From the Messianic Movement to Catholicism: An interview with Matthew Wiseman

In recent years, there has been a wider recognition and appreciation of the Jewish roots of the Catholic faith. Scholars and other authors have written numerous books and articles exploring this topic: Brant Pitre (Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist; Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary), John Bergsma (Jesus and the Old Testament Roots of the Priesthood), Roy Schoeman (Salvation is from the Jews), Aidan Nichols (Lovely Like Jerusalem: The Fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ and the Church) and more.

Matthew David Wiseman, Ph.D., has contributed his own efforts to this important work through his personal story. He is the author of The Two Jerusalems: My Conversion from the Messianic Movement to the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press, 2024), a remarkable memoir recounting his search for the roots of Christianity, which led him from Protestantism through the Messianic Movement and into the Catholic Church.

Dr. Wiseman is a teacher and an independent scholar living in San Antonio with his wife and three children, specializing in Biblical Poetry, St. John Henry Newman, Scripture, and the development of doctrine. He studied linguistics at Baylor University and received a PhD in Hebrew Bible from the University of St. Andrews.

He spoke recently with Catholic World Report about his new book, the Messianic Movement, and the Jewish roots of the Catholic Church.

Catholic World Report: How did this book come about?

Matthew Wiseman: The book really came about almost entirely over Christmas break in 2019. We had just moved back to the U.S. from St. Andrews, Scotland, where I did my Ph.D. work, and it had me thinking a lot about home and history and origins.

I was particularly thinking about growing up in Midland, and just how insular our Protestant and Hebrew Roots circles were, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that Midland probably had close to as many Catholics as Protestants, only we had all of these cultural barriers, most of the Protestants only spoke English, and were of Northern European extraction, while the Catholic community was majority Hispanic. It made me want to revisit my whole history in the light of my conversion, and I started noticing all of these surprising, Providential encounters with Catholicism that were subconsciously preparing me for the real encounters with Catholic theology that I would have in college and grad school.

I started writing it down, and once the inspiration struck, it all poured out pretty fast. Most of the rough draft was written late at night in a hotel room in Atlanta while we were visiting my in-laws. What jumped out at me as I was writing is that this was a kind of adventure story as much as a spiritual story. The characters and the exotic locales make it entertaining in-between the theological discussions.

CWR: How would you describe the “Messianic Movement” to those not familiar with it?

Wiseman: An overview of the Messianic Movement is tricky, because it started as one thing and now it has split into several wildly opposed movements with different theologies and practices.

First came the Hebrew Christian movement of the nineteenth century, which was a movement among Protestant churches for Jewish converts to keep much of their religious culture. They were theologically mainstream Protestants, but with distinctly Jewish prayer and practice. In the Sixties and the Seventies this developed into “Messianic Judaism,” an outgrowth of the Jesus Movement which sought to revive the Jewish Christianity of the first century, but again with mostly mainstream Evangelical theology.

Since then the movement has diversified, and a significant majority of its practitioners are not of Jewish extraction, but are Gentiles who keep the Law of Moses in one way or another: some according to Jewish oral traditions, and others according to their own, often idiosyncratic, interpretations of the Bible alone. Many are still mostly of mainstream Evangelical theology, but it also has various kinds of non-Trinitarians, people who deny the divinity of Christ, some reject the Epistle to the Hebrews, some reject all the Pauline Epistles, some reject all the New Testament except the Gospel of St. Matthew, while others accept non-canonical books like Jubilees and Enoch. My family and I went through a couple of versions of this during my youth.

Another branch of this movement of which I was unaware until after my conversion is the “Hebrew Catholic” movement. These are Jewish converts to Catholicism who retain elements of their cultural and religious practices which are compatible with their Catholic faith. I’m particularly fond of this movement, though I don’t consider myself a member since I do not have any Jewish ancestry that I know of.

CWR: Is it important to understand the Jewish roots of the Catholic Church?

Wiseman: The short answer is: yes, absolutely. Catholicism is a Temple religion, and the Sacraments are deeply rooted in the ritual, liturgy, and literature of both the First and Second Temples. If you want to understand who Jesus is and what He accomplished, it is extremely helpful to understand Second Temple Judaism. The New Testament and the pre-Nicene Fathers share traditions with the Mishnah, the Midrash, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, and Philo of Alexandria. These traditions are often transmitted to us through the Fathers, as well, through guys like Melito of Sardis and St Clement of Alexandria, but it is terribly helpful to be able to trace those back to the milieu of the Second Temple.

But you do have to be careful, because much of the traditional Jewish material was not written down until the second century A.D. and later. Much of it was formed partly in reaction against Christianity, and occasionally borrowing from Christianity. They both emerge from the same body of traditions, but you have to be careful to distinguish between traditions which can be reliably traced to before the split between Christianity and Judaism, and those which are a later development.

CWR: Some might say that “Jews who accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah” would be a fair way to describe Catholicism. What’s the difference, though?

Wiseman: St. Paul makes it very clear that the Gentiles are accepted into the Church as Gentiles. They are “sons of Abraham,” and members of the “commonwealth of Israel” (Ephesians 2), but as Gentiles, not as Jews. In the New Covenant, the Gentiles are counted as part of the children of Abraham. This is all anticipated in Isaiah, in chapters 56, 60, and 66. We become part of the same Commonwealth, but we are not Jews, that is, members of the Tribe of Judah.

On the other side, not all Jews who accept Jesus as the Messiah are Catholics. There are many who are various kinds of Protestants, and there are even small Messianic groups who reject the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

CWR: One of the Catholic teachings that those outside the Church often grapple with is the issue of authority, specifically teaching authority. What role did the question of authority play in your conversion journey?

Wiseman: It played a huge role, but not in the way you would expect. One of the things that trying to keep the Law of Moses made really clear was the need for an authority structure. If you start trying to observe the Biblical feasts and keep the dietary laws, you start to realize that Moses doesn’t really give all the information that you need some other source of information, and it has to be a higher authority than your personal opinion and wisdom. It had to have the authority to settle disputes and to require obedience. In Judaism, you not only have your rabbinical authority, you even have a religious court called a beit din, “house of judgment,” which has binding legal authority. You need that.

Besides the practical questions, we in the Messianic Movement were deeply divided over doctrinal issues and extremely fragmented. We were adamant that in order to understand the New Testament you had to understand its Jewish context, but there was no authority, either doctrinal or academic, to tell us what elements of that context were relevant to each case, or to show us how to properly apply the context to our understanding. The leaders that we did have were just as deeply divided as the people on these questions. It took a particular kind of arrogance to have any confidence in your claims under these circumstances. A little humility made it very clear that an interpreting authority was necessary, which is what drew many of us to a more traditional, Orthodox Jewish expression of Messianism. It offered that kind of authority in the form of its vast body of oral and written tradition, as well as in the form of living rabbis and religious courts.

So, when I came to the conclusion that our whole Messianic project was untenable, I was already primed to accept a doctrinal and legal authority. There’s a passage in the book where I talk about how immediate the transition from traditional Jewish practice to traditional Catholic practice, where I took off my yarmulke and picked up a rosary. I didn’t necessarily understand the traditions of the Church, but I already accepted the premise of her authority, so I didn’t think I needed to understand in order to obey.

In Judaism, you obey first and understand later, and the understanding follows from the obedience. That attitude came with me into my Catholicism.

CWR: Christians, including Catholics, have not always had the best track record for treatment of Jews, or respect for Judaism as the faith of God’s chosen people. Was this something you struggled with?

Wiseman: It was certainly a point that we raised often in the Messianic Movement. What really helped me, and I couldn’t tell you where this was first pointed out to me or who it was that told me, though I suspect it was my Anglican priest friend Lance, God’s people do not have a great track record of righteous treatment of the weak and poor at any period in its history. The Old Testament is a litany of Israel’s failure to live up to the calling in every possible respect. So is Church history.

St. Augustine talks about it in his Psalm Against the Donatists, and Hilaire Belloc has this delightful line about how a proof of the divine origin of the Catholic Church is that “No merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.” The proof that it is a divine institution is not in the fact that it has flaws on its human, temporal side. King David also fell short, as did Hezekiah and Moses, and Jacob started out as such a rapscallion that it took a couple decades of his uncle relentlessly cheating him to bring him to heel. It is a divine institution because it has Divine Grace.

It didn’t hurt that I discovered that the Church’s flaws had been greatly exaggerated. The supposed massacre of Jews by the crusaders in 1099 almost certainly never happened. And while serious wrongs were certainly committed in 15th century Spain, the scale of them has been greatly exaggerated.

CWR: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

Wiseman: Growing up, we had the impression that knowledge of the Jewish roots of the faith would inevitably lead people to condemn traditional Christianity as a departure from the true faith—misguided though well-meaning at best, or an outright pagan takeover at worst. What I want readers to take from this book is that it was not true at all. A true, deep understanding of the roots of the faith leads right back to the most traditional forms of Christianity.

One thing that didn’t make it into the book because I learned it after my conversion, was the discovery that the Western, Latin musical tradition retains a lot of features, and even a few melodies, that can be traced to the liturgy of the Second Temple. Gregorian chant even has roots that go all the way to ancient Hittite musical texts from the 18th-century BC. That’s the time of Abraham! All of this study of Second Temple Judaism and the Ancient Near East, all of these trips off the beaten track into the back streets of Jerusalem and the backcountry of Judea, ended up in Rome. The thing I had always been told was the most pagan turned out to really be the tradition handed down by the Apostles.

The other thing I want people to take away is that it is a story about my own colossal ignorance. I am not the hero of the story. Christ is. I consistently make pig-headed mistakes based on my lack of knowledge and understanding, and His great mercy uses those misunderstandings to lead me home. It’s not a story about how I’m a genius who figured all of this out; it’s about how God’s providence revealed my own ignorance and insufficiency to me.

The only kind of wisdom I display at all is the kind that Socrates describes: the knowledge that I know nothing, and I save that until the very end when I’m out of other options.

CWR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Wiseman: Read Benedict XVI, especially the Jesus of Nazareth books. I would like to be like him when I grow up. And pray the Psalms. They’re best in the form of the Divine Office, but if that’s too big a commitment, pray them anyway. Pray them somehow. Get a pocket Psalter and pull it out when you’re waiting at the doctor’s, pray one when you get up and one before bed, pray them at meals or during your break at work. You can never pray the Psalms too much.