At the Eighth Street Synagogue: 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Christ and the Torah

It was a daring engagement, even by the Master’s standards. On the evening of November 8, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá entered the Eighth Street Temple in Washington, D.C., to address a congregation of American Jews about Jesus of Nazareth. The pews were full and the air was guarded. In nineteen centuries, very few visitors with His message had been welcomed in such a room.

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He opened by drawing a distinction He had drawn elsewhere across the journey:

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> The divine religions embody two kinds of ordinances. First, there > are those which constitute essential, or spiritual, teachings of > the Word of God.

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The essential teachings — love of God, the unity of the human family, justice, truthfulness — do not change. They appear and reappear in every authentic revelation. The outward ordinances — ritual, dietary law, social custom — *do* change, because the needs of the time change. Religion is dynamic; the divine reality behind it is one.

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Then He named the chain:

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> Abraham was the founder of reality. Moses, Christ, Muḥammad were > the manifestations of reality.

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He reached the heart of the address. The Jewish congregation had inherited the conviction that Christ had been an enemy of Moses. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá took the opposite view, and made it on historical grounds:

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> Through Christ, through the blessing of the New Testament of Jesus > Christ, the Old Testament, the Torah, was translated into six > hundred different tongues and spread throughout the world.

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Without Christianity, He pointed out, the Hebrew Scriptures would have remained the literature of one nation. Through Christianity they became the inheritance of half the human race. To honour Christ, then, is not to dishonour Moses; it is to recognize the hand of Moses in the world’s longest book of faith.

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He closed with a plea:

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> Christians and Jews should have the greatest love for each other > because the Founders of these two great religions have been in > perfect agreement in Book and teaching.

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The room, by all accounts, was changed.

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