The Boteach Delusion

A review of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s Kosher Jesus

I once enjoyed the dubious privilege of being called a liar by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. When Shmuley sensed the tide of opinion in the hall was against him, he wisely withdrew the charge only to retract his apology later when we were shaking hands. Since then, I’ve never really been able to take Shmuley seriously.

Even allowing for my mildly jaundiced attitude, there is little one can say positively about Shmuley’s latest book. Some of Shmuley’s fellow rabbis have denounced Kosher Jesus as heresy even though they have not read the book, a fact that tells us more about the rabbis than it does about Shmuley or his book.

Even though I feel sympathy for Shmuley, I am far from impressed by Kosher Jesus. It’s the kind of book you could imagine being written by a hybrid clone of Richard Dawkins and Dan Brown.

Shmuley’s contention is that Jews and Christians have for centuries misunderstood Jesus. Shmuley’s kosher Jesus (as opposed to the unkosher Jesus of historic Christianity) was a ‘wise and learned rabbi who despised the Romans for their cruelty to his Jewish brethren, who fought the Romans courageously and was ultimately murdered for trying to throw off the Roman yoke of oppression. He was a man who worked to rekindle Jewish ritual observance of every aspect of the Torah and to counter the brutal Roman occupation of his people’s land’ (p xvii).

According to Shmuley, the Gospels were doctored by Gentile editors who took care to expunge the Jewishness of Jesus and to make Jews the bad guys and the Romans the good guys. These rogue editors made Jesus say such things as, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s…’ something no self-respecting Roman-hating, freedom fighter would have ever said.

Under Rabbi Boteach’s imaginative deconstruction, Judas Iscariot become a creation of later editors who were intent on demonising the Jewish people. These Jew-hating spin doctors created an archetypical villain who would become a symbol of the Jewish people as a whole, a human being so evil that he would for moderate consideration betray God himself. And, in case the symbolism was too subtle, they gave their creation the name ‘Judas’.

Shmuley’s Jesus might be kosher but, according to him, the apostle Paul was most definitely non-kosher. Shmuley’s unkosher Paul was a Gentile convert to Judaism and a manipulative liar who fraudulently claimed to have been a disciple of the great Jewish sage Gamaliel. He went ‘almost exclusively’ to Gentiles and bullied Peter into eating non-kosher food.

But don’t get Rabbi Boteach wrong. Although he wants us to know that everything Christians believe – from the doctrine of original sin to the return of Christ – is constructed on a foundation of anti-Semitism, paganism and downright falsehood, he has no desire to ‘denigrate or deny Christian doctrine’ (p. 160)!

But even though Christians are wrong, Christianity is the way for Christians to reach God just as Islam is the way for Muslims to approach God. Judaism is the way to God for Jews, the only difference being that Judaism is right and the others are wrong. Rabbi Boteach doesn’t mind Christians supporting Israel and opposing anti-Semitism; he just wants us to stop trying to persuade Jewish people to believe in Jesus.

Those things apart, the book is a confusing farrago of poor logic, pseudo-scholarship, gross misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Christian doctrine and wishful thinking.

Shmuley thinks Luke’s Gospel has 31 chapters, that Damascus was an ‘Assyrian city’.

On page 107, Shmuley states that. ‘Using one’s tongue to assassin ate the character of an innocent victim … is immoral.’ Five pages later he informs us that Paul lied about being a disciple of Gamaliel because was not a great scholar because he seems to have been incapable of reading Hebrew. On page 113 Shmuley accuses Paul of misquoting Deuteronomy 21:23 to give it a ‘fraudulent meaning’.

To prove that Paul ‘misrepresents this verse utterly’, Shmuley quotes Galatians 3:13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole”.’

Shmuley states that he is quoting Galatians 3:13 from the New International Version of the Bible; only he isn’t. The NIV translation reads: ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree”.’ Where did ‘the pole’ come from?

Shmuley then goes on to expound Paul’s argument. Christians have always thought that ‘the tree’ Paul refers to is the cross on which the Lord Jesus was hung. How wrong we are for, according to the rabbi, Paul ‘explains that the pole refers to the Torah, the Law of Moses.’ Hence, ‘Paul bases one of one of Christianity’s core doctrines on a misrepresentation.’

Thus, Shmuley hoists himself on his own petard.

Gregory Zuckerman describes Shmuley Boteach as being ‘among the most provocative and creative minds in public discourse.’ Creative is right.

I will defend unequivocally Rabbi Boteach’s right to publish what he wants but, for reasons stated above, Kosher Jesus will not be available from the CWI Bookroom.

A One-Sided Attack on Zionism

With the assistance of Stephen Sizer, Porter Speakman’s biased documentary on Christian Zionism, http://withgodonourside.com/index.htmlhas been doing the rounds of UK churches.

The prestigious Christianity Today gave the DVD a four star rating, announcing that “...Christian Zionism is officially on notice”.

To the credit of TC, the website features a response by Guest Blogger Gerald McDermott, the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Virginia’s Roanoke College. I’ve watched the film and agree wholeheartedly with Prof McDermott. Read his blog and the responses to it online at Christianity Today.

The documentary With God on Our Side is anything but balanced. It does not give “both sides their due” but instead interviews only Israelis on the far left and ignores Christian Zionists who defend the rights of Palestinians. The result is a one-sided attack on Israel that treats social and political realities with the same ideological insouciance which the documentary assigns to John Hagee and his band.

One interviewee in the film claims—without rebuttal—that Jews did not live in the land for two thousand years. The truth is that Jewish communities have lived in the land through all this time, flourishing in Jerusalem, Galilee and coastal cities in the 9th and 11th centuries, and then rebounding after being massacred by Crusaders in the 12th century. By the early 19th century, long before the rise of Zionism, more than ten thousand Jews lived in what is now Israel.

Viewers are told of Jews expelling Arabs from villages in the 1948 war for independence, but not that the war was started by Arabs, or that Arab armies from neighbouring countries targeted Jewish civilians, or that the war was unnecessary because the UN had offered a two-state partition that the Jews accepted and Palestinians rejected.

The documentary states that Israel started the 1967 war “pre-emptively” but fails to provide the context: after months of threatening war against Israel, Egypt’s President Nasser announced (just days before Israel struck) that “the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon . . . are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived.”

The film then proceeds to charge Israel with “illegal occupation” of the West Bank after the 1967 War on the grounds that Israel failed to comply with UN Resolution 242.

According to this resolution, Israeli withdrawal was to take place in the context of mutual recognition of the right to exist and territorial adjustments to achieve secure boundaries. Withdrawal was ordered from "territories," not "the territories."

Both Arthur Goldberg and Lord Carrington, the primary authors of this resolution, have said that the word "the" was purposely omitted because it was not intended for Israel to give back all of her territories, since they recognized that some were needed for secure boundaries.

Despite the fact that most Arab states have refused to recognize Israel's right to exist (a condition of Resolution 242), Israel has implemented the principles of the Resolution three times. When Egypt terminated its claims of belligerency in 1979, Israel returned the Sinai. When Jordan signed a peace agreement, Israel returned land claimed by Jordan. Then in September 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, only to be met with new attacks on her civilians launched from that territory.

Illegal occupation? Hardly. Israel has made repeated efforts to comply with UN stipulations for the territories, while its Arab neighbours have not.

When the Palestinians appeared to accept Israel's right to exist during the Oslo negotiations, Israel turned over control of major West Bank cities to the Palestinian Authority (PA). But when the PA showed support for terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens in 2000, Israel resumed control of those cities.

In that same year Israel offered to return 92 percent of the West Bank, which this documentary dismisses as ungenerous because, it charges, Israel never owned the land in the first place. Yet Jews have lived in ancient Samaria (the West Bank) for over three thousand years. Jordan unilaterally renounced all claims to this area in 1988 and released legal ownership to Israel at that time.

This video suggests Jews should remove all settlements from the West Bank, leaving it entirely for Palestinians. That would be as unreasonable as insisting that no Arabs can live in Judaea.

Besides, what other country has been required to give up land that it won in a defensive war? Do Germans displaced from Koenigsberg clamour and agitate for that German city to be returned to them by the victorious Russians?

The film concentrates attention on suffering caused Palestinians by the new wall. The wall is indeed tragic in many ways. But there is only a passing reference to the attacks on citizens which prompted its building, and the fact that this wall has prevented many such attacks.

Perhaps most disturbing, this video leaves unchallenged one man’s denunciation of Israel as “apartheid on steroids.” This accusation is not only inflammatory but egregiously unfair. South African apartheid was based on race. "Blacks" and "coloureds" could not vote and had no representation in the South African parliament. But Israeli citizens of all races—Arabs and Jews alike—can vote, be represented in the Knesset, and have recourse to the courts.

Apartheid was also a legal system that restricted participation to a minority that had control over a majority. In Israel the majority give equal legal rights and protection to Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the population of Israel. Irshad Manji, a Muslim, has written, “At only 20 percent of the population, would Arabs even be eligible for election if they squirmed under the thumb of apartheid? Would an apartheid state extend voting rights to women and the poor in local elections, which Israel did for the first time in the history of Palestinian Arabs?”

There are also theological problems with this film. First, we are shown only Christian Zionists who use biblical prooftexts to support Israel’s rights to the land. There is no sign of the vast numbers of Israelis and evangelicals who believe that modern Israel is a miraculous work of God fulfilling biblical prophecy while at the same time supporting Palestinians’ rights to self-determination in the land. In other words, viewers never hear of another kind of Jewish and Christian theological Zionism that takes seriously both prophecies of Israel’s return and the biblical mandate of social justice for Jews and Arabs alike.

The second and more serious theological problem is that the end of the documentary suggests that God’s covenant with the Jews (Gen. 12.1-3 et al) was eclipsed by the new covenant for Christians. This is the familiar replacement theology that does not do justice to Rom 11.28-29, and that helped create an atmosphere that required Zionism in the first place. In other words, it was this sort of supersessionism (the belief that the Christian covenant replaced the Jewish covenant) that taught Christians for millennia that Judaism was no longer significant theologically, which then encouraged the belief that Jews were no longer important in a Christian world.