That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew

That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (Daß Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei) is a short German treatise Luther published in 1523, six years after the Ninety-Five Theses and two after the Diet of Worms. He wrote it under pressure from a specific accusation. A rumor had spread among his opponents that he had preached that Jesus was conceived of Joseph's seed, that Mary was not a virgin, and that Christ was therefore not truly God. Luther opens by naming the charge a lie and sets out to answer it from Scripture. But the refutation quickly becomes a second project: having to prove from the Hebrew prophets that the Messiah was born of a virgin and has already come, he realized he was writing an argument that could be put into the hands of Jews, and he turned the treatise toward that audience as well.

The argument moves through the Old Testament. Luther takes the promise to Eve in Genesis 3, the promise of Abraham's seed, the oracle to David, Isaiah 7:14, Daniel's seventy weeks, and above all Genesis 49:10, the scepter that shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh comes. His case is that these texts cannot be read coherently unless the Messiah is both the natural offspring of Abraham and David and more than a merely human king, and that the loss of Jewish political sovereignty in the first century shows the time of the promise has passed. He rejects the rabbinic readings of these passages as evasions. Alongside the exegesis runs a sharp polemic against the church's own conduct. The papists, he says, have treated the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; had he been a Jew and watched such fools expound the Christian faith, he would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. He reminds Christians that they are the aliens and in-laws, while the Jews are blood relatives of the Lord, and that if the Jewish apostles had dealt with Gentiles as Gentiles now deal with Jews, no Gentile would ever have been converted. He therefore urges that Jews be received kindly, permitted to work and trade and live among Christians rather than being driven into usury, and instructed from Scripture without coercion. If some remain unpersuaded, he writes, what of it; not all Christians are good Christians either.

The treatise has continued to matter chiefly because of what followed it. Twenty years later Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies, which recommended burning synagogues and expelling Jews, and the two works are now read against each other. When the Jewish advocate Josel of Rosheim appealed to Luther in 1537 for help against an expulsion from Saxony, invoking the earlier treatise, Luther refused. The 1523 work thus stands as evidence that Luther's later position was a change, not a constant, and as a document of how a missionary hope grounded in theological supersessionism could sour into hostility when conversion did not come. It also remains one of the clearest early Reformation statements that faith cannot be compelled.

Who should read this: readers of Luther who want to understand the full arc of his thinking about the Jews rather than only its catastrophic end, students of Christian anti-Judaism and its history, and anyone studying how the Reformers read the Hebrew prophets. It is not a devotional work, and readers seeking a model of Jewish-Christian dialogue should know that its kindness is entirely in the service of conversion.