An article on this site yesterday affirmed that Jesus was a Jew. Quite right. It is not a matter of debate, nor even of serious discussion. It is a simple fact: scriptural, historical, and theological. But it is also not a controversy worth pretending exists.
The recent attempts to manufacture one, usually from internet personalities of dubious seriousness, tell us far more about the modern appetite for outrage than about Christianity itself. No Catholic who attended the liturgies of Holy Week last week could plausibly be confused on the matter. One would have heard, more than once, the Gospel proclaim Christ moving within the life of Israel: observing its feasts, teaching in its Temple, fulfilling its Scriptures. Holy Mother Church does not hide this; she repeats it constantly.
So while some rush to swat down this supposed denial, one is tempted to ask who exactly is being addressed. It is difficult to escape the impression that a fringe error is being inflated into a crisis. The more interesting question lies elsewhere. If there is a real confusion today, it is not that Christians deny Christ’s Jewishness, but that many misunderstand what it signifies.
In certain strands of contemporary Christianity, one finds a tendency to treat “the Jewish people” not as a theological reality within salvation history, but as a kind of moral or political category, often bound up with present-day events in the Middle East. This tendency is perhaps most visible among some American Evangelicals, for whom support for the modern state of Israel has taken on an almost theological character, framed in quasi-religious terms, as though current political realities were a straightforward continuation of biblical Israel. Historical continuity is quietly assumed to carry theological weight, and political actions are granted a kind of spiritual immunity. That is a far more consequential error than anything one might hear on a podcast.
The Church has always made a distinction, one found already in St Paul, between Israel according to the flesh and Israel according to the promise. Christ was born into the former, but He came to fulfil it: the Old Covenant reaches its completion in Him, it is not placed alongside the New as a parallel path, but brought to its intended end. The people of God are therefore no longer defined by lineage, but by incorporation into Christ. As St Paul writes, there is now “neither Jew nor Greek”, but one in Him. This is not a rejection of Israel, but its fulfilment; its expansion beyond the limits of a single people to embrace all nations.
It follows that the Judaism of the Old Testament—the religion of Moses, the prophets, and the expectation of the Messiah—is not identical to what we now call Rabbinic Judaism. After Christ, there was not a mutual “parting of ways” so much as a refusal, on the part of the Jews, to recognise the fulfilment of what had been promised. Christianity stands in continuity with the religion of Israel precisely because it proclaims that fulfilment. Rabbinic Judaism, developing after the destruction of the Temple, proceeds on a different basis. Properly understood, it represents not a parallel continuation of biblical religion, but a departure from it, insofar as it does not accept its completion in Christ.
This is a real and irreconcilable theological difference. It cannot be smoothed over by vague appeals to shared heritage or by collapsing distinct historical realities into one another. At the same time, recognising this difference does not justify hostility. The Church’s posture has always been one of both clarity and charity: clarity about truth, and charity toward persons.
The Good Friday liturgy expresses this balance with remarkable sobriety. The Church prays for the Jewish people not with contempt, but with hope: áuferat velámen de córdibus eórum—that the Lord may remove the veil from their hearts.
It is therefore both possible, and indeed necessary, to reject two errors at once. The first is the automatic reduction of Jewish people to objects of suspicion or hostility: this is wholly incompatible with Christianity, which recognises in Israel a unique role in salvation history and, indeed, the very human lineage of Our Lord. The second is a kind of theological naïvety: the idea that contemporary political entities or religious traditions possess a divine mandate simply by virtue of historical continuity. Much of the present confusion stems from precisely this mistake. States, like all human institutions, act morally or immorally; they are not sacralised by history, nor exempted from judgement.
To recognise this is not to deny Scripture, but to read it properly. The promises made to Israel are not erased; they are fulfilled and transformed in Christ. To treat them as though they remain in exactly the same form, attached to the same political or ethnic structures, is to misunderstand the nature of that fulfilment.
Recent interventions from the Holy See, which have not hesitated to condemn injustice wherever it occurs, are a useful reminder that the Church does not grant any nation a blank cheque. Nor should she. Christian moral judgement cannot be suspended in the face of political expediency, however strong the temptation may be to align theology with contemporary alliances.
To isolate Our Lord’s Jewishness from this wider context—whether to deny it, or more perniciously, to instrumentalise it for political ends—is to miss the point entirely.
The question is not whether Christ belonged to a particular people. It is whether we belong to Him.
