The Church and the Jews, 3: What Is “Authentic Judaism”?

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 01, 2025

This is the third installment of a four-part essay. (Read Part 2)

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What do I care for the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord. ...Your new moons and festivals I detest; they weigh me down, I tire of the load. When you spread out your hands, I will close my eyes to you; Though you pray the more, I will not listen.—Isaiah 1:11, 14-15

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Robert George is right to point out, against certain misguided Catholics, that the coming of Christ did not reduce Judaism to the status of being merely one of the many false religions. This is because Judaism is rooted in revelations and practices that were divinely revealed and commanded, and there is some level of material continuity between Judaism today and the religion of the ancestors of Christ (yet there is a spiritual rupture, as we shall see).

However, as I wrote in Part 1, George “confuses the particular love we owe to the Jewish people, and God’s abiding call for them to find the fulfillment of their covenants in Christ, with his unqualified claim that the Church requires us to affirm the validity of ‘Judaism’ as a post-Christian religious system.”

George writes:

Catholic teaching leaves no room for the denial of Judaism’s continued validity and significance and its special role in God’s plan for the world. The purpose for which God chose the Jewish people and their mission in fulfilling that purpose continue today: Jewish fidelity, witness, and wisdom enlighten. They light the path to God.

The basis of Judaism in divine revelation, and the continuing providential role of the Jewish people, are indeed reasons why Christendom traditionally tolerated Jewish worship, unlike that of outright false religions. However, this providential role does not imply that true fidelity to God is found in continued observance of the Old Law after the institution of the New. It is instead related to the former prophetic meaning of the rites. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote:

From the fact that the Jews observe their rites, which, of old, foreshadowed the truth of the faith which we hold, there follows this good—that our very enemies bear witness to our faith, and that our faith is represented in a figure, so to speak. For this reason they are tolerated in the observance of their rites. (ST II-II, q. 10, a. 11)

While we cannot deny the connection between Judaism and the religion of the Old Testament, George goes too far in simply identifying the two, and in claiming that the Church requires us to give unqualified affirmation of the “validity” and “legitimacy” of “Jewish practice” or, as he put it in another article, “living Judaism.” Nostra Aetate prescribes our attitude toward the Jewish people, not toward Rabbinic Judaism.

Compare George’s unsubstantiated claim that Church authority condemns “all efforts…to delegitimize, dishonor, or vilify Jewish faith and practice” with the teaching of the Ecumenical Council of Florence in 1441:

The Holy Roman Church... firmly believes, professes and teaches that the matter pertaining to the law of the Old Testament, of the Mosaic law... after our Lord’s coming had been signified by them, ceased, and the sacraments of the New Testament began; ...after the promulgation of the Gospel it asserts that they cannot be observed without the loss of eternal salvation. All, therefore, who after that time observe circumcision and the Sabbath and the other requirements of the law, the holy Roman Church declares alien to the Christian faith and not in the least fit to participate in eternal salvation.

It has been the constant teaching of the Fathers, Doctors, and Magisterium of the Church that the Old Law was replaced by the New, and that the observance of the old ceremonial and juridical precepts is no longer pleasing to God—indeed quite the opposite, with St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the above-cited Council teaching that these precepts are now “both dead and deadly.” In modern times, Pope Pius XII reiterated this teaching: “On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death” (Mystici Corporis 30).

Therefore likewise, George’s demand that Catholics reject so-called “supersessionism” is far too crude and simplistic to pass for Catholic theology. Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Redemptoris Mater that with the coming of the Son of God, “the period marked by the promise made to Abraham and by the Law mediated by Moses has now reached its climax, in the sense that Christ fulfills the divine promise and supersedes the old law.” Pius XII taught the same in Mystici Corporis 29-30:

On the gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees, fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race. “To such an extent, then,” says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, “was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from the many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as Our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom.”

What is “authentic Judaism”?

The question of what Rabbinic Judaism is and the extent to which it is a different religious system from that of our Hebrew fathers in faith is a complex one. Here I emphasize points of discontinuity in order to correct the errors I am responding to, but I do not pretend to do full justice to the topic. For further perspective, I recommend Gideon Lazar’s recent article, “Jesus is THE Faithful Jew.”

Robert George writes:

The increasingly common internet slanders that true Judaism “no longer exists” or is no longer authentically practiced — whether because of the Second Temple’s destruction at the hands of the Romans in a.d. 70, because of various developments in contemporary Jewish religious practice, or any other theory that is alleged — are simply incompatible with Catholic teaching on the validity and legitimacy of God’s enduring covenant with his chosen people.

This striking lapse of reason can only stem from the false assumption critiqued by Pope Benedict, which conflates God’s fidelity to Israel with Israel’s fidelity to God. God’s enduring promise simply has no bearing on the question of whether Jews today are practicing the Old Testament religion authentically.

One can hardly fail to notice that time after time in the Old Testament, God sent prophets to tell the Israelites they were not practicing their faith authentically. Did God thereby contradict His own enduring covenant? If Israel could be unfaithful to the Old Law even before it had been fulfilled by the New, then how much more will their practice be judged “inauthentic” to God’s covenant now that it has been fulfilled and can be practiced authentically only in Christ?

And which practice today is authentic? Reformed? Orthodox? Hasidic? George favors Orthodox Judaism as the most authentic, but if non-Orthodox Jewish practice is less authentic, does that mean God has been faithful to His covenant with some Jews and not with others?

George’s logic ultimately implies that the Jews do not need to accept Christ to be faithful to their covenant. But there is only one authentically Israelite institution today: the Catholic Church.

Judaism vs. the Old Testament religion

George treats Rabbinic Judaism as completely continuous with the Old Testament religion: “There was neither a schism nor an additional piece of claimed revelation that led to the existence of the Jewish religion.” But of course there was a schism, between the Jews who accepted Jesus as Messiah and those who denied Him. There was a schism between the new spiritual Israel and Israel of the flesh. This schism was foreshadowed in the Old Testament and foretold by Jesus in parable after parable.

George thinks he can safely maintain his position by appealing only to post-Vatican-II popes. But even they do not agree with him.

In the very first paragraph of the essay George cites, Benedict XVI denied this equation: “For ‘Judaism’ in the strict sense does not mean the Old Testament, which is essentially common to Jews and Christians. In fact, there are two responses in history to the destruction of the temple and the new radical exile of Israel: Judaism and Christianity.”

Pope St. John Paul II, in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope (ch. 6), went even further, characterizing the Synagogue as a reaction against the Incarnation: “Man was no longer able to tolerate such closeness [to God], and thus the protests began. This great protest has precise names—first it is called the Synagogue, and then Islam. Neither can accept a God who is so human.”

In reality, Temple Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism are at least as different from one another as Catholicism and Protestantism. Just as Protestants have come up with novel, alternate forms of worship because of their rejection of the Mass, Rabbinic Judaism had to cope with its inability to enact the sacrifices of either the Mosaic Law or the Law of Love.

The Jews contemporary with the Apostolic Fathers could not continue the sacrifices of the Old Law, since the Temple had been destroyed soon after Christ’s resurrection. But neither were they willing to accept Jesus as the new Temple and definitive Sacrifice fulfilling the old covenants. Thus the practice of modern Judaism is not merely continuing what their ancestors had done as though the Messiah had never come, though to be sure this would be bad enough—it is rooted historically (not necessarily in the heart of every Jew today) in the prideful refusal of the 1st—and 2nd-century rabbis to receive the New Covenant.

If this claim seems like bigotry, consider that in terms of time and succession, these rabbis were to the Pharisees who persecuted Christ as their contemporaries, the Apostolic Fathers, were to the Apostles still in living memory. Just as the liturgy of the early Church developed from the Sacrifice of Christ and His instructions at the Last Supper, so the ceremonial and legal elaborations of Rabbinic Judaism represented in many ways a doubling-down on those man-made burdens of the Pharisees which Christ condemned, and for which they condemned Him.

When Julian the Apostate attempted to rebuild the Temple in order to support every religion that opposed the Church, fire miraculously came out of the ground and destroyed the construction works, as though God were definitively underlining what had He had already decreed by the rending of the temple veil: this religion is now defunct. For while the Jews cannot follow the spirit of the Law without Christ, without the Temple they cannot even follow the letter. So God scattered the proud in their conceit.

That the Temple has not been rebuilt in two thousand years is a clear sign to the Jewish people that something has changed. The failure of so many Jews to consider the meaning of this is a quintessential illustration of the “stiff-necked” appellation which the Holy Spirit places on them in Scripture.

But this is a truly terrible trap to have fallen into, calling for compassion rather than judgment. And just as, following Vatican II, we do not impute the sin of heresy to everyone who is raised Protestant 500 years after Martin Luther, neither ought we impute the hardheartedness of the rabbis at the time of the early Church to every single Jew today.

We must love the Jews as our estranged brethren, still specially called by God. But should we have an exaggerated reverence for Jews, who are children of Abraham according to the flesh, such as we do not extend to Protestants, who have been baptized by water and the Spirit and have an even greater claim to be called our brethren? It will be a sign of real progress when Catholic apologists are seen to be as vigorous in their sparring with Jews as they are with Protestants.

There is, no doubt, a place for language more diplomatic than I have used above. But in order to be properly diplomatic, we must first acknowledge the facts; adjusting tone comes later.

(Read Part 4)