches and lose everything about their Jewish identity. They were seeking some way of maintaining an embrace of Christianity, of a belief in Jesus, but to be able to hang on to some remnants of a Jewish identity. The other stream that fed into early Hebrew Christianity was the understanding that the church world had, that this may be a convenient tactic for lubricating the conversion process. They felt that by presenting a face to Christianity that looked more familiar to Jewish people, it would be something that Jewish people might not be turned off to so quickly. And so to make Christianity less objectionable to Jewish people, the whole idea of somehow putting a Jewish face onto Christianity was appealing to mission groups. Now, this Hebrew Christian movement never really became a full-fledged movement. It was always a very minor phenomenon. And when Jewish people began coming over to North America from Europe and from the Soviet Union, it really floundered for many, many decades in the early 1900s. And it never really took off as a movement until the late 1960s and early 1970s. The early days of the Hebrew Christian revival in North America was really a result of the counterculture movements in North America. There was a huge growth of what they call the Jesus movement, the Jesus people. These were people from the North American counterculture, really in many ways rejecting the establishment of materialism of American life and seeking a more spiritual life. And many Jewish people got drawn to this Jesus movement and they, like their predecessors about a hundred years earlier in Europe, they did not feel comfortable totally giving up, totally trashing their Jewish identities. So you found that there was the beginnings of the growth of a Hebrew Christian movement in North America in the 1970s, largely fueled by Jewish people that had been drawn to Christianity through the Jesus movement and now not wanting to totally abandon their Jewishness and simply melt into a gentile church, they wanted to have some way of expressing their Jewishness and seeing Christianity really as a Jewish phenomenon. They appreciated that Jesus was a Jew and that his ministry was in Israel and the apostles were Jewish people. And so there was an attempt to try to give more of a Jewish face to the culture of Christianity. There was a desire to call Jesus, for example, by his Hebrew name or what was thought to be his Hebrew name Yeshua. And this movement, at one point, realized that Hebrew Christianity just sounded to Christian and so the movement changed the name to Messianic Judaism and it continued to grow again for the two reasons we mentioned previously. One, that Jewish converts to Christianity were seeking a way of maintaining their Jewish identity. Number two, and this was especially important in the 1970s and onward is that many Christian mission organizations in North America thought this would be the most potent way of marketing their religion to Jewish people by giving it a Jewish face and by making it seem less abrasive to Jewish ears and the optics would be more Jewish and more easily embraced. It would not be rejected out of hand as something that wasn't Jewish. And so you found that there was an embrace of celebrating Jewish holidays, having Passover satyrs and lighting Chanukah candles and having Jewish ceremonies like a chuppah at a wedding, etc. So this was a movement that developed primarily through the desire of Jewish converts to Christianity to maintain a Jewish identity and especially driven by Christian mission organizations that were seeking a more effective technology and way of marketing Christianity to the Jewish community and there were two other streams that fed into this. You had a rising intermarriage rate in North America beginning in the 1970s and Messianic Judaism was really marketed intentionally to Jewish people that were interdating or intermarried as a very convenient compromise because a Jewish Christian couple, where would they worship? Where would they attend? Would they attend a synagogue or a church? They don't have to choose now. They're able to sort of have their cake and eat it too by going to an amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity and it was seen as a very convenient compromise for many couples. And so that third stream into Messian Judaism became a large number of North American intermarried Jews where this became a very convenient address. And fourth and probably the most significant ironically element of the Messianic movement in North America has been the tremendously large number of Gentile Christians that have been drawn to it. Primarily out of a desire for authenticity, out of a desire to seek the true roots of their own faith. Beginning in the 1960s, there's been a tremendous interest among Christians in recovering and discovering the historical Jesus. Who actually was Jesus? And how did his movement develop in the early days? And how did it really end up moving away from its Jewish roots? And so because of that, there was a recognition that Christianity over the course of several hundred years really morphed and transformed itself in a way which moved away from its original Jewish roots. And many Christians seeking authenticity felt that the Messianic movement presented a face to Christianity which was more authentic, meaning it was more like what Jesus would have been comfortable in as opposed to their Baptist church or Pentecostal church. But what's interesting and significant is that within the Messianic movement itself, there has been a tremendous amount of confusion. One of the elements of confusion is the claim that this movement is Jewish because that's been really the element that they've needed to defend all these years. What is Jewish about Messianic Judaism? And so one of the elements has been that they are simply going back to the first century to the time of Jesus and his apostles who lived in Israel, who were Jewish and who lived in the Jewish community and they didn't curtail their association with the Jewish people or with Judaism. And so there's an element where Messianic Jews feel that they are basically going back to the earliest days of Christianity and recapturing its Jewish roots. The problem is severalfold. Number one, that the fact that Jesus was Jewish and that his apostles were Jewish doesn't automatically make the movement a Jewish movement. What does that mean? We know that in Judaism a person that's born a Jew remains a Jew regardless of what they do. So a Jewish person can become, God forbid, a mass murderer but they're still a Jew. They're just a Jewish criminal. And a Jewish person can convert to Islam or to Hinduism and they're still a Jew. You'd call them a Jewish apostate. So when a Jewish person converts to Christianity, they still remain a Jew. That's not a question. The question is, is what they're doing Jewish, meaning is what they're doing consistent with the teachings of Judaism? So just like the mass murderer or the person that embraces Hinduism is not doing something that would be endorsed by or advocated or consistent with the teachings of Judaism, so too, Christianity is not consistent with the teachings of Judaism. And so to make the claim that Christianity must be Jewish because after all Jesus was Jewish and his followers were Jewish makes as much sense as saying well the golden calf must have been Jewish because the people that built the golden calf were Jews. Just because a Jew does something doesn't automatically make what they're doing legitimate from a Jewish point of view. But the second issue here is that if we do go back in history to the first century we'll find that what Jesus and his apostles were doing was really nothing like what contemporary Christianity practices and believes. The truth is that today's Messianic Jews believe exactly the same things as any born-again evangelical Christian. The doctrinal statements of every Messianic congregation and organization believe in the exact same theological beliefs and doctrines as the Southern Baptists and Pentecostal Christians. There's literally no difference between what Messianic Jews believe and what normative evangelical Christians believe today. And so the truth is that Messianic Judaism in terms of what religion it fits into fits into Christianity not into Judaism. And so what they're forced to do unfortunately is to really go back a step. And they're forced to say that well actually all of these groups are Jewish. They're forced to say that in truth all the beliefs of contemporary Christianity, the belief in atrinity, the belief in the fact that Jesus dies for your sins, the belief in the idea that you need to sacrifice to atone for your sins, the belief in the idea that there's going to be a new part of the Bible called the New Testament which was written in Greek and all of the elements of Christianity Messianic Jews are forced to insist that those are also Jewish. So what happens here is they end up really unfortunately slipping into a kind of replacement theology because what they end up having to say is that it's modern contemporary Christianity that's really Jewish. It's only modern contemporary Christianity whose beliefs are consistent with the Jewish Bible and it's the Jewish community that has gotten everything wrong. And so initially their tactic was to simply claim that what they were doing almost trying to distinguish themselves from the rest of the Christian world is Jewish because they go back to the first century. But the truth is that their beliefs and their practices are not consistent with the first century. From all the studies that we can do of the Christian scriptures it seems very clear that Jesus did not claim to be God, that he was not worshiped as God, that he was not seen as part of a trinity, that he was not telling people that now that they believe in him as the Messiah they no longer have to observe the laws of the Torah. These are all later changes that took place over the next hundred years with the spread of Paul's Gentile Church. And so really it's ironic that today's Messianic Jews are not really going back to the first century. They're simply embracing the same exact Christianity that exists in the world today among other Protestant evangelicals. And all they really do is to put a Jewish face, a Jewish patina on this Christian structure. So they simply will call Jesus by his Hebrew name Yeshua. They might refer to the New Testament as the Britahadasha. They may call the apostle Paul Rav Shaul. They may speak about Merriam as the mother of Jesus and not Mary. They may speak about baptism as the mikvah service. But really all that's happening is that the names are being changed to protect the guilty. What is really being covered up is a totally non-Jewish Gentile Christianity that really emerged after the first century. And so there's a tremendous amount of confusion in this movement to try to really tease out what is really Jewish about it. And the other thing that's confusing within the movement itself is their insistence that to distinguish themselves from the Jewish community, they will insist that they are biblical Jews and that they don't practice a man-made rabbinic Judaism. And so the problem they face is that when you watch this movement up close, you'll find that virtually everything they do is based upon the practices of rabbinic Judaism, not upon what the Bible simply says. And so this convenient way of identifying themselves and distinguishing themselves from the Jewish community really in practice doesn't work out because all of their practices are rooted in the practices of rabbinic Judaism. The one last thing I'd like to share about the Messianic movement is that for a tremendous number of people it's become a gateway out of Christianity, both among the Jewish people that are in the Messianic movement and the tremendous number of Gentile Christians that are drawn to the Messianic movement, they eventually find their way out of the movement towards a genuine practice of Judaism because they come to the realization that it's impossible to really embrace both Christian theology and Judaism, to embrace both what is today normative Protestant Christianity and the Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible. And so probably the most significant aspect of this movement today is that it has become an exit point, an exit ramp out of Christianity for so many people, both Jews and Gentiles.