Dr. Brian J. Crawford is the Director of Digital Evangelism for Chosen People Ministries and the author of The Scandal of a Divine Messiah: A Response to Maimonidean and Kabbalistic Challenges to the Incarnation. This is part two of two.

In part one, Brian shared his 20-year journey from a beach in Tel Aviv to the streets of Orthodox Brooklyn. In this episode, we get into his book — and the two philosophical traditions that have walled Jewish people off from considering Jesus as Messiah for centuries.

The first is Maimonides, the towering 12th-century Jewish philosopher who used Aristotelian logic to argue that it is metaphysically impossible for God to take on human flesh. The second is Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition rooted in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, which argues the incarnation is redundant because everything is already divine.

Brian explains how both traditions imported Greek philosophical ideas into Judaism — often without realizing it — and how those ideas, not the Hebrew scriptures, became the real foundation for Jewish objections to Jesus.

In this episode

• Why Orthodox Jews consider the incarnation idolatrous

• How Maimonides used Aristotle to argue God cannot become man

• How Kabbalah’s Neoplatonic mysticism makes the incarnation redundant

• The hidden Greek philosophical foundations of Orthodox Judaism

• How the New Testament uses Greek categories without importing Greek errors

• Why Brian kept the New Testament out of the first two-thirds of his book

• The incarnation as the singular crossover between God and the world

• How the book has been received by Orthodox Jewish readers

• Brian’s current PhD work on Maimonides’ 13 Principles

• Book recommendations for Reformed Christians on Israel