Modern Christianity, especially in the West, sometimes treats the Jewishness of Jesus as a kind of historical accident. He happened to be born in first-century Palestine. He happened to know the Hebrew scriptures. The actual gospel, on this telling, is detachable from any of it — a universal message that just happens to have come to us in Jewish clothing.
That’s wrong, and the New Testament won’t let us hold it for long. Jesus came as a Jew, into a specific people with a specific story, and that particularity is part of the gospel itself.
The Bible insists on it
The first verse of the New Testament is a genealogy:
This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Matthew 1:1, NIV)
Notice the two anchors. Son of David — Israel’s greatest king, with whom God made a particular covenant about a coming descendant. Son of Abraham — the man with whom the whole rescue plan began in Genesis 12. Matthew isn’t tracing Jesus’ ancestry as a curiosity. He’s locating him in Israel’s story. Jesus is the climax of a specific people’s long, complicated, faithful and unfaithful relationship with God.
Paul puts it as compactly as it can be put. In Galatians 4:
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. (Gal. 4:4–5, NIV)
Born of a woman, born under the law. Two parallel phrases. Jesus is fully human (born of a woman) and fully Jewish (born under the law). Both matter. Christianity isn’t a religion that floats free of history. It has a body and an address.
Jesus on his own particularity
The most striking statement on this point comes from Jesus himself, in a conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well in John 4. She raises the longstanding Samaritan-Jewish dispute about the right place to worship. Jesus’ answer:
You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. (John 4:22, NIV)
Salvation is from the Jews. Six words. They mean what they say. The salvation that has come to the world has come through Israel. It isn’t a generic salvation that could equally have come through any people. It came through the people whose story God had been writing for two thousand years — through Abraham, through the exodus, through David, through the prophets, finally through one of their own descendants.
Why this matters for reading the Bible
Once you see Jesus’ Jewishness clearly, several things click.
The Old Testament isn’t optional. Jesus quoted it constantly because it was the Bible he had, and because his life was the conscious fulfillment of its arc. Reading the Old Testament is reading Jesus’ own scripture. The earlier article on this site, Why read the Old Testament?, goes into this further.
Strange Old Testament texts make new sense. The sacrifices, the priesthood, the temple, the Passover lamb, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 — none of these are obscure background details. They are the categories the New Testament uses to explain what Jesus was doing. You can’t read Hebrews without them.
Paul’s strange agonies make sense. Paul writes whole chapters of Romans 9–11 wrestling with what God’s faithfulness to Israel means in light of most Israelites not recognising their own Messiah. He can’t let the question go. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all (Rom. 9:4–5, NIV). The list is breathtaking. Israel’s story matters because Jesus’ story is its continuation.
What it means for us
The grafting image Paul uses in Romans 11 is the right one. Gentile Christians have been grafted into a tree that wasn’t originally ours. We owe Israel an immense theological debt. The history of the church too often forgot this, with disastrous consequences.
Christianity isn’t a Western religion that took some Eastern colour. It’s the unfolding of the God of Israel’s promises, opened now to the whole world. Salvation is from the Jews. Six words to remember every time we open the New Testament.