Reply to 'Jesus was not a Christian'

The letter by Rabbi (?) David Pollina "Jesus was not a Christian" (The Sunday Times, July 8) will hopefully cause an indignant outcry all over Catholic Malta!

I know Mr Pollina personally, because I lived next door to him for two months here in Malta. He calls himself a messianic Jew (you can find out what this means on the Internet). Messianic Jews or Messianics are essentially Jews that however believe that Jesus was the Messiah, promised in the Old Testament.

For them Jesus is also God, but the (one) God of Israel in the flesh, not God, the Son, as Christians believe. For them (as for Jews) there is no Holy Trinity! For them Jesus and his early followers were Jews and nothing but Jews! Messianics are neither Christians nor Jews, as we know them (they are not considered Jews by the State of Israel!).

One independent source gives the number of Messianics in the United States as 100,000 (Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, June 2006); Wikipedia says that in 1993 there were 350,000 adherents of Messianic Judaism worldwide.

In comparison Jehovah's Witnesses declare, as of August 2006, a membership of 6.7 million (Wikipedia). Now to Mr Pollina's letter. Let me cite at least some of his hair-raising assertions:

"The 'New Testament' is not necessary at all for salvation, everything is in the 'Old' alone!"

As proof Mr Pollina cites 2 Tim 3, 15 that speaks of the wisdom of the Holy Scriptures "that leads to salvation through faith". But he is leaving out precisely the point of the mentioned verse, because it says in a definitive way that "leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus!' Could Mr Pollina tell us where precisely the 'Old Testament' speaks about "faith in Christ Jesus"?

There was a "total lack of careful preservation" of the Scriptures of the early Church (Gospels, letters), "the New Testament' was only assembled as a unit in the third and fourth centuries", before then there were only "thousands of tiny scraps, which when assembled give over 300,000 variant textual readings!"

The Encyclopaedia Britannica (certainly not biased towards Catholic views) tells us something different: a) Justin Martyr (died c. 165) speaks about the Gospels being read in church services (from tiny scraps?). He quotes from the Gospels, Hebrews, the Pauline letters, 1 Peter and Acts; b) Irenaeus (Bishop of Lyon, end of second century) uses the four Gospels, 13 letters of Paul, 1 Peter, 1 and 2 John and Revelation; c) the so-called Muratorian Canon (list of authoritative writings) already contains, around the years 170-180, most of the books of the 'New Testament' - 22 out of 27! In effect we already have (according to Encyclopaedia Britannia) the "definitive formation of the canon (of the 'New Testament') in the second century"!

When the New Testament mentions the Holy Scriptures, it of course refers to the Old Testament (how could it be any different?), but in 2 Peter 3, 15 for example, the letters of Paul (or parts of them) are already compared to "other passages of the Scriptures"!

It is hard to imagine that there are "300,000 variant textual readings" concerning the New Testament, which consists of not even 200,000 words! Are there really for each word one different reading and a half? You wonder how one can make any sense out of it at all!

I would really like Mr Pollina to tell us more about the many historical claims that are provably false, which he finds in the Book of Hebrews! First of all: Hebrews is not a historical book! As examples of faith it cites many events and figures of the past, but it takes all its knowledge from the Old Testament so highly appreciated by Mr Pollina! If he has difficulties with the New Testament, because it won't fit into his mindset, that's his problem! But if he decides to quote it, he should at least do so correctly!

"Jesus never founded any new 'Church' or religion separate from Judaism!"

What about Mt 16, 18: "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church" (ekklesia in the original Greek), or Mt 28, 19 f.: "Go to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples: baptise them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you!"

It's all in Judaism? When exactly did the Jews start to baptise their children in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit?

The Jews circumcise their children, as far as I know (at least the boys). And so do the Messianics! Jews know (repeated) ritual immersions (for example, the one required after a woman's menstruation), but not a one-off baptism.

Why did Jesus, Stephen or James have to die in the first place, when they (according to Mr Pollina) preached nothing but Judaism? Why had Saul to convert, when he (as he himself states in Gal. 1,14) was already "ahead of most fellow-Jews in my practice of the Jewish religion"?

Why doesn't Mr Pollina mention circumcision? Is it too delicate a question? As I understand him, all true followers of Jesus would have to be circumcised and eat only 'clean' (kosher) food (e.g. no pork). The so-called 'Council of Apostles' (Acts 15) had to deal with precisely this question. In effect the assembly of Apostles (among them Peter) imposed none of these obligations! Listen to Paul in Gal 6, 15: "It does not matter at all whether or not one is circumcised"! (Similarly in Gal. 5, 6). Paul had Titus, one of his closest co-workers and addressee of one of his letters not circumcised! Paul, a Jew and nothing else up to his end?

"Were Peter to walk into a Catholic church, he would preach conversion to Judaism!"

At the first Christian Pentecost the people, troubled by the words of Peter, asked him and the Apostles anxiously: "What shall we do, brothers?" And Peter answered: "Each one of you must be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ!" (Acts 2, 38). Doesn't sound very Jewish, does it?

"None (of these, namely Jesus, Peter and Paul) would ever entertain pagan holidays like Christmas or Easter!"

But how can somebody with a Jewish background like Mr Pollina call Easter a pagan holiday? The Jewish Pesach or Passover and the Christian Easter are intimately linked. That starts already with their names (not to speak of their theological meaning). From Hebrew 'Pesach' derive the names for Easter in Greek and Latin, Pascha, and hence in the Romance languages: Paques (French), Pasqua (Italian) and Pascua (Spanish).

And even the date of the celebration of Christian Easter is related to the date of the Jewish Pesach. In the beginning, the Eastern Christians indeed celebrated Easter at exactly the 14th day of Nisan, the month of the Hebrew calendar, the day on which the Israelites were ordered to slaughter the paschal lambs. But then the Church decided that Easter was not to be celebrated on whatever day of the week, but (still in connection with the Pesach date) always on a Sunday, the day of Christ's resurrection, "the Lord's day" (Rev. 1, 10). Maybe that's what troubles Mr Pollina, that for us the holy day of the week is Sunday and not the Jewish Sabbath, but, sorry, Mr Pollina, we are Christians and no longer Jews!

Dear Catholics of Malta, don't allow anybody to lead you down the garden path! By now we have had enough of all these 'false prophets' with their strange ideas that come from overseas to teach us ignorant Christians or Europeans finally where the truth lies.

There are those like Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) who want to make us believe that the Church was lying to us all through the centuries or the others who tell us that these stupid Christians got it wrong right from the outset! In the United States there are today more than 30,000 different Christian denominations! Do we really need, in addition to that, also Jewish Christians or Christian Jews, to make the confusion complete?

But, dear Maltese Catholics, take these and other occasions as motives to reinvigorate your great Christian heritage, especially now, that the first son of your nation has been declared a saint!