Correcting Dovid Gottlieb: Christianity's Prediction of the Jewish Exile

I have been reading Dovid Gottlieb's Living Up to the Truth. It is a propaganda packet, about 100 pages long, and arguing that Rabbinic Judaism is uniquely confirmed by the facts of history. Gottlieb is not a historian. His expertise is in mathematical logic, a subject he taught for 10 years.

As a non-historian, he is not familiar with the conventions of history. For example, the practice of history is the practice of matching explanations to hard data. There is a certain amount of hard data, such as artifacts and ancient texts, and the goal of the historian is to evaluate rival explanations on criteria such as explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, ad hoc-ness, accord with accepted beliefs, and superiority to rival hypotheses.

Like a magician, Gottlieb exploits the ignorance of his target audience. Because they are not practicing historians, Gottlieb can run a lot of tricks on his audience that he would not be able to run against experts in the field.

The "Prediction"
Gottlieb's first blunder is his strawman attack on Christian theology. Here is the relevant section from Chapter 2:

It is fine to make predictions, even unique predictions, but if they do not come true, then, of course, you are in serious trouble. Certain Christian sources assert that the reason the Jews are in exile is because they have not accepted the Christian Messiah. They predict that the Jews will remain in exile until they convert. Now, that is the right sort of prediction, that the Jews will be in exile until they accept the Christian messiah. Here, at least the logic was right because that is a prediction that no one else would credit. No Hindu would have any reason whatsoever to expect Jews will stay in exile until they accept the Christian Messiah. He would have no reason to believe that. Nor would a Buddhist, a Moslem, a Shintoist, a Taoist, a Confucianist, or an Atheist. Certainly Jews will not credit it. So that is the right sort of prediction to make: a prediction that no one else will credit.

But, since 1948 (the formation of the state of Israel), that prediction has been wearing a bit thin. All right, in 1948 we didn’t have Jerusalem. Since 1967 (Israel conquered Jerusalem in the Six Day War) it has been wearing even thinner. Still, there was always the Soviet Union holding on to its Jews making it impossible for those Jews to come. So there was a last ditch hold-out position. In the last few years even that has disappeared. (There has been massive Soviet Jewry immigration into Israel since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Jews in Russia are free to leave.) This prediction has simply come out false. The fact that there are Jews who refuse to leave their penthouses in Manhattan in order to come to a smaller dwelling in Tel Aviv could not exactly be regarded as a punishment. That is not what the Christian writings predict. They say that we will be punished in exile for not accepting the Christian Messiah, and that has not happened.

In conversation with Gottlieb, he has explained this passage.

Christian sources predict that the Jews will remain in exile until they convert to Christianity. Now this prediction, if it came true, would certainly be selective evidence in favor of Christianity. No alternative to Christianity would make such a prediction.

But does Christianity even make such a prediction?

The first part of the argument is correct. Early Christian sources do state that the Jews were exiled from the land for the crime of not believing in Jesus. Even Jesus himself predicted such an exile in his Parable of the Tenants (even the extreme-left Jesus Seminar considers this an authentic saying of the Historical Jesus). In this parable, a landowner goes on a long journey and leaves the land to be worked by tenants. He sends servants to collect the rent money, and the tenants kill the servants, one after another. The landowner then sends his own son, and the tenants kill him as well. What will the landowner do when he finally catches the tenants? He will throw them off the property and give it to someone else.

This parable is generally interpreted as the landowner being God The Father, the vineyard being Israel, the tenants being the Jewish leaders, the servants being God's prophets, and Jesus being the landowner's son. God will exile the Jewish nation and give the land to someone else.

That is where the similarity ends. There is no claim that the Jewish return is in any way dependent upon Jewish belief in Jesus. In fact, the book of Matthew implies the opposite. First, the Jews would receive the land back, and later on come to believe in Jesus.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” (Matthew 23:37-39)

Here, Jesus is saying that he would not return until Jerusalem accepts him. But Jerusalem has to be populated with Jews for this prophecy to make any sense, so the Jews will return to Jerusalem, and then later on will accept him, according to Matthew.

Where Gottlieb Gets it Wrong
Gottlieb's claim is about Christian tradition, rather than the Bible. And here, the evidence goes against him even more. The church fathers generally believed in replacement theology, which is to say that the church is now the legal entity "Israel" mentioned in the Mosaic Covenant. The Jewish people as a group, on this view, do not have any special status.

I asked where any of the church fathers predicted that the Jews would remain in exile unless they converted to Christianity. I got the following quote from a book by Edward H. Flannery called The Anguish of the Jews.

Augustine saw the Jews as living proof of the truth of Christianity, noting that their eternal wandering and permanent expulsion from the Land of Israel firmly proved that God had rejected them. Jews were not to be killed, said Augustine, because they had a role to play as the Church’s “slave-librarian.

This is a secondary source, so one would need to prove this from a primary source. The closest reference I could find in Augustine was from his City of God, book 4, chapter 34:

And if they had not sinned against Him with impious curiosity, which seduced them like magic arts, and drew them to strange gods and idols, and at last led them to kill Christ, their kingdom would have remained to them, and would have been, if not more spacious, yet more happy, than that of Rome. And now that they are dispersed through almost all lands and nations, it is through the providence of that one true God; that whereas the images, altars, groves, and temples of the false gods are everywhere overthrown, and their sacrifices prohibited, it may be shown from their books how this has been foretold by their prophets so long before; lest, perhaps, when they should be read in ours, they might seem to be invented by us. But now, reserving what is to follow for the following book, we must here set a bound to the prolixity of this one.

Augustine also has a passage in Book 18, chapter 46:

But the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him, because it behooved Him to die and rise again, were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom, where aliens had already ruled over them, and were dispersed through the lands (so that indeed there is no place where they are not), and are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.

And very many of them, considering this, even before His passion, but chiefly after His resurrection, believed on Him, of whom it was predicted, “Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, the remnant shall be saved.” But the rest are blinded, of whom it was predicted, “Let their table be made before them a trap, and a retribution, and a stumbling-block. Let their eyes be darkened lest they see, and bow down their back always.” Therefore, when they do not believe our Scriptures, their own, which they blindly read, are fulfilled in them, lest perchance any one should say that the Christians have forged these prophecies about Christ which are quoted under the name of the sibyl, or of others, if such there be, who do not belong to the Jewish people.

 For us, indeed, those suffice which are quoted from the books of our enemies, to whom we make our acknowledgment, on account of this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they contribute by their possession of these books, while they themselves are dispersed among all nations, wherever the Church of Christ is spread abroad. For a prophecy about this thing was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read, where it is written, “My God, His mercy shall prevent me. My God hath shown me concerning mine enemies, that Thou shalt not slay them, lest they should at last forget Thy law: disperse them in Thy might.”

Therefore God has shown the Church in her enemies the Jews the grace of His compassion, since, as saith the apostle, “their offense is the salvation of the Gentiles.” And therefore He has not slain them, that is, He has not let the knowledge that they are Jews be lost in them, although they have been conquered by the Romans, lest they should forget the law of God, and their testimony should be of no avail in this matter of which we treat. But it was not enough that he should say, “Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Thy law,” unless he had also added, “Disperse them;” because if they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the Scriptures, and not every where, certainly the Church which is everywhere could not have had them as witnesses among all nations to the prophecies which were sent before concerning Christ.

Augustine describes the exile, but does not make any predictions about when or even if the Jews would return to the land. The claim that the Jews have been stripped of the Covenant is not a claim that the Jews will never return to the land.

It does not follow that if the reason for the exile exists, that the exile itself will also exist. This inference is based on a rehabilitation theory of justice, where the purpose of punishment is to reform the person. This theory is popular in modern times, but was not popular at all in the days of the early church.

I have asked several of my contacts who are experts in church history, and none of them can find anything in the church fathers making any predictions about whether or not the Jews would be able to return to the land, establish a sovereign state, build a temple, offer sacrifices, anoint a king, etc.

The church fathers weren't in the business of making predictions about whether the Jews would return to the homeland or not.

Where Gottlieb Gets it Right
Nobody but the Jews would have predicted that the Jews as a people group would one day return to the land and establish a sovereign nation-state. This should give us pause to think about replacement theology. If God has replaced the Jews with the church, then why has this group been preserved, and why did God allow the Jews to establish a sovereign nation state after nearly 2,000 years in exile?

I think the best solution is one that acknowledges the role of Jesus and the New Covenant, and also recognizes that Israel is still the Jews, and the church is a different entity, a sort of new Israel. Jews who believe in Jesus are dual citizens.

Update!
After a long conversation with Gottlieb himself, I found an actual counterexample to his claim in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho:

And what the people of the Jews shall say and do, when they see Him coming in glory, has been thus predicted by Zechariah the prophet: “I will command the four winds to gather the scattered children; I will command the north wind to bring them, and the south wind, that it keep not back. And then in Jerusalem there shall be great lamentation, not the lamentation of mouths or of lips, but the lamentation of the heart; and they shall rend not their garments, but their hearts. Tribe by tribe they shall mourn, and then they shall look on Him whom they have pierced; and they shall say, Why, O Lord, hast Thou made us to err from Thy way? The glory which our fathers blessed, has for us been turned into shame. 

 This passage says that the Jews will return to Jerusalem first, and then later come to belief in Jesus. This is the exact opposite of what Gottlieb asserts, that according to Christianity, the Jews will not return to the land until after believing in Jesus.