Did the Jews Really Reject Jesus?

Maybe not.

It's going on two thousand years since "the Jews" rejected Jesus. But wait! Weren't all the earliest followers Jews? And weren't nearly all the New Testament books written by Jews? Which Jews did reject Jesus? More importantly, which ones did not?

It's an interesting historical question, one I came across recently in an article in my favorite magazine, First Things. The magazine's editor Richard Neuhaus reviewed a book entitled Why the Jews Rejected Jesus by David Klinghoffer. He found the very title highly problematic and explains why.

Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire. That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including today’s State of Israel, while those in the diaspora were very much part of the establishment in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople. At one point, the book's author Klinghoffer acknowledges that, during the life of Jesus, only a minuscule minority of Jews either accepted or rejected Jesus, for the simple reason that most Jews had not heard of him.

Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians.

What if the great majority of Jews did not reject Jesus? That throws into question both the title of the book and, at least for me, an assumption I had about the early spread of Christianity. Neuhaus says that the question can be avoided only by the definitional sleight of hand of counting as Jews only those who rejected Jesus and continued to ally themselves with rabbinical Judaism’s account of the history of Israel (which Klinghoffer seems to do).

So there you have it. Most of the Jews in the early centuries of Christianity may well have come to believe in Jesus as their promised Messiah, leaving the old "Jews rejected Jesus" line in doubt. Or at least we're left with a historical number puzzle.

By the way, here're today's numbers: there're about 13 million Jews worldwide (compared with 6 million 2000 years ago). As for Christians, the estimate is that there are now 2 billion (Christians of all kinds). And 2000 years ago, there were -- let's see -- none.