Y'Shua by Moishe Rosen (1983, Paperback)

Y'shua: The Jewish Way to Say Jesus, a book by the Rev. Martin Rosen, founder of the Jews for Jesus missionary organization, is an excellent example of the scripture-twisting and general misuse of source material that underlies missionary Christianity. Its author's selective use of rabbinic sources and B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) in chronological dating is a facade behind which he presents the Jews for Jesus organization's ersatz Jewishness. Meant to be used in witnessing to Jewish people in a lucid, relaxed style, it aims to disarm the Jewish reader, attempting to impress him with the supposed Jewish character of this volume. Rosen's work is a thinly veiled attempt to spread the Christian message by the use of unethical manipulation of the basic principles of scholarship. Y'shua is a poorly researched rehashing of the familiar missionary distortions of the Bible and the New Testament. Comments will be confined to a sampling of the egregious errors endemic to this work. For a thorough study of the biblical and New Testament passages Rosen discusses consult Gerald Sigal, The Jew and the Christian Missionary.

Rosen begins with a number of inconsistencies. For example, he writes, "When Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian armies captured Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., the Temple was destroyed and the monarchy was swept away. When the exiles finally returned to the land some seventy years later, they were subjects of a new empire, that of the Persians."1 According to Rosen's calculations, the year of the return is 516 B.C.E. (586 B.C.E.-70 years=516 B.C.E.) (p. 2). Yet, on the following page he states, "During the three centuries between the return of the exiles from Babylonia (538 B.C.E.) and the conquest of Antiochus III (201-199 B.C.E). . . ."2 Here he gives the year of the return from Babylonia as 538 B.C.E., not 516 B.C.E. Subsequently, Rosen states, "[Pompey] . . . entered and occupied Jerusalem in 63 B.C.E. No independent Jewish state was to exist again in this territory for 2,011 years."3 Aside from the minor error that one year must be deducted because there is no zero year between 1 B C.E. and 1 C.E. an independent Jewish state existed in Judah from 132-135 C.E. These inaccuracies and inconsistencies are harbingers of the poor scholarship found throughout this work.

Many missionary-minded Gentile Christians exhibit a psychological need to consider themselves the spiritual Israel; they believe they have succeeded where the Jewish people have failed. They sometimes display their feelings by identifying with things of Jewish interest and nature. One may describe this phenomenon as Christian pseudo-Jewishness. Professional missionaries nurture Christian pseudo-Jewish aspirations and expressions because those so tendered help fill missionary coffers. They also see the emphasis on the supposed "Jewishness" of Christianity and its Gentile followers as a "culture cushion" for Jewish apostates entering the Christian spiritual world. Rosen attempts to lull his readers with the statement that, "The word 'Christian' . . . is equivalent to 'Messianist,' a follower of the Messiah. It becomes apparent that Gentiles who believe in Christ are really following a Jewish religion!"4

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