Jews Can’t Find Salvation, Former Southern Baptist President Insists

A former president of the Southern Baptist Convention has publicly reiterated his belief that Jews can’t find salvation without Jesus, renewing a controversy that first erupted seven years ago.

“I’m not against the Jewish people,” the Rev. Bailey Smith told 2,000 Southern Baptist evangelists last week in St. Louis. “But unless they repent and get born again, they don’t have a prayer.”

Jewish leaders responded with dismay to Smith’s comments, which echoed his 1980 statement that “God doesn’t hear the prayers of a Jew.” The latest comments, made June 17, were reported in Friday’s Dallas Times Herald, which obtained a tape transcript.

Rabbi James Rudin, national interreligious director of the American Jewish Committee, told the newspaper, “It is really unfortunate that we have another insensitive and theologically biased example of Christian anti-Semitism from a man we heard it from seven years ago.”

Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1980, is also a member of the current PTL board headed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The Rev. Paige Patterson, president of Criswell Bible College in Dallas, called Smith “a friend of the Jewish people” but also “unequivocal in his conviction that nobody comes to God other than through Jesus.”