Who better than a former Evangelical minister and missionary who is now an observant Jew to offer commentary on the recently released film, “The Passion of The Christ”?
Gavriel Sanders spoke in Milwaukee on Feb. 24 at the Tuesday Wisdom Series sponsored by the Ohr HaTorah Jewish Heritage Center in Glendale. While his journey to Judaism was his main topic, he also spoke about the film.
He told the audience of 35 people, “Jews across the country are most worried that the film will stir up anti-Semitism. While that may happen to some extent, my worry is that, from a missionary point of view, this is the greatest outreach opportunity ever given to them — the best tool to fall into the hands of Christians.
“I feel the biggest problem is that most Jews are biblically illiterate and will be unable to properly answer, ‘Why don’t Jews accept Jesus if the evidence is so compelling?’ I’m worried that Jews are not ready to respond to the question and that the Evangelicals will use this failing on a national level.”
Sanders added, “Jews have a responsibility to explain their position. Many Christians are bothered that Jews don’t accept their savior. The danger of the film is that Christians will wonder how can Jews not believe. I don’t think they will accept the film as fiction.”
Sanders, who spent more than 20 years as a missionary in the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, describes himself as a perfect candidate to have been swept up by the Campus Crusade for Christ movement in the 1960s.
“My family moved around a lot so I never had a core group of friends. When I was 16 and my name was still Mark, I met a group in the park in Dallas, Tex…. I started hanging out at the church, mostly for socialization, and became a born-again Christian.”
Sanders later attended a Bible college where he said he got a degree “in God, because I knew the truth.”
He went to Israel in 1967 to learn Hebrew. He lived on a kibbutz composed of mostly secular Jews so he decided to share his faith. Seen as a threat, he was sent to another kibbutz to finish an ulpan program “if I promised not to offer my beliefs unless I was asked.”
Several months later he returned to the U.S. to work as a missionary in California. Interested in language, he got a graduate degree in linguistics and went back to Israel to teach English and “let my light shine about Christian gospel.”
He found the kibbutzniks loved their land, but had no spirituality so he had a ripe population for conversion. “I told them the most Jewish thing one can do is to believe in Jesus because he was Jewish and that Christianity just took a different path from Judaism.
“However, the more I taught and studied I began to find some inconsistencies. When I read text within context, I started questioning and doubting some of the prophecy.”
In 1984, he once again returned to Los Angeles. “The missionaries were going to take advantage of the world coming to L.A. [for the Olympics], to the chagrin of local Jewish leaders. They held a rally that I attended — just to find out what they were doing — and after hearing two rabbis speak I literally felt myself begin to melt. It was the beginning of my undoing, faith-wise.”
Feeling an attachment to Israel, but not to Judaism, he took bar mitzvah and conversion classes at a Reform synagogue in 1996 in L.A. Still not content, he went online to investigate Orthodoxy.
“I felt I was on the porch, but hadn’t entered the house of Judaism. I started a second conversion and four years ago took my first steps inside the mansion,” he said.
Sanders and his wife live in New York. “Marketing is my day job. The rest of the time I continue to study.”
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