Why Do So Many Jewish People Reject the New Testament?

3410 Views 2 min Aug 2, 2023

Jewish Outreach, Modern Israel, Theology

So, why do most Jewish people reject the New Testament as part of Scripture? It's complicated. But Director Nic Lesmeister with Gateway Center for Israel gives us a brief summary of three historic and religious reasons for this Jewish rejection.

Video Transcript

Something that a lot of people wonder about is why do so many Jewish people reject the New Testament as a part of the Bible?

There’s a couple key reasons for this. The first has to do more with history. The fact is, Jewish people for centuries were persecuted by believers in Jesus for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah. All throughout the European history, through the Middle Ages into the late 18th and 19th centuries, Jews were forced to convert to Christianity. They were told that they had killed Jesus. And so why would you as a Jewish person want to believe that the New Testament, which was written largely by Jewish writers, was actually a legitimate Jewish book and part of the Bible? There’s too many wounds there. So there’s a historic reason why the Jewish people reject the New Testament.

Second is more of a religious reason, and that is that after Jesus ascended to heaven, and the body of believers began to grow and become what is now known as the Gentile Christian Church, the Christian community and the Jewish community began to separate on what they believed was the divine revelation of God. Now, the Christian community went with the writings of the apostles in the New Testament and the gospel writings as the word of God. The Jewish community moved into the study of the Torah and the rabbinic understanding of what the Bible says. This became their sacred text. So we had two groups of people going in different directions, and they went in that different direction for a long time.

The last reason that the Jewish people largely reject the New Testament as God’s word is they don’t know it’s Jewish. It’s as simple as that. I can’t tell you how many Jewish people that I have met that have said they finally started to read the New Testament, and they had the astonishing revelation that all of the characters and the writers were Jewish. So many of the Jewish people today reject the New Testament just because they’ve never read it and they’ve been told to never read it. But once they read it, they realize this is a part of our story as a Jewish people. So I hope these reasons help you to understand why the Jewish people en large have not accepted the New Testament as God’s word.