If you come from a Christian background
This is the book Jesus read
Not a preface to the real thing. The whole of it — the scriptures he quoted, argued from, and assumed his listeners knew by heart.
If you grew up in a church, you have met most of this book already, in pieces. Creation. Abraham. Moses and the sea. David and the giant. The psalm about the shepherd. What you may not have been told is that these pieces belong to a whole that has been read, argued over and lived inside continuously for well over two thousand years — by the people it was written for, who never stopped.
You will see it called the Old Testament. In Jewish usage it is the Tanakh, a word made from the first letters of its three parts: Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim — Teaching, Prophets, Writings. Nothing about it is old in the sense of finished. The books are in a different order, and that order tells a different story: it ends not with a prophecy of what is coming but with a command to go home and build.
Reading it the way Jewish tradition reads it is not a step away from your faith. It is a step further into where your faith came from.
Most of what you love in the Gospels is a quotation
When Jesus is asked to name the greatest commandment, he does not compose one. He quotes two verses from the books on this site, and his questioner agrees with him. When he answers the temptation in the wilderness, all three answers are lines from Deuteronomy. When he speaks from the cross, he is saying a psalm.
This is not a discovery that diminishes anything. It is how a teacher inside a tradition talks. But it does mean that if these books are unfamiliar to you, a great deal of what you have read has been arriving without its first half.
- You know it asIt is written here
- Love your neighbour as yourselfLeviticus 19:18
- Love the Lord your God with all your heartDeuteronomy 6:5
- Man shall not live by bread aloneDeuteronomy 8:3
- My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken mePsalm 22:1
- He was wounded for our transgressionsIsaiah 53:5
- A new heart also will I give youEzekiel 36:26
- Do justly, love mercy, walk humblyMicah 6:8
The part that is harder to say
For most of two thousand years, a great deal of Christian teaching held that Jewish people as a people were guilty of the death of Jesus. That teaching was not a rumour at the edges. It was preached from pulpits, written into liturgy, and used to justify expulsion, forced conversion, massacre and, in living memory, worse.
If you were taught some version of that — or absorbed it without anyone teaching it directly — it is worth knowing that the largest Christian bodies in the world have formally said it was wrong. The Catholic Church repudiated the charge of collective guilt in 1965. Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Reformed bodies have issued their own repudiations since, several of them explicitly renouncing writings by their own founders.
So if you carry a suspicion of Jewish people that came to you through your faith, your faith has since disowned it. You are allowed to put it down. Nothing you believe requires you to keep it.
Where the two readings genuinely differ
This site will not pretend the traditions agree about everything, because that would be its own kind of disrespect.
The largest difference is about Jesus, and it does not get resolved by reading more carefully. Jewish tradition does not read the messiah as a divine figure, and reads the passages Christians hear as predictions in their own setting — Isaiah's servant as the people of Israel, the psalms as the prayers of a king in trouble. Jewish reading is also not primarily interested in prediction at all; it asks what a text obliges you to do.
You do not have to settle that here. You can read the text closely, learn what a Jewish reader hears in it, and remain exactly what you are. That is what most people who come here do.
When you are ready to stop reading about it
Start with the fourteen days
Day ten is the Shema — the verse Jesus quoted as the greatest commandment, in the chapter it comes from.
Open day oneNot quite you? If you have no religious background at all