Letters and Jews for Jesus

I was rather surprised that The Times published such a scurrilous note as Lawrence A. Levey’s rebuke for your having accepted the Jews for Jesus ad (Letters, Jan. 8). What an intemperate heaping up of wild charges against that organization! One can dismiss his diatribe as an outburst of emotional resentment that many Jews today are drawn to Jesus of Nazareth as “bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.”

On one point, however, I must challenge his deliberate distortion of the obvious. He describes Jews for Jesus as a “bastardization of authentic Christianity.” I am a Gentile Christian and an evangelical, committed to historic, biblical Christianity. I know no evangelical theologian who would regard the dominant tenets of Jews for Jesus as deviating in the least from what the New Testament says Christianity is all about. After all, the Christian movement began as something that can only be described as Jews for Jesus. Thank God those Jews shared their convictions with Gentiles. Otherwise, we would have remained with “no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).

ARTHUR F. GLASSER

Dean Emeritus

School of World Mission

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena