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Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s Sermon at Synagogue on Jewish Jesus Causes a Storm


Rabbi Stephen S. Wise gave this sermon in late December 1925 and it set off a storm of protests in Jewish communities.  Before you read the article, it is important for you to be aware of some of the accomplishments of Rabbi Wise.

● a founder of the New York Federation of Zionist Societies in 1897

● first vice-president of the Oregon State Conference of Charities and Correction in 1902

● appointed Commissioner of Child Labor for the State of Oregon in 1903

● co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

● founding of American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) in 1918

● founded the Jewish Institute of Religion, an educational center in New York City in 1922

founding president of the World Jewish Congress in 1936 (created to fight Nazism)

● co-chair of the American Zionist Emergency Council in WWII

● held press conference in 1942 an announced that the Nazis had a plan for the extermination of all European Jews, and had already killed 2 million; it didn't make front page news in America.

Now back to his sermon. Below are quotes from an article in the January 1, 1926 edition of The Jewish Transcript of the Pacific Northwest.

Stephen S. Wise’s Sermon on Jesus Causes a Storm

What has threatened to revive theological and dogmatic controversy resulted from metropolitan newspaper reports of a sermon delivered by Dr. Stephen S. Wise at the Free Synagogue last Sunday at Carnegie Hall before a large congregation.

The subject of Dr. Wise’s sermon was “A Jew’s View of Jesus.” In his sermon Dr. Wise reviewed the book of Dr. Joseph Klausner, Hebrew writer of Jerusalem, entitled Jesus of Nazareth, His Life, Times and Teachings, an historic study on the life of Jesus on the basis of old Jewish and Talmudic-Hebrew literature, and is part of series on the development of the Jewish Messianic idea by the author, was published in Jerusalem in Hebrew in 1922.

Jesus of Nazareth is not a myth as He has been pictured in Hebrew teachings, but was a man . . . The very foundations of morality, he asserted, are contained in the unparalleled code of ethics which comprises the teachings of Jesus.

Because Christendom has renounced Jesus, in fact, shall we continue to deny Him, now that we, His brother Jews, are free to face His life and teachings anew? Shall we not say that this Jew is soul of our soul and the soul of His teaching is Jewish and nothing but Jewish? This teaching of Jesus the Jew is a phase of the spirit which led the Jew Godward.

Now is the time to throw overboard the doctrine that the teachings of Jesus are alien to those of the elders.

Jesus was, I accept this despite the notion I had been led to believe earlier in my life – a notion that Jesus was a myth and never existed. I tell you, and I will repeat those words to every Jew in the world if need be, Jesus was, and we must accept this fact at once.

But a question remains to be answered. Because of Christian dogma or unchristian injustice to the Jew, shall the Jew never feel free objectively to face and revaluate the teachings of a Galilean Jew of the first century?

He maintains that the great division between Judaism and Christianity could have never arisen if the teachings of Jesus there had not been something fundamentally different and alien from the teachings of Judaism.

I do not need to be a Christian in order to recognize the place of Jesus in the great Jewish tradition. Israel gave Jesus the man and the Jew to humankind. For the most part, Christendom has denied in deed, though affirming him in name. Is not the hour come, for us, his fellow Jews, to place Jesus where he belongs – this radiant Jewish teacher in Palestine of the first century?

I encourage you to read the entire article by going to the following links. It begins on page 1, then goes to page 5 and ends on page 8. It is well worth reading.




Page 1 also contains another article about the controversy.

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Shalom,
Jim Myers


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