Blindsided: A Jewish Agnostic Finds the Messiah by Stephen Katz

Author:Stephen Katz [Katz, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jews for Jesus.
ISBN: 9781881022794
Google: JnlUtwAACAAJ
Publisher: Purple Pomegranate
Published: 2006-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

The minister ended our interview with a challenge. “Stephen,” he said, “the only way for you to know if Jesus was the Messiah, is to ask him into your life. I can tell you that if you do that, you will know the answer one way or the other. If he is just a myth, your life won’t change at all. But if he is who he claimed to be—the Messiah of Israel—then your life will begin to change and you’ll know it’s true.” His challenge made immediate sense to me, but I didn’t take him up on it. First of all, I’m naturally cautious and this sounded like a huge, potentially life-changing step. But there was something working on a deeper level. I wasn’t the greatest Jewish kid in the world, but I was Jewish enough to know one thing: Jesus wasn’t for me; he wasn’t for my people. He may be for anybody else, but he’s not for the Jews.

Nevertheless, halfway through my research I was beginning to lean in the direction that it just might be true—that Jesus might actually be the Messiah.

I hadn’t heard anything about Jesus or the Messiah as a kid and now I was facing what seemed to be compelling reasons to believe he might be the one. The entire question of the Messiah was essentially Jewish, yet no one had talked about it as far as I could recall.

In Sunday school we learned the major Bible stories about the patriarchs and the twelve tribes of Israel, but there was absolutely no mention of the Messiah. I don’t know if anyone in my synagogue even expected a Messiah. Now, I had entered a new world. I found out that there is a huge amount of biblical material on the subject.

As I continued my research, it seemed that the Jewish scholars dealt with the text of key Messianic prophecies in such a manner so that they couldn’t possibly refer to Jesus. They would offer several possible explanations that often struck me as being more about who the Messiah was not than who he was or would be. To me, the Christian explanations of these passages were more reasonable. Being a novice to the text, and reading both sides, I asked myself which explanations made the most sense out of the actual text.

One of these passages was the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. I didn’t know much about Jesus, but from what I’d begun reading in the New Testament, it sounded like the events at the end of his life. It certainly didn’t sound like Israel, which is what most of the Jewish authors said. “We did not esteem him . . . he was wounded for our transgressions . . . the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The passage speaks of one who dies for “our” sin and is buried. Yet after this occurs he “shall see the labor of his soul and be satisfied,” implying a return to life from the dead.

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