 You were born a Jew. You may have gone to Hebrew school for some years and had a bat mitzvah, or a bat mitzvah. Whether you had a good education, a poor one, or none at all, you're now a teenager, maybe in your 20s, 30s, or any age, and you have a problem. Your problem is Jesus of Nazareth. For a long time he meant nothing to you. You knew that you were a Jew and Jews didn't believe in Jesus, but at some point that began to change. You may have read something or heard a speaker say that you cannot be saved unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior, and furthermore that you can remain a good Jew and accept Jesus. In fact, you may have been told to accept Jesus as your savior made you a fulfilled or messianic Jew. Perhaps for the first time in your life you met sincerely religious people who reached out to welcome you and include you into a real fellowship. You were probably told that only through Jesus could your sins be forgiven. You then read portions of the New Testament and you were moved by the personality of Jesus. His love of God, his fellow man, and his compassion for the weak and suffering. And you're now in the process of becoming a Jewish Christian, or maybe you've already become one, or you're just beginning to think of becoming a Jewish Christian. Or, your situation may be different from anything described so far, but you're a Jew and attracted to Jesus and Jewish Christianity. This video is for you. It was produced in the spirit of reverence. Chances are good that if you have begun thinking about becoming a Jewish Christian, you've encountered some hostility from Jewish relatives and friends. Some of them may have had little Jewish commitment until they heard about your Jewish Christianity, at which point they berated you for apostasy, being disloyal to your people, and other nasty things. To you all this sounded very unfair because you didn't think you were being disloyal to anybody, just happy with a newly found faith. So naturally you may be confused. Can I be a Jew and a Christian? Why is Judaism rejected Christianity? These and other questions come to your mind. You've heard these questions answered by your new Christian friends, but since you're a fair person, you want to hear the other side of things. You want to hear it from a Jew who knows what he's talking about, and who won't abuse you and call you names. After you've heard both sides of this story, you'll make up your own mind, and this is as it should be because every person is responsible for his or her own choices with a right or wrong. The purpose of this presentation is to explain the Jewish point of view with respect to Jews becoming Christians or Jewish Christians. Judaism never did, nor does it now wish to discourage Gentiles from becoming or remaining Christians. The reason for this, as you'll see, is that Judaism has never believed that everybody should become Jewish. From the Jewish point of view, good people of all religions have a share in the world to come. Judaism does, however, believe that Jews should be Jews and nothing else. Now the purpose of the presentation is therefore to explain why Jews ought not to become Christians or Jewish Christians, but it's not directed at anyone who is not Jewish. It was produced in a spirit of respect for those to whom it is addressed. We assume that you're a sincere seeker of the truth and that your search is a genuinely religious one. It's necessary to say this because often Jews speak to fellow Jews attracted to Christianity and they find it hard to believe that such Jewish Christians are sincere. The reason for this is simple. For many centuries, most Jews who converted to Christianity did so out of self-interest rather than religious sincerity. Up to very recent times, being a Jew in a Christian world was a social and economic disadvantage. Many occupations were close to Jews as were popular social circles. Many Jews who embraced Christianity therefore acted out of self-interest rather than genuine religious conviction and Jews resented such conversions of convenience as did sincere Christians. Gradually this attitude became deeply ingrained in the Jewish mind and as a result many Jews find it hard to believe that a Jew who embraces Christianity can be sincere. But times do change and while discrimination against Jews has by no means disappeared it has diminished particularly in the United States and Canada. Today in this country, most Jews who move towards Christianity don't do so out of social or economic self-interest. They must therefore be addressed with the respect that any sincere person who seeks truth deserves and that's the spirit in which this video was produced. In addition to respect, the Jews who have been attracted to Christianity also deserves honesty. We're not going to hide our goal. It's to retrieve for Judaism every possible Jew. We will attempt to do so honestly and with love and with the knowledge that in the final analysis each person is responsible only to God for the decisions that he makes. One more word about motivation. Nowadays many Jews who hear about Jews involved with Christianity attribute such involvement to a lack of Jewish education or some kind of psychological problem. Now it's true that many Jews both old and young lack a proper Jewish education. It's also true that many persons today have psychological problems but religious choices can rarely be explained just on psychological grounds. One way or another a person is responding to God and to spiritual realities. The spiritual realm involves man's soul and it's deeper than the mind that the psychologists can understand. There will be no attempt here to explain away your interest in Christianity by reducing it to a psychological or educational problem. If your Jewish education is weak then you want to improve it and hopefully we will play a small role in helping you do that. But above all you can be sure that you're being taken seriously on a religious and a spiritual level. There's one more thing, an important point that must be made before we begin to discuss the issues. To a certain extent throughout our discussion we will be proving things or trying to show that the proofs offered by others leave something to be desired. As you listen, especially if you pay careful attention to various proofs offered you might come to the conclusion that we consider religious beliefs to be based purely on rational proofs. That's not our intention. Religious beliefs are to a large extent based on faith and this is true of both the Jewish and the Christian believer. Let's look at some specific examples. Much of the debate between Judaism and Christianity involves the interpretation of passages from the Bible. To the believing Jew, the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament in Christian terminology is the Word of God. To the believing Christian both the Old and the New Testament are divinely inspired. Now the belief that a particular book is or is not the Word of God cannot be proven objectively. Such a belief is held by faith and Christians speak of faith as something given by God as a gift to some and not to others. The encounter between Judaism and Christianity is to some extent an encounter of different faith positions and honest Jews and Christians should recognize this fact. Now this is true not only with regard to the question of whether or not the New Testament is divinely inspired but also of a number of other questions such as the divinity of Jesus and under what circumstances God forgives sins. Faith plays an important part in both Judaism and Christianity and would be less than forthright for either Jews or Christians to assert that they can prove their case beyond doubt and therefore do not require faith. But what is faith? Is it simply believing things without any evidence? Is anyone entitled to believe anything simply on the grounds of faith without having to give any reason for his beliefs? I mean this is a difficult question to answer and theologians have written a great deal about it. Perhaps the best example of faith is that of Abraham about whom the Bible says when they say Abram put his faith in the Lord and the Lord counted that faith to him as righteousness. It's important to note the context in which the verse appears. The verse appears in connection with Abraham's puzzlement about God's reliability. God promised Abraham that his offspring would be as many as the dust of the earth and then Abraham and Sarah had no children. After Sarah passed her menopause it looked as if God was not going to keep his promise. It's at this point that we're told of Abraham's faith. Abraham believed that God would keep his promise even though from the human point of view I didn't look all that likely. This sort of trusting faith is somewhat different from the believing sword that we have in mind when we speak of faith in God's existence or the divine inspiration of Scripture. Nevertheless it shows that faith has an element of trusting someone in spite of the existence of contrary evidence. If we truly love God and feel his love for us we trust him to keep his promises and to do what is good for us. At the same time it can't be that the will of God that human beings act irrationally. Even if things held on faith cannot be proven with certainty there's much that can be understood. Take something like interpreting the meaning of the Bible. In order to understand the Bible we have to read it. Those who can't read Hebrew or Greek have to depend on translations and translators often disagree about the correct translation of certain passages. Furthermore, when reading anything written many centuries ago we have to be sure we understand the expressions and way of thinking of the people to whom the work was addressed. Otherwise we're in danger of misunderstanding its message. Now this is particularly true of historical religions like Judaism and Christianity whose claims to credibility are based on happenings in time and place. These religions have long histories during which certain ideas develop. Take something like the idea of the Messiah. It is really impossible to understand the meaning of the claim that someone is the Messiah without understanding what the idea meant among ancient Jews and how it came to mean what it did. Christianity was born within Judaism. Jesus and his disciples were all Jews. They were educated along Jewish lines and thought of themselves as Jews. To understand Christianity it is therefore necessary to know a good deal about Judaism. Now this is particularly true for a Jew who becomes interested in Christianity. He has to face the Jewish roots of Christianity and therefore his own Jewishness which is something he may never really examined before. We will attempt to explain how Judaism views Christianity and why it cannot agree with some of the most important Christian beliefs. Now because we will concentrate on our areas of disagreement we may give the impression that there are no areas of agreement. Now that of course is not so. Belief in the dignity of man as created in the image of God is one area of agreement. So is the teaching that we must help those less fortunate than us because God so desires it. And there are many other areas of agreement. Nevertheless, for a Jew to come to believe that Jesus was God to take just one idea in Christianity that Judaism cannot accept is a very serious matter and so we hope you will continue watching with an open mind.