Gerald McDermott
for Ecumenical Zionism: Jews, Christians, and the Land of Israel conference
JTS in NYC
5 Feb 2025
For 1700 years Christian preachers and scholars have been saying that the Hebrew Bible is Zionist but the NT is not. It cannot be, they reasoned without looking too closely, because everyone knows that according to the NT God put to an end his covenant with the Jewish people after Jesus came to the world.
The Holocaust was a wake-up call that started Christians rethinking what they had been repeating for 1700 years. The Roman Catholic Church was the first major Christian church to repent of this false teaching in its Vatican 2 document Nostra Aetate in 1965. The bishops quoted the apostle Paul saying of his Jewish brothers who did not accept Jesus that they are (present tense) beloved of God because of the patriarchs and that God’s calling them to be His Chosen People is “irrevocable.”
Since the mid-19th century Protestant dispensationalists had agreed that God’s eternal covenant with the Jewish people is still in place. But there were three big problems: 1) they did not capture any major Christian church body, 2) they invented a bizarre teaching called the Rapture that would have the Jewish people left behind after Christians are zapped off the planet, and 3) they held to date-setting and an elaborate eschatology that seems more fanciful than biblical.
But in recent decades there has arisen a scholarly movement called the New Christian Zionism that is comprised of both catholic and Protestant scholars. It is new because it has nothing to do with dispensationalism and because it is recognizing things on the surface of the NT text that have gone unnoticed for centuries.
How could that be? On the surface of the text but unnoticed for centuries?
In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1961) Thomas Kuhn showed that at the beginning of every scientific revolution (think of Galileo, Newton, Einstein) elite scientists had evidence for the new theory right in front of their eyes. But they could not see the evidence because the existing scientific paradigm had cast a veil over their eyes. The evidence was right in front of them but they could not see it.
I remember the day when I realized this might have happened to biblical scholars and theologians for centuries. They were not able to see the land promise in the NT because they had been trained not to see it.
They had been told, as I was in my NT studies at the U of Chicago Div School and in my PhD program in religious studies at the U of Iowa, that the Heb Bible is all about the particular and the NT is all about the universal, so it only makes sense that the God of the NT would no longer be interested in one particular land instead of all the lands of the world.
But funny thing is, when your eyes are open to the actual text instead of what you have been told about the text, you start seeing remarkable things.
Such as, for example, that five times in the NT Jerusalem is called the holy city. The devil took Jesus to the holy city to tempt him to jump off the top of the temple (Matt 4:5). After the death of Jesus many bodies of the saints were raised and walked around the holy city and appeared to many (Matt 27:53). John says in revelation that the gentiles will trample the holy city for 42 months (Rev 11: 2), and God will bring down from heaven the holy city Jerusalem (both in Rev 21:2 and10).
Many times the NT refers to the land promise, and at least five times explicitly. The author of Hebrews says God led Abraham to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance (11.8), and that by faith he went to live in the land of promise (11.9a), and that Isaac and Jacob were heirs with him of the same promise (Heb 11:9b). Before his martyrdom deacon Stephen said God promised to give Abraham this land as a possession and to his offspring after him (Acts 7:4-5). Paul told the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia that the God of this people Israel chose our fathers, and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance (Acts 13.17-19).
Now there are many other implicit references to the land promise. But we might ask why there are only these five explicit mentions of the land promise. Two answers are likely. First, the land promise was assumed because for the NT authors their Bible (the Tanach, which was Jesus’ Bible) already repeated the land promise one thousand times (I have counted them and tabulate these references in two books, the New Christian Zionism and Israel Matters). Second, the NT authors lived in the land. It was acknowledged over and over in the NT as Judea--the land of the Jews--and so there seemed no need to repeat or defend the promise.
Jesus referred to the future of the land of Israel many times. I will provide five. In Acts the disciples asked him if he would restore the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6). He did not dismiss this as a silly or unspiritual question (as scholars with their blinders on have often claimed) but said the Father has set times and seasons for that, and they were not to know them yet. Isaac Oliver, a Jewish NT scholar, argues in his new Luke’s Jewish Eschatology (Oxford University Press) that Jesus had an earthly—if eschatological—kingdom in mind. So yes, the kingdom would be restored in the future to Israel.
In Luke 13, Jesus said that one day the residents of Jerusalem will welcome him (v. 35), and in chapter 21 prophesies that Jerusalem will be trampled upon by gentiles until the times of the gentiles are completed (v 24).
The cessation of gentile trampling on Jerusalem means the beginning of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem. This means that Jesus predicted a time when Jews would have political control over their capital. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the beginning of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem—in 1967, two thousand years after Jews lost it in 63 BC to Pompey--could be seen as a fulfillment of prophecy by the NT Jesus.
This is not the same as saying that the Jewish state is a direct fulfillment of prophecy (but of course the massive return of Jews from all over the world to the land since the 18th century is clearly a fulfillment of biblical prophecy). It is also not the same as saying that the current Jewish state is beyond criticism. Or that this is the last Jewish state before the eschaton.
But it is not beyond imagining that on the basis of this remarkable prophecy by the NT Jesus that we can say that the rise of Jewish sovereignty over its capital after two millennia could be a “sign of the times,” the sort that Jesus rebuked some religious leaders for not recognizing (Matt 16:3).
Matthew has Jesus saying that in the paliggenesia or renewal of all things (19.28) his apostles would rule over the twelve tribes of Israel, suggesting not only a distinct future for the land of Israel but also the restoration of the ten northern tribes.
The Jesus of the NT also refers to the land in a verse that it almost universally mistranslated: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land [usually translated “earth” following the universalist presupposition of supersessionists] (Matt 5:5). More and more scholars are recognizing that Jesus is quoting word-for-word Ps 37:11. Five times this psalm uses the phrase inherit the land, and each time the Hebrew word eretz refers unmistakably to the land of Israel, not the whole earth.
Jesus might have been referring to Isaiah’s prophecy that when the earth is renewed all the gentiles shall flow to the mountain of the house of the LORD . . . that he might teach [them] his ways (Is 2:2-3).
Many supersessionists object that John’s gospel overrules these expectations of a future for the land because John’s Jesus says his body is the new temple, and true worship would no longer be restricted to Jerusalem but would be wherever there is worship in spirit and in truth (John 2:21; 4:21).
The eminent NT scholar Richard Hays does not think John is supersessionist on the land promise, but that we should think of the gospels as speaking on different levels. For, he points out, Mark’s Jesus declares of the temple, My house shall be a house of prayer for all the nations (Mark 11:17), affirming Isaiah’s vision of an eschatologically restored Jerusalem and temple. In Matthew Jesus surprises Christians (most have never seen this) by saying that God still dwells in the temple of his day (Matt 23:21). So the NT composite picture of Jesus on the temple is that it is both God’s house and the symbol of Jesus’ body as God’s house. True worship, for Jesus, will be everywhere in spirit and in truth and centered in Jerusalem in the eschaton.
If Jesus clearly referred to the future of the land of Israel, so did Peter. In his second speech in Jerusalem, delivered after Jesus’ resurrection, Peter says there is still to come a future apokatastasis, using the Greek word in the Septuagint for the return of Jews to the land from the four corners of the earth (Acts 3:21). So for Peter, the return from exile in Babylon did not fulfill the Tanach’s prophecies of return. Nor did Jesus’ resurrection. There was a future return to come. And we know this did not happen for another eighteen hundred years.
We have already seen from Acts that Paul made clear that he held to the land promise. In Romans there is further evidence. Paul says the gifts of God are irrevocable (Rom 11:29). There is little doubt that for Paul the land was one of these gifts, for in the writings of prominent first-century Jews—Philo, Josephus, and Ezekiel the Tragedian—the land was God’s principal gift to the Jewish people.
The early church saw it this way. According to Robert Wilken in his The Land Called Holy, early Christians interpreted the angel’s promise to Mary that her baby would be given the throne of David and that he would reign over the house of Jacob forever (Luke 1:32-33) as indications of “the restoration and establishment of the kingdom in Jerusalem.”
The book of Revelation is replete with references to the future of the land of Israel. The two witnesses will be killed in Jerusalem (11:8), the battle of Armageddon will take place in a valley in northern Israel (16:16), the gates of the New Jerusalem (which, notably, is not the New Rome or New Constantinople) are inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel (21:12), the 144,000 with the names of the Lamb and the Father on their foreheads stand on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem (14:1), Gog and Magog will march over the broad plain of the land of Israel and surround the saints and the beloved city of Jerusalem before they are consumed by heavenly fire (20:9). The renewed earth will be centered in Jerusalem (11:2; 21:10).
For the author of Revelation, then, the land of Israel was holy not simply because the people of Israel and Jesus lived there but also because it would be the scene of crucial future events in the history of redemption.
In sum, there is an abundance of evidence in the gospels, Acts, the epistles, and Revelation for the 1) land promise, 2) the holiness of Jerusalem, and 3) the theological significance of the land of Israel in the future and in the eschaton.
Does this matter? Yes, it does, for three reasons.
First, if the land promise was ended with the coming of Jesus, then God is not trustworthy. For he promised to Abraham and his seed that the land would be theirs for an everlasting possession (Gen 17:8) and that as long as the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky, the Jewish people would be God’s people and he would do them good (Jer 31 & 32).
Second, if the land promise to Israel is broken, then so might be God’s promise to renew and restore the heavens and the earth. The land promise’s partial fulfillment—by bringing Jews from the four corners of the earth back to the land starting in the eighteenth century--is downpayment on the promise of a new heaven and a new earth.
Third, it is a deep theological reason why we should support Israel in this war against the new Nazism. Jews have more title to the land than any other people. God called them to share the land in justice, and they have shown time and again that they are willing. Today two million Arabs are full citizens in Israel enjoying political freedoms and world-class education and health care—far more than Arabs enjoy anywhere else in the Arab world.
Like Hitler’s Nazis, Iran and its proxies are conducting genocide, the attempted elimination of a whole people, the Jews. If we Christians thought it was right to destroy Nazism in Word War 2, then we should support Israel’s efforts to destroy this new Nazism.
Gerald McDermott is an Anglican theologian who teaches at Reformed Episcopal Seminary and Jerusalem Seminary. He is the author of Israel Matters: Why Christians Must Think Differently about the People and the Land (Brazos).
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