Note from editor: I am blessed to be friends with David Nekrutman, one of the most powerful and knowledgeable bridges between Jews and Christians. Nekrutman received his MA in Biblical Literature in 2018 from Oral Roberts University. He is the first Orthodox Jewish person to graduate from a Spirit-filled theology program.
In a Facebook exchange, Nekrutman responded to Joshua Charles, a former Evangelical now turned Catholic whose podcast is gaining traction. Charles posted, “I think the worst and most pernicious form of “antisemitism” is refusing to tell the Jews the truth, calling them to salvation in Jesus Christ, and communion in His Catholic Church. Cowardice is always the subtlest form of hate.”
I highly recommend connecting with David as a guide to Jewish-Christian relations
The following is Nekrutman’s response, which, IMHO, is brilliant, encapsulating how Jews feel when being proselytized or having the “gospel preached” at them.
There is a profound misunderstanding at the heart of this argument—of Jewish history, Jewish agency, and, ironically, Catholic theology itself.
To equate the absence of Jewish proselytization with “antisemitism” is to turn history upside down.
Jews did not reject Christianity because we were uninformed. We knew exactly what Christianity claimed. For nearly two thousand years, Jewish communities lived under Christian civilization and were confronted—sometimes peacefully, often violently—with the demand to accept those claims.
Our ancestors did not need another explanation of the Gospel. They needed the freedom to remain Jews.
Forced disputations, the Inquisition, expulsions, blood libels, forced conversions, and other forms of coercion followed across Christian Europe. The historical record is not one of Jewish ignorance waiting for someone courageous enough to “reach” us.
It is something far more uncomfortable:
The Jews heard the message—and said no.
And sometimes they paid for that “no” with their homes, their livelihoods, their freedom, and their lives.
But there is an even deeper problem with this argument. It contradicts the very Catholic theology you claim to defend.
Since Nostra Aetate in 1965, the Catholic Church has undergone a profound theological reorientation in its relationship with the Jewish people. The Church rejected the idea that the Jewish people are simply a discarded covenantal relic and emphasized the continuing significance of God’s covenant with Israel.
In 2015, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable, explicitly stating: “The Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”
That is not an accidental omission. It reflects a deliberate theological posture: the Church can witness without treating the Jewish people as a failed religious project requiring institutional conversion efforts.
So calling restraint “antisemitism” gets the moral equation backward.
The Jewish refusal to convert is not evidence that Christians have failed to explain Christianity well enough.
Sometimes the most important act of interfaith respect is accepting that the other person has heard you—and has freely chosen a different covenantal path.
You cannot resurrect missionary triumphalism by dressing it up in the language of inclusion.
The Jewish people are not Christianity’s unfinished business. We are not a theological problem waiting to be solved.
We are a people who survived precisely because our ancestors refused to surrender their covenant—even when the cost of saying no was everything.
We heard you. We understood you. And we continue to say “no” and remain Jews.
When challenged by Charles, Nekrutman responded:
There is another question lurking behind this zeal that cannot be brushed aside:
Which Jesus, exactly, are you demanding the Jewish people accept?
Christendom is splintered into tens of thousands of denominations, sects, and competing theological frameworks—each claiming an exclusive monopoly on the truth, and many condemning the others to damnation. When a Christian steps forward to tell the Jewish people they “need Jesus,” the immediate, obvious question is: “whose Jesus?”
Are you presenting the Jesus of the Gospels—the 1st-century Galilean Jew who lived fully within the world of Torah, debated Halakha with the certain Pharisee leaders within the many movements of Judaism, and never once heard of the Council of Nicaea, the Papacy, or the Westminster Confession?
Or are you presenting a thoroughly Hellenized, Latinized, or Americanized construct? Are you asking us to accept the Jesus of Trent, the Jesus of the Reformation, the Jesus of modern evangelical altar calls, or the Jesus whose cross adorned the banners of Crusaders butchering our ancestors in Mainz and Worms?
That distinction matters. You cannot hand us a theological Rorschach test, baptize it with two millennia of accrued Church dogmatics, and then act shocked when Jews refuse to see our own God in it.
The issue is not whether Christians feel bound by a “Great Commission.” That is an internal Christian premise. The issue is the staggering blindness of aiming that commission at the Jewish people as if we are blank slates living in a vacuum, rather than a people with a two-thousand-year memory of what has been done to us “in that exact name”.
When two millennia of Christian history feature forced baptisms, yellow badges, ghetto walls, expulsions, and the pyre—all orchestrated by institutional authorities invoking the name of Christ—you forfeit the luxury of saying, “You just need to hear Jesus.”
To turn around today, look at that unbroken record of survival against Christian coercion, and declare that “failing” to target Jews for conversion is “the worst form of antisemitism” is a moral and intellectual perversion. It takes actual antisemitism—an ideology that drenched the earth in Jewish blood—and hijacks its vocabulary to castigate Christians who simply possess the humility to practice theological restraint.
Since Nostra Aetate, where on earth is that the teaching of the Catholic Church? Rome spent the last sixty years dismantling the toxic supersessionism that fueled centuries of anti-Judaism. It formally acknowledged that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is living, irrevocable, and unrevoked. It conceded that Judaism is not a superseded relic or a pagan void waiting to be conquered. The Catholic Church arrived at a mature, agonized theological posture: proclaiming Christ while explicitly renouncing targeted institutional campaigns to convert the Jews. That painful, unresolved tension is where serious adults begin the conversation.
You don’t get to bypass sixty years of Magisterial reflection with the simplistic, inherited reflexes of street-corner revivalism…especially on Facebook.The question isn’t, “Why aren’t Catholics preaching to Jews?” The question is: “What does Catholic witness actually mean when facing the very people who gave you your Scriptures, your God, and your Messiah—and who paid in blood for refusing to trade Sinai for Rome?”
Answering that requires vastly more than missionary arrogance disguised as “love.” It requires historical honesty, doctrinal sobriety, and the basic decency to recognize that the Jewish people have our own eternal covenant with the Creator—and we are not asking for your permission to keep it.
As an Orthodox Jew who has dedicated more than 25 years to Jewish-Christian relations, I cannot stay silent on Joshua Charles’s recent post claiming that failing to share Jesus to Jews is “the worst form of antisemitism.” Dropping that take on Yom Kippur only added insult to injury.
I don’t need a lecture on the Great Commission; I know Christian theology well, and so do my people. I also consider Joshua a personal friend, despite our fundamental disagreements over Jesus. But friendship doesn’t excuse reckless rhetoric. Joshua knows his influence is rising in Catholic circles, and he knows exactly what buttons he is pushing.
What makes this dangerous is that hundreds of well-meaning Catholics will cheer him on without understanding the radioactive history behind those words—or the fact that the post-Vatican II Church itself explicitly repudiates targeted proselytization of the Jewish people. Using a massive platform to feed cheap revivalist zeal isn’t courage; it’s irresponsible.
I highly recommend connecting with David as a guide to Jewish-Christian relations
David Nekrutman
https://www.facebook.com/david.nekrutman
www.theisaiahprojects.com
This article first appeared on Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz’s Substack.
