I mean to state this
proposition very carefully.
Whatever
stereotypes may run wild in the world, it ought not to be controversial to assert that Jews are, as a people, held as remarkable for intellectual achievements (and, perhaps, that their
mothers will be delighted to catalogue these for you). This is reflected in a number of
statistics, for example that Jews are much more likely than members of many other ethnic or religious groups to graduate from
college, and therefrom to enter professions requiring attainment of advanced academic
degrees. Making up around two percent of the world's population, in the last century Jews have, often in the face of significant
discrimination, come to represent a ridiculously disproportionate number of
Nobel Prize winners and other science-oriented prize and honour winners in numerous fields, of US Senators, Cabinet members, judges up to and including Supreme Court Justices, astronauts, inventors, leaders of industry, and multimillionaires and billionaires generally. Names like Einstein, Spinoza, Spielberg, Disraeli, Oppenheimer, Pasternak, Bloomberg, Asimov, all of these light up the leading edges of their fields. And Jews are at the same time, again statistically,
less likely to be alcoholics, spouse abusers, violent criminals, or indeed convicted felons of any stripe. And Jews are as well, without question a spiritual people, boasting an equally strong retinue of theologians, philosophers, and religious leaders who examine the questions of the ephemeral and the eternal in impassioned depth.
Being neither Christian nor Jew myself, I find it unbiasedly plausible to assert, then, that the 'average Jew' is holistically the intellectual superior of the 'average Christian,' and that the most intelligent Christians at any level of observance are, at the least, no smarter than the most intelligent Jews of the equivalent level of observance. Further, it is equally supportable that the faithful Jew is at least as honest a seeker after truth, and at least as certain of the belief which resides in his heart, as the believer of Christianity or any other faith. And yet, the Jew unhesitatingly rejects the single most fundamental precept of the Christian's faith. This is not like the atheist's rejection of the very notion of divinity, for the Jew believes in God and even in a personal God, one having a relationship with man, one having communicated with man and having characteristics which are most peculiar for a Universe-creating deity such as jealousy, demanding worship, and expressing concern with when and where humans engage in activities with their genital parts. But, finds even the most honest spiritual seeker amongst the Jews, the Christian account of the claimedly special divinity of
Jesus of Nazareth is simply untrue.
And even those Jews who openly respect much of the teachings of Jesus believe that Jesus was no more than a street preacher -- not, in any special sense, a "son of God," nor a
savior, nor resurrected from death. The Jews have always greatly venerated their
prophets, men like
Moses and
Elijah and
Maimonides -- but Jesus is rarely, if ever, counted as a prophet at all, not even amongst the minor prophets, barely even amongst the non-prophetic great teachers of men. Even
Muslims give greater credence than do Jews to the proposition that Jesus was in some sense '
holy' (though Muslim theology teaches that Jesus was saved from the
cross by substitution of a
doppelganger). And even those very few Jews who do count Jesus as a prophet, and some few amongst them who do count Jesus as a miracle worker, as a man resurrected from death -- even they shrug at the supposition that Jesus was a prophecy-fulfilling savior, a divine being, contending instead that such is as it is with God's chosen, with Moses and Isaac and Abraham and Joseph. Miracles happen; those who serve as their vessels are but men, no more and no less.
Naturally, a question resolves from this. For, if we confess (as we must if we are fair) that the Jews are a spiritually attuned peoples, earnest and genuine seekers of divine wisdom, who are at the least on average book-smarter than the average rest-of-us and equally equipped with whatever tools enable any of us to discern true faiths from false, and if the Jews in their wisdom have through the ages considered and rejected the Christian account of a Christ -- even in the face of centuries of
ridicule,
torture,
murder, and numerous frighteningly effective attempts at
genocide from which they might have spared themselves by changing their beliefs -- then we must in good conscience ask: what is it that the Jews might know that the Christians don't? For, it seems, if so intelligent and spiritual a people were apprised of a new belief, and honest spiritual and intellectual discourse were able to support such belief, than those people, in their intellect and in their enlightenment, would wholly flock to this new belief, and so there would be none of them left at all for whom a reasonably discernible
truth was rejected.