What this leaves is the question of Jesus himself. The focal point of the film is the central conundrum, as Scorcese puts it, of Christianity… having a central figure who is at once completely human and completely divine. God manifested as man, and man manifested as God. I’ve recently been in friendly debate about this issue with a very good friend of mine who is a devout Christian. He cannot understand why I can so easily reject Jesus as Christ, as God, and I cannot accept a God who is not wholly beyond the physical realm. Judaism teaches that God is inconcievable and invisible. God can only really be spoken about in metaphoric terms, and while we believe in prophets and messengers who can communicate the will of God, but it is contrary to and incompatiple with Judaism to believe that a man can embody God, when man cannot even see God and live.

Now, Judaism of course does not have a single unified party line when it comes to theology. We tend to talk more about what God is not rather than what God is, which leaves the question open to individual interpretation. This is a major issue I’ve always had with Christianity, at least with most of the Christians I’ve known. Theology isn’t personal. Religion becomes deeply personal because it’s all about your personal relationship to Jesus Christ and there aren’t the same sorts of laws and rituals that comprise Judaism. But the question in Christianity always seems to come down to “Do you believe in God?” rather than “What do you believe God is?” Most of the folks I know who reject “organized religion” do so because they’ve moved past the ability to accept a single fixed notion of “God The Father” sitting on His throne in heaven, and as far as Christianity goes, once you question God, what is there to hold on to? All there is is faith.

Which brings me to another point about the whole concept of Christianity: it’s all got to be based on pure faith and faith alone. Jesus performed Miracles which were witnessed by a few people, who told other people who told other people. A few people who heard these stories wrote them down. An authoritative body weeded through them and chose the four versions that matched most closely what they believed to be the Truth and conveyed what they believed to be the true meaning of the story. Adherents were then sent world-wide to make others believe the story, and to believe that their religion, based on people and places and events that these people had never seen or heard of, what the only way to reach The Kingdom of Heaven. What proof did they bring? A book telling a story, their own faith, and sometimes weapons.

I’m not going to say that the basis of Judaism isn’t euqally dubious. It is similarly based on a book of stories detailing events that we haven’t seen or experienced directly. The differences, however, are as follows:

1. Our central revelatory event “happened” before all of the children of Israel. Our “proof” is the tradition, which is passed down from generation to generation, supposedly witnessed by all of our ancestors, not by a few who then spread the word. Given that this is still not evidence the difference is purely philosophical, but it is significant. This is something that I’ll have to come back to in order to elaborate.

2. The religion doesn’t demand faith in the book. Rather, it demands engagement, study, interpretation, thought. Which brings me to…

3. The religion itself is merely the structure. The theology is something that you have to help to fill in on a personal and a community level. There are relatively few assertions that Judaism makes about God because we don’t believe that God is something that can be fully understood. But rather than dismiss it as “mystery” we insist on engaging and struggling with the question. Because we are Yisrael, the people who struggles with God.

What it has always come down to with regards to the question of why I won’t accept Christ is simply, well, why should I? I have no reason to believe that this one rabbi who lived about 2000 years ago in an era of oppression and hopelessness where preachers and prophets and messiahs were crawling from the woodwork was all of a sudden not only The Messiah (who incidentally did not bring about the End Of Days and the World To Come) but was, in fact, God. I have a religion and I have my own ever-evolving theological sense, and quite frankly, Christianity flies in the face of it.

To Be Continued…