The One New Man: Jew and Gentile in Messiah
As taught in the Messianic Jewish tradition
How Messianic Jews read Ephesians 2: one body of Jew and Gentile, Israel not replaced
The Messianic Jewish movement reads the New Testament as the continuation, not the cancellation, of the story of Israel. Within that frame, no theme is more central to how the movement understands the people of God than what the Letter to the Ephesians calls the creation of "one new man." This lesson sets out, from inside the Messianic Jewish tradition, how Jewish believers in Yeshua (Jesus) understand the relationship between Jew and Gentile in the body of Messiah: a single new community in which the dividing wall is broken down, yet in which the distinct calling of Israel is not erased. It draws on the Hebrew Scriptures, the apostolic writings, the social and Temple world of first-century Judaism as reconstructed by the Jewish-Christian scholar Alfred Edersheim, and the contemporary confessional statements of Messianic Jewish bodies.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain the Messianic Jewish doctrine of the "one new man" as a single reconciled body of Jew and Gentile in which the dividing wall is the enmity of exclusion, not the covenantal calling of Israel.
- Connect Paul's "middle wall of partition" in Ephesians 2:14 to the Temple's Court of the Gentiles and the soreg barrier with its death-warning inscription as described by Edersheim.
- Use the olive-tree image of Romans 11:17-24 to articulate the movement's anti-supersessionist claim that Gentiles are grafted into Israel rather than replacing it.
- Describe how the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15:13-21 establishes a two-fold community: Gentiles welcomed without conversion while Jewish believers continue in Torah observance.
- Show how the Messianic reading of Galatians 3:28-29 levels status and inheritance before God without erasing the Jew/Gentile distinction, paralleling "neither male nor female."
- State accurately where this tradition diverges from covenant theology and mainstream Christianity on the continuing validity of Torah for Jewish believers and on the identity of Israel and the church.
Scripture
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