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→ 21 March 2021
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Israeli archeologists discover fragments of Dead Sea scrolls from 2nd century | Stuff

Israeli archaeologists have discovered of dozens of new Dead Sea Scroll fragments bearing a biblical text found in a desert cave, and believed hidden during a Jewish revolt against Rome nearly 1900 years ago.

The fragments of parchment bear lines of Greek text from the books of Zechariah and Nahum and have been dated around the 1st century AD based on the writing style, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which announced the discovery on Tuesday.

They are the first new scrolls found in archaeological excavations in the desert south of Jerusalem in 60 years.

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→ 5 November 2020
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Christchurch: New Hebrew Roots Bible Study

Hi Christchurch Folk, there is a new bible study that has started up which explores the Hebrew roots of the bible both Old and New Testaments.

Meeting on Wednesdays, well-researched and thought-provoking, this study program will give you access to many useful resources.

For more details, contact our secretary Rebecca Marchand: rebecca.marchand@nzfoi.org.

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→ 23 April 2020
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Outrage Greets Danish Lutheran Group’s Rewrite of Bible to Omit Word ‘Israel’ | Algemeiner

NZFOI: Disturbing…

The news that a Danish Lutheran group had rewritten the Bible in order to omit the word “Israel” has been greeted by outrage, with critics calling it a “surreal revision” and a gift to “Jew-haters and Israel-bashers.”

The Danish Bible Society’s translation of the New Testament refrains from using the word “Israel” and instead substitutes “Jews” and variations thereof — such as “land of the Jews” for “land of Israel.”

The words “Jews” and “Israel” both appear in the original text of the Bible as separate and distinct words.

The group claimed the move was to avoid identifying ancient Israel with today’s State of Israel, although other ancient names with modern equivalents, such as “Egypt,” are not omitted.

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→ 25 February 2020
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Black Hebrew Israelites behind attacks in Jersey City and Monsey | Jerusalem Post

NZFOI: Last Sunday, Rebecca Marchand gave a briefing on the December anti-Semitic attacks in Jersey City and Monsey. For many attendees this was the first time they had heard of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, or even that there were anti-Semitic sentiments amongst African-Americans for that matter. More disturbingly, the philosophies of the BHI resembles closely the philosophies of the British Israelite Movements and the modern Christian doctrine of Supersessionism. We should also add that though Supersessionism is commonly held amongst Christians, many oppose it. This article provides a disturbing briefing on BHI.

The Jersey City murders are the culmination of years of incitement against Jews. But the perpetrators in that case were themselves minorities from the African American community. The perpetrators have been identified as coming from an extremist religious group called Black Hebrew Israelites, making them a minority of a minority. The perpetrators are seen as a “militant” fringe within that minority.

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→ 26 July 2019
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Is Jesus Good for the Jews? | Wall St Journal

NZFOI: A particularly relevant and timely piece, after Golriz Ghahraman’s recent allegations that Jesus was a “Palestinian refugee.”

Was Jesus a Jew? The idea shouldn’t be controversial. Yet there have been plenty of attempts to challenge his connection to Judaism. Dissociating Jesus from his Jewishness has a dark history that continues to poison discourse today.

In the early 20th century, the anti-Semitic and racist German-British philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain argued that while Judaism provided the religious background for Jesus, he “had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins.” The Nazis picked up on this thread. As Hitler consolidated power, German theologians insisted that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan, descended from Galilean gentiles.

In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has sought to sever Jesus’ religion from his nationality or ethnicity. In a 2014 Christmas message, Mr. Abbas called Jesus “a Palestinian messenger of love, justice and peace.” This remains a common refrain from anti-Israel activists.

Sometimes this rhetoric is aimed at erasing Judaism from the religious and moral history of Western civilization. Other times it’s an attempt to undercut Jewish appeals to a uniquely ancient relationship with the land of Israel. Either way, these objections place Jews in a complicated position.

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→ 14 May 2019
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Bless Israel NZ 2019 Video Available

Nations Bless Israel held their nationwide event last Sunday. 

Around sixty communities from all over New Zealand connected in to collectively participate in the event via a livestream.  H E Ambassador Gerberg and Rt Hon Alfred Ngaro attended the event. 

Since its first event two years ago, the movement has started extended its reach overseas, with events planned in seven other countries.

For those unable to attend, the event can be viewed by clicking this link. 

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→ 25 December 2018
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Christians living in Israel | J-Wire

The Christian population grew in 2017  by 2.2%, compared with 1.4% in the previous year.

The majority (77.7%) of the country’s Christian population are Arab (133,000) with Arab Christians constituting 7.3% of the total Arab population in Israel

Nearly one quarter (22.3%) of the Christian population in Israel are non-Arab Christians – 38.3 thousand, most of them immigrated to Israel with Jewish family members under the Law of Return (including their children born in Israel) since the 1990s.

Most of the Arab Christian population  (70.6 percent) live in the northern part of Israel mostly in  Nazareth (22.1 thousand) and Haifa (15,800). Around 9.6% of the Christian Arab population (12,600) live in the Jerusalem district.

The geographical distribution of non-Arab Christian population differs from that of the Arab Christians: 40.9% live in the Tel Aviv and Central Districts, 33.8% in the Northern District and Haifa District. There are 4,000 Christians in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, 3,700 in Haifa 3.7 and 3,200 in  Jerusalem.

According to the Tourism Ministry, Israel welcomed some 150,000 Christians for the festive season to celebrate Christmas in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and to spend the Christmas period in the Holy Land, closing out a record year for tourism in Israel with almost  4 million people entering the country on tourist visas.

In 2018 more than half of the tourists who visited Israel were Christian, making a  significant contribution to incoming tourism kindly visit us
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→ 2 November 2018
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Mike Pence’s Messianic problem | World Israel News

Jonathan S Tobin

It was the sort of unforced error that was the last thing the Trump administration needed in a week during which its liberal critics have been trying to place blame for the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue on the president.

Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to appear at Republican campaign rally in Michigan. After Saturday’s horrific attack on the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha Synagogue that left 11 Jewish worshipers dead, the vice president’s office asked that the local organizers also invite a rabbi to offer a prayer remembering the victims. But while that request showed sensitivity to a national tragedy, what followed came back to bite the veep in a big way.

The problem was that as far as the Jewish community is concerned, Loren Jacobs — the “rabbi” who was asked to speak at the rally — isn’t Jewish.

Jacobs was there representing the very-Jewish sounding Congregation Shema Yisrael in suburban Detroit. But when he spoke in condemnation of the anti-Semitic attack, he did so by invoking the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and Father of my Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and Father, too.”

Far from being a representative of the Jewish community, Jacobs is a Christian, albeit the pastor of a Messianic Jewish church that bills itself on its website as being “the same thing” as Christianity, but “expressed within the Jewish heritage.”

But while many Christians may see this as somehow being a variant of Judaism, Jews see it very differently. In a world in which Jews are bitterly divided along denominational, ideological and political lines, the one thing almost of them agrees on is that anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus is not a Jew.

More to the point, most Jews see “Messianic” sects that bill themselves as being either a form of Judaism or rooted in Jewish traditions as a standing insult, if not a threat, to their faith and identity.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS — Jewish News Syndicate.  His opinion columns appear there on a daily basis. He is also a contributing writer for National Review, a conservative magazine of opinion and ideas, a columnist for the New York Post, a contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Haaretz, a columnist for the New York Jewish Week, a contributor to the Gatestone Institute and to the Israeli magazine, MiDA.

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→ 17 October 2018
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Why You Should Know about—and Read—Jacob Neusner | Logos.com

Jacob Neusner

NZFOI receives no commissions for any product sales through this article.  We partly reproduce it, here merely to raise awareness of Neusner’s writings amongst our readers who may never have heard of him.  

If you don’t know who Jacob Neusner is, it’s time to bone up. Apart from his exceptional prolific publishing output (and that’s an understatement; see point one below), he was known both for his highly acerbic nature to some and his deeply affectionate loyalty to others. He was also, as my final point suggests, the consummate scholar, but not in the way you’d expect.

Neusner was one of those incredibly brilliant individuals who always seem destined to create havoc through their combination of ingenuity, intellect, and industriousness. Neusner possessed all three. He related how he was never intellectually challenged in his youth until he encountered the Talmud in October 1954. Although raised Jewish, he began learning Hebrew much later than his Jewish peers. Still, he ended up resetting the paradigm for the study of Judaism, from its earlier apologetic form to rigorous critical inquiry through the use of academic methods.

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→ 17 October 2018
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The similarities between Jewish and Christian biblical commentaries | CJN

Maimonides in Cordoba

Jewish life in Europe in the Middle Ages was often precarious. Medieval Jews were expelled from England, France, Spain and Portugal. They were forced to participate in public disputations that were usually rigged – they had to defend Judaism without being accused of blasphemy against Christian doctrines. They were accused of and punished for such fabricated crimes as ritual murder and host desecration. Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land to kill Muslim “infidels” often practised on Jewish infidels along the way, decimating a number of Jewish communities.

But on a day-to-day basis, Jews, the only tolerated minority in medieval Christendom, had many rights, including the right of self-government.  In recent generations scholars, have also highlighted the intellectual connections between medieval Jews and Christians, especially in the area of Bible commentary.

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