The Third Day: Outreach Judaism and Jesus

By Roger Garza

There is a reason why most analysts of biblical prophecy can't figure out how Christians and Jews can ever unite. The reason is that they are missing a piece of the prophetic puzzle. A piece that is so obvious I can only conclude that God hid it in plain sight, in the Scriptures - and is only now making it known to the world as a whole rather than just a select few. The fact is that both the Old Testament and the New Testament proclaim that in the last days, Gentiles and Jews will come together into one family and will together worship the One True God.

Most Jews assume that this will happen when Christians (and all other Gentiles), finally realize that they were wrong, when Christians finally realize that Jesus was not the Messiah, and convert to Judaism. Most Christians assume that this will happen when Jews finally realize that they were wrong, accept Jesus as the Messiah, and convert to Christianity. At this point in history, either alternative seems highly unlikely.

But what if there is a third alternative - one that lets Jews remain Jewish, Christians remain Christian, and yet puts us all into one united family of God? In this book you will learn:

* How the same type of scholarship that is used to refute Christianity refutes Judaism also, and the same type of scholarship used to support Judaism supports Christianity as well.

* How the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation do not contradict Jewish monotheism as defined in the Old Testament.

* How the completeness and finality of Old Testament Law can be reconciled with the apparently contradictory statement that Christ has inaugurated a better Covenant (Hebrews 8:6)

It is my belief that once the ideas proposed in this book are received and applied, the world will awaken from the nearly 2,000 year old nightmare of fear and mistrust between Christians and Jews, and our mutual thirst for the arrival of the Messianic Age will finally be quenched.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638441502

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THE THIRD DAY

Outreach Judaism and Jesus

ROGER GARZA

ISBN 978-1-63844-149-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63844-150-2 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Roger Garza

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

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Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Part 1

Personal Testimony

In the book of Isaiah, God states that he can predict the future.

Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose. (Isaiah 46:9–10)

Set forth your case, says the Lord; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified. (Isaiah 41:21–23)

God indicates that only he can reliably tell the future. God says that his ability to predict the future distinguishes him from false gods.

When I was very young, about twelve or thirteen years old, I had a dream. I was looking out of the front window of my parent’s house, and a red-haired monster—a demon of some kind—came walking up the driveway. I was terrified. Then I saw the back of my dad’s head; it was as if he had gone out the front door and stood in front of the thing. When that happened, it turned and walked away. I had been saved. I knew I was dreaming only because there was a small tree on the right side of the driveway that wasn’t there in actual life. Like other dreams, it came and went, but it was one of several that made such an impression on me that I remembered it for a long time.

About three years later, when I was sixteen years old, an older student at school invited me to Bahai studies held off-campus by a teacher at my school. I enjoyed the attention, and I went to several of these meetings out of curiosity. One day, the older student arrived in a car in front of my house to take me to a meeting, but this time, his normally carefully combed red hair was unwashed and wild-looking. He had been smoking something…or so it seemed, and the feeling in my stomach told me I had seen him long before. My dad didn’t like his looks, and he ran out the front door and told my friend that I wasn’t coming to that meeting or any more meetings. My friend turned and walked back to the car.

A thrill of memory shot through my body. It felt a little like déjà vu, but it wasn’t because I knew I had dreamed it before. It all came back to me. I was looking out the same window. My dad went out the same door. My friend came up the same driveway, faced my dad in the same position as the demon in the dream. Even the little tree to the right of the driveway was now there; it had been planted about two years before and was now the same size as the tree in the dream.

So I honored my dad’s words and went to no more Bahai study groups.

About fifteen years after that experience, I was living in an apartment with another friend. One evening, while I was alone in the apartment, I began to wonder how nice it would be if the Lord sent me some kind of a sign to bolster my faith. I had heard that I wasn’t supposed to desire that, so I didn’t turn my wish into an actual request.

A day or two later, I had a dream in which someone had shot my friend. In the dream, I found myself in some kind of a hallway that I thought was either a hospital corridor or a waiting area inside of a police station, and I heard a voice say, David’s been shot. Whether he was dead or not, I didn’t know. I remember that I felt a deep sorrow in the pit of my stomach.

The next day, I told David about the dream. He listened to me, but as far as I could tell, he didn’t think much of it. However, a night or two after that, someone pulled a gun on him. David was a skilled martial artist, and he knocked the gun out of the man’s hand and put him on the ground. Then he turned to walk away. But he made a big mistake; he forgot to secure the gun. The man on the ground was not knocked out, or if he were, he quickly regained consciousness, and he grabbed the gun again and started firing, still at close range. David ran off, and amazingly all the bullets missed. David said he was amazed because it was at point-blank range.

When I found out about that, I immediately remembered the dream and wondered. But I had forgotten about my earlier desire for more faith. When I remembered that a day or two later, I was even more amazed because the whole thing now seemed to have been orchestrated by some higher power, someone who could respond to my request, and who could respond by accurately predicting the future actions of freewill creatures and then download that future information into my dream.

In the early 1980s, I had experiences of a different kind. One night, while I walked through the town in prayer, I saw a beautiful light that identified itself as God. Words are extremely insufficient to describe this incredible experience.

Around the same time, I was living in an apartment with still another friend (Jonathan), and I used to work late at night and then sleep into the day. Jonathan, on the other hand, would sleep at night and work during the day. One day, while I was sleeping, I had a dream in which I saw an open Bible (a Protestant Christian Bible) with shining golden words. But the words weren’t on the pages. They were suspended in space, inside of a cavity in the middle of the Bible…a hole with edges that glowed like the orange parts of a smoldering leaf or paper. Within that hole were the shining golden sentences suspended in the air.

The clearest words were from Revelation 1:17, which was written by John the Apostle when he saw Jesus risen from the dead, and the words said: When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. There seemed to be several other golden sentences in there as well that said about the same thing. In retrospect, I believe those sentences were a combination of the places where Daniel fell down at the feet of an angel (but doesn’t explicitly say as though dead) and where God told Moses that if he saw his face, he would die because no one can see God and live. None of these sentences were written in English, but somehow I knew what they said.

I woke up from sleep, and a little later, Jon came home. He was all excited and told me that while he was at work, the Scripture kept coming into his mind that when John the Apostle saw Jesus, he fell at his feet as though dead. He said something to the effect that the incredible power of the Lord was so great that I couldn’t help but tell the other workers about it.

To make a long story short, someone with the power to enter into my thoughts and dreams had presented himself to me as both the Jesus of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament.

How can I explain these experiences? There certainly seems to be someone out there who transcends my understanding of the natural world. Someone who can both read my mind and drop thoughts into it and then produce effects in the natural world that correspond to the ideas I have in my mind. Someone who can predict the future accurately, even when the outcome is contingent on the uncertain direction of future choices. This was either the God of the Bible or someone who wraps himself in the appearance of God.

At the beginning of this chapter, I quoted from biblical passages, which indicate that only God can predict the future. Therefore, I see no logical or safe alternative to accepting the experiences I have just described as messages from God to me. I do not believe he was leading me astray. At the very least, I believe he wanted me to present this message to you in just this form.

Some may wonder about the fact that the world is full of many personal testimonies, including many more amazing sounding than mine. How can I say mine are for real but not the others that conflict with it? All I can say to this is that the only testimony I know from direct experience is my own. I can’t account for all the other stories. Some of them may be lies. Others may be true but not really in conflict with mine once all the facts are known.

This is my testimony to you, and this is why I believe Psalm 121:5–8 gives those who believe a sure and imperishable promise, The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and for evermore.

Roger Garza

Introduction

In the early 2000s, I saw a television ad that invited any who were interested to visit a group of people who defined themselves as Messianic Jews. I began to attend some of their meetings, and I found the visits interesting, especially in the small group studies. During that time, I showed the congregation leader some things I had written on various topics. He seemed to like my writing, and he introduced me to an article by Rabbi Tovia Singer about alleged contradictions in the crucifixion accounts in the Gospels and asked me if I would write a response to it. Well, here it is…almost twenty years later than I originally intended to respond. This lateness is because my answer to that article grew into a response to the entire Let’s Get Biblical series.

Tovia Singer founded Outreach Judaism to counter the efforts of fundamentalist Christian groups and cults who specifically target Jews for conversion. I do not propose to defend the tactics or beliefs of all of these groups; I will only defend my own views.

I believe that both the Tanakh (which we Christians call the Old Testament) and the New Testament are the word of God to man. I also have respect for the oral traditions of Christianity and Judaism and consider them extremely valuable. But my respect for oral tradition, whether Jewish or Christian, is tempered with a suspicion that they are not as trustworthy as the written Scriptures. That suspicion grows exponentially stronger the longer those traditions are claimed to have remained oral only.

As a Christian, I approve of evangelism because Jesus told his followers to go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you (Matthew 28:19–20). However, I hold that the New Testament implies there should be a difference between Christian evangelism to all the other nations and the proper Christian approach to Jews.

Judaism is the only religion on earth whose Sacred Scriptures are referred to by Jesus as 100 percent true. Our Christian Scriptures also assure us that the Tanakh (called sacred writing in 2 Timothy 3:15) is able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. And the New Testament explicitly stated that those who really believe Moses would believe Jesus as well (John 5:46). Since this is so, no Christian should ever worry about a Jew who turns to Torah study, for the New Testament gives us every reason to think that following the Torah will lead him to salvation. I know that at this point in history, the evidence for what Jesus said in John 5:46 is mixed at best, but time will tell, as the Scripture says, The day will disclose it (1 Corinthians 3:13).

Because of this, I have no problem with that aspect of Rabbi Singer’s ministry, which concentrates on encouraging Jews to follow the Torah. However, I think he is making a serious mistake in thinking he must discredit Christianity to defend Judaism. First of all, I see little evidence in his writings that he has ever seriously considered the possibility that apparently contradictory aspects of Judaism and Christianity are only apparent but not real. In this work, I will try to offer some possible ways in which both religions could be true. I believe that at least some of what has been historically thought of as contradictions between Christianity and Judaism could instead be compatible parts of a greater and ultimately consistent whole. Put another way, Christianity and Judaism could both have been built on top of a common foundation that both have deviated from in various ways.

Now I want to make it clear that I claim no expertise in either Hebrew or Greek, though I do have access to people who do, and in some places, I received their advice in writing this book. However, I firmly believe that there are many people who make contradictory claims about what the Bible says based on their claim to have expertise in these languages, and it is quite difficult for the average reader or net surfer to know whether they really are experts or just imitators. Or in some cases, they might be real experts but also have a preconceived theology that prejudices their analysis to the point where they are not being objective.

Therefore, one of my goals in this book is to ferret out the arguments that can be made and understood in plain English. Because there are so many translations of the Bible, most of which are now online, it is within our power as average readers to look at many of the claims made by Rabbi Singer and judge them purely on the basis of what he has asserted in English. I will, therefore, be using logic a lot and linguistic analysis only a little.

In these pages, I usually do not quote R. Singer directly but instead give my own sense of his words. This work has two parts, but they do not correspond to the two parts of Let’s Get Biblical 1 and 2. Instead, Part 1 is my response to various articles and videos of R. Singer that can be found online, and Part 2 of my work is a more direct response to both volumes 1 and 2 of Let’s Get Biblical.

1

Four Hundred Thousand Variants in the NT Greek Manuscript

The following question was sent to Rabbi Singer:

You stated that there are almost 6,000 Greek NT (New Testament) manuscripts (around 5778 copies). Among them are 400,000 variants of differences, while there are only 139,000 words in the NT. However, Prof. Bruce Metzger wrote that the NT is 95 percent reliable when compared to the original manuscript of the New Testament. (https://outreachjudaism.org/400000-variants-in-the-nt-greek-manuscript/)

My summary of Rabbi Singer’s answer:

Bruce Metzger was considered to be one of the best modern textual critics of the New Testament. You must read his work for yourself to fully understand him.

There are almost 6,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in existence. No one knows how many errors there are among these copies, but the number is estimated to be about 400,000. There are many more differences between these manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Although nine out of ten of these mistakes are just scribal errors, that only shows that the ancient scribes make mistakes just like we do. However, textual critics believe they can reconstruct most of these mistakes. However, whether or not they can do this, we can never be sure whether they match the original books of the New Testament because they are lost!

Later copies of the New Testament are more uniform because they were copied by trained scribes. We must remember that 90 percent of the contradictions in the New Testament documents are not significant; that means about 360,000 mistakes are unimportant. But that leaves 40,000 significant errors, errors which are extremely important and which have important implications for Christian theology.

Would God allow his Holy Book to have all of these mistakes? If the New Testament is indeed from God, wouldn’t he protect the text from errors? In fact, God did just that but not with the New Testament. The Torah, which has 304,805 letters, has been preserved exactly the same; no changes have occurred in it. In contrast, the 139,000 words in the New Testament are riddled with errors.

Rabbi Singer has a double standard of how to judge whether a text is from God or not. He uses one standard to judge the Torah and another to judge the New Testament. If we use the same standard to evaluate both texts, we get vastly different results than what the rabbi thinks he finds. The same kinds of texts the Rabbi calls errors in the New Testament are also found in the Old Testament; this will become increasingly clear to the reader as we get further in to this study.

The rabbi states that no one has the originals of the New Testament books, but by the same token, no one has the originals of the Torah either. Further, we are much closer to having originals of the New Testament than we are to have originals of the Torah. The earliest fragments of the Torah are some Silver Scroll Amulets (the Ketef Hinnom Amulets), which appear to contain Numbers 6:24–26. They are believed to date from the late seventh or early sixth century BC, at least six hundred years after Moses is believed to have written down the Torah.

In contrast, even most liberal scholars concede that the earliest fragments of New Testament writings are within one hundred years of their composition (from a manuscript known as P52, a fragment of John’s gospel dating from around AD 125). I would argue that some evidence is even earlier. Consider the following quotation from David D. Flowers:

The apostle Paul passes along an early creedal statement about Jesus, For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born (1 Corinthians 15:3–8 NIV).

Flowers goes on to say, James D. G. Dunn [a British New Testament scholar] has written that scholars can be ‘entirely confident’ that this tradition was formulated within months of Jesus’s death (James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making, Vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003], 855, https://daviddflowers.com/tag/bruce-metzger/).

Some believe that Matthew, a tax collector who would have been an expert in shorthand, may have followed the tradition of the students of the rabbis and taken notes of Jesus’s words and actions on the same day that they occurred. Even other followers of Jesus may have done this (according to New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg in The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, InterVarsity Press: 2007, p. 54. This same thing is also implied in the words of Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, Eyewitness to Jesus, Doubleday: 1996, on pages 17–18).

A defender of the Torah places himself on very unstable grounds if he relies on the argument that the further in time one gets from having an original document, the less likely it is that the copies we now have accurately pass on what was in the original document. That argument is far more damaging to the Torah than it is to the New Testament. Virtually all of the New Testament still exists in manuscripts dating from within the first three hundred years after Christ. None of the Torah exists in any known documents until over five hundred years after Moses, and if we don’t count the silver amulets, nearly one thousand years after Moses.

Also interesting is the fact that Rabbi Singer invokes the works of New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger. You have to keep in mind that Bruce Metzger concluded from his research that overall, the New Testament is reliable and true. This is not the conclusion that Rabbi Singer finds, but he still uses Metzger’s name and reputation to support his theology. My question for Rabbi Singer is, if Metzger’s scholarship is so good, why do you reject his conclusions? Moreover, later on, the rabbi complains about Christians who invoke Jewish scholars in the same way that he himself invokes Metzger.

A large portion of Rabbi Singer’s arguments rest on three questionable assumptions:

He assumes that the Masoretic text of the Bible hasn’t changed at all because during the period for which we have textual evidence of it, the last two thousand years, the text has remained fairly stable. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t change during the one thousand-year period previous to that (for which there is little textual evidence). Furthermore, the textual evidence that does exist from the first one thousand years of the Tanakh does not support the theory of an unchanging Hebrew text, as we shall see a little later when we discuss such texts as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

He assumes that since the six thousand ancient manuscripts of the New Testament have some differences between them, many of these differences are errors, and therefore, the New Testament is full of errors. Of course, one can only prove these differences are errors if they are contradictory. But many differences in the textual variants of the New Testament can be shown to be complimentary pieces of a puzzle rather than a puzzling pile of contradictions. I will try my best to demonstrate this as we move on.

Related to the previous assumption is…

The assumption that in order to be from God, a text cannot have any variations whatsoever. In making this assumption, the rabbi thinks he is defending the Torah. But he is not because ancient Torah texts that predate Christianity have such variations.

Let’s look at some of the weaknesses of these assumptions.

First of all, the textual plurality found at Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls) shows that there were many more versions of the Hebrew Bible in circulation than just the Masoretic textual family prior to the first century. This means that the textual stability of the Masoretic text cannot be assumed to preexist the Christian period.

The online Theopedia says,

One extreme view was that the Septuagint provides a reasonably accurate record of an early Hebrew textual variant, now lost, that differed from the Masoretic text. The other extreme, favored by Jewish religious scholars, was that the differences were primarily due to intentional or accidental corruption of the Septuagint since its original translation from the Masoretic text. Modern scholars follow a path between these two views. (https://www.theopedia.com/septuagint)

Brennan Breed says,

Until the last few decades, most biblical scholars believed that the Masoretic biblical texts were, with some exceptions, the best witnesses to the most ancient Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians sometimes call the Old Testament).

Recent discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, suggest that there were several different versions of many biblical books in the Second Temple period. Some of these versions differed only slightly from each other, but some versions were very different… Scholars think that many OG [Old Greek] translators worked from early Hebrew versions of biblical books that were quite different from those versions that became the MT [Masoretic Text]. (http://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/bible-basics/what-are-the-earliest-versions-and-translations-of-the-bible.aspx, What Are the Earliest Versions and Translations of the Bible? by Brennan Breed, assistant professor at Columbia Theological Seminary)

Rabbi Singer treats the Torah as one single piece of work that is perfectly preserved by the Masoretic text. If I did the same kind of thing with the New Testament that the rabbi does with the Torah and the Tanakh, I might pick out one New Testament textual tradition and reject all the others and then claim that the whole New Testament is the same and has never changed.

Regarding general subjects of the LXX and the Masoretic text, Dr. Todd Daly states, "The authoritative scholarly treatment of all textual questions now is Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible" (third edition, Fortress, 2011).

Emanuel Tov suggests that the reason the Masoretic text is the only one associated with Judaism today is that after AD 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple), the Masoretic text was the only one left in Jewish hands. The Septuagint no longer exerted any influence in Jewish circles because it was now in Christian hands, the Samaritan Pentateuch was with the Samaritan community, and the Qumran scrolls were hidden in caves (Tov, p. 179).

Tov also writes, "The non-Masoretic witnesses are usually disregarded in the text of the editions [of the Hebrew Bible], in contrast to the practice followed in virtually all NT editions… There is less divergence among the various NT sources than that seen among the witnesses of the Hebrew-Aramaic Scripture [emphasis mine], but they still differ in many small details" (Tov, p. 341–42).

Rabbi Singer holds out Bruce Metzger as a prime representative of mainstream New Testament scholarship. However, it is quite obvious that the Rabbi’s views on the text of the Tanakh are not the same as a prime representative of Torah and Tanakh scholarship, Emanuel Tov. Contrary to Singer’s assertion that all 304,805 letters of the Torah are the same, Tov writes, From the seventeenth century, it was declared that 1,900 of the 6,000 differences between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Masoretic text involved readings common to the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint (Tov, p. 157).

Like the Masoretic text, the Samaritan Pentateuch is a Hebrew text of the Torah, written in an older script than the Babylonian square script of the Masoretic text. The Dead Sea Scrolls also contain other Hebrew texts from the Tanakh that differ from the Masoretic text and the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even more textual variations in the Torah have been discovered than those known before. The point here is that Rabbi Singer must get his idea that there are no variations in the text of the Torah from the assumption that all other Hebrew texts of the Torah, like those mentioned above, are not part of the sacred text. He eliminates all but one kind of text from his consideration of what constitutes the Hebrew Bible, then assumes it has never changed.

Third, speaking of the variations in early New Testament manuscripts, Singer considers that many of these variations are very important mistakes and asks, "Would God allow this to happen to the New Testament if this was his holy book that God wanted to pass on to future generations?"

Personally, I don’t think that variations in a sacred text necessarily constitute mistakes. They might instead be instances where God has arranged for mysteries to exist in the various manuscripts in order to hide revelations that the readers must dig for. (It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out Proverbs 25:2).

Even if there are traces of scribal inconsistency in our copies of the sacred manuscripts, that could be an instance of the justice of God. Remember that man originally lost his way by choosing to hear the words of a creature (the serpent) instead of the words of the Creator in the Garden of Eden. Is it not, therefore, fitting that man must now find his way back to salvation by digging through the words of creatures (scribes and translators) in order to find the treasure of the Creator’s words hidden inside? Is this not the way the justice of God tends to work? We followed the words of a creature, and that led us away from God, so now we must be satisfied with words delivered through creatures in order to return to God.

God allows the fingerprints of man to appear all over the copies of his Torah, the Tanakh, and the New Testament, but God makes sure that his unchanging message is still to be found in there despite the fickleness of human manuscript transmission.

However, there are a number of ways we can ferret out errors, and we can get closer to the original manuscripts by simply paying special attention to the areas where all the texts agree. Contrary to what Rabbi Singer implies, the areas in which early New Testament manuscripts agree are far more than areas where they seem to disagree. Most of the areas of apparent contradiction have plausible explanations, as we shall soon see.

I also question whether these mistakes are very serious since the most egregious examples Singer can think of to present in this article are not nearly as problematic as he implies. Let’s take a look at those textual variations in the New Testament that Singer thinks are so damaging to Christianity.

The Question of John 5:7

If 1 John 5:7–8 is a forgery, the doctrine of the Trinity would not be in the New Testament. But as scholarship has shown, 1 John 5:7­–8 is in fact a forgery!"

The doctrine of the Trinity can be found by a comparison of texts, which are clearly in the original Greek New Testament (see More on the Trinity and the Incarnation later in this book and see The Trinity Doctrine in a Nutshell in chapter 16 and look at the passages cited there). These passages are original and have nothing to do with 1 John 5:7–8.

The verse in question is 1 John 5:7 (King James Version), For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. Almost all scholars believe that these words were not written by John but were inserted much later, first appearing in Latin texts from the late fourth century. Only by a comedy of errors, including deliberate deception, did this verse find its way into the King James Version, the only translation that includes it. The lack of this verse does not affect any Christian doctrine, including the doctrine of the Trinity. It is not a problem for Christians at all. That the rabbi would include this well-known forgery as a problem for Christianity almost defies belief.

The Question of Mark 16:9–20

After his supposed resurrection, Jesus didn’t appear to any of his followers in the book of Mark as it existed originally. Mark 16:9–20 was added later by scribes who wanted the apostles to have encountered Jesus.

Rabbi Singer is wrong here. The Gospel of Mark explicitly says that Jesus had risen from the dead, and that he would appear to his followers (Mark 16:6–7); it just doesn’t list those appearances. Mark’s Gospel starts abruptly (no genealogy or birth story is recorded) and ends abruptly (no post-resurrection appearances listed). No one knows exactly why this is; one possibility is that the original ending of Mark was lost. Another is that Mark was not writing a biographical gospel like all the others, but instead a manual telling us how to live like Jesus lived when he walked the earth, in which case how Jesus came to be born or what he did after rising from the dead would be irrelevant. Also, the rabbi has produced no evidence that the ending added to Mark (Mark 16:9–20) does not convey accurate information. He only quotes scholars who point out that this was not the original ending, a fact that does not militate against the idea that the ending found in verses 9–20 is God-breathed scripture.

The Question of Luke 22:43–44

Did Jesus sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane? This detail, found in Luke 22:43–44, was actually inserted later into Luke’s earlier account by scribes worried that Jesus didn’t show enough passion.

First, let the reader note that this is not an extremely important textual variance but an extremely minor one. So what if there are two textual traditions of Luke, one that included Jesus’s bloody sweat and one that didn’t? Are any Christian doctrines affected? No. Some New Testament scholars (including Bruce Metzger) believe that Luke 22:43–44 is a piece of free-floating tradition that could have been inserted into any of the passion narratives (Philip W. Comfort, New Testament Text and Translation Commentary, Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. 2008, p. 234).

This bit of tradition could be completely accurate without having to have been originally attached to any particular Gospel account. Rabbi Singer’s