SID: Hello, Sid Roth here with Dr. Michael Brown, we just found out that Michael went off his drugs instantly. His Jewish parents thought it was wonderful, but they did what every good Jewish parents would, even a secular Jewish parent does, they marched him off to the rabbi, the rabbi said to Dr. Brown, you don’t even know Hebrew and you are telling me. Dr. Brown says yes, but I’ve been touched by God, I’ve seen God heal in the name of Jesus, you don’t know Rabbi, so you went, you took the challenge, you studied Hebrew, now I have a question for you, I know that you have a great deal of the Jewish scriptures memorized, in Hebrew, I have a favorite passage that was written some 800 years before Jesus came to earth, it is Isaiah 53, could you look in the camera and share just a few paragraphs in Hebrew?
MICHAEL: Well sure, it starts at Isaiah 52:13: Hebrew: Behold my servant will act wise and he will prosper and he will be high and exalted, lifted up and seen. Hebrew: Many were astonished, his visage was marred beyond that of a man, he was so disfigured Sid, that he didn’t even look like a man. And it goes on, this wonderful verse, one of my favorites in all of the Hebrew Scriptures, it starts with the words “all of us” and it ends with the words “all of us.” Isaiah 53:6: Hebrew. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the guilt of all of us. Sid, the most amazing thing that happened to me was not being healed of hives, or being touched by God in other things; the guilt left my life, the sense that I was guilty in God’s sight because of my sin, it left in a moment of time, and I knew I was right with God. Sid, here is what happens, the local Rabbi brings me to ultra-orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1973, and man they are serious, they pray every day, they are seeking to live holy lives, they seem devoted to God just like the people in my church that I am going to, except they are Jewish, I mean they look right, it looks like Moses with long beard the way you picture it.
SID: I would picture them the most from religious people in town.
MICHAEL: Yeah and here I am in a church? I mean at that point I used to memorize twenty verses a day, I had memorized probably in the previous six/seven months four thousand verses or so. I could, man I could out quote anybody (from the King James Bible) I sit down with them and I quote and they go, oh those English translations, they are just – they weren’t being nasty, they are just saying ah they are not good. So they get the Hebrew out and they said can you read? I remembered a few letters from my Bar Mitzvah. See in my Bar Mitzvah, this is the way it is for many Jews, and our Christian friends listening need to realize most Jews in America are not religious, most Jews in America don’t know the Bible well, and even religious Jews do not
have the relationship with God, the intimacy, the encounter that we have. But here they opened their Bibles, they start to show me the Hebrew and they said, “Can you follow along.” Now I feel like a kindergartener Sid, I mean I have met with God but I feel intimidated, and these nice guys are trying to read along letter for letter with me in the Hebrew. What am I supposed to say? So I thought okay, I know God has changed my life, but they are asking solid questions. I need to get answers and I need to get answers in a way that I don’t have to rely on anybody else. I don’t have to rely on a dictionary or a commentary; I can study it for myself. After all, doesn’t God want us to know his word? I mean where does it ever say in his scriptures, if you want to understand the Bible go to the rabbi, go to the priest, go to the pastor, doesn’t it say, “Seek me and live?” Isn’t that what God said to our people, scatter?
SID: We have done the God by-pass.
MICHAEL: Yeah, look, the middle ages the Catholic Church didn’t want people to have the Bible in its own language, you know to this day people think well I, who am I to understand the Bible. I once talked to a Yeshiva kid, you know, religious Jewish teenager, and he said I can’t rely on my own understanding, you are right; I have to ask the rabbi. I said no, God says wherever you are scattered around the world, “Seek me and live.” So I had to dig into the scriptures on my own and I honestly told God this, I said if traditional Judaism is right and everything I believed up till now is wrong, and I have to leave the church, leave my friends, leave my fiancé, I will do it to follow you God. But if Jesus is the Messiah as I believe, I don’t’ care what happens to me and what the Jewish community thinks about me, I am going to follow you, I want to follow you and your truth regardless of the cost or consequences. You see many people raised religiously never pray that. Many people who are raised in tradition, or they are just, “well we never believe that.”
SID: It’s called a “don’t think for themselves.”
MICHAEL: They don’t think for themselves. Look I –
SID: Listen, we Jews, of whom we both happen to be Jewish, we Jews pride ourselves if you will, on thinking for ourselves in every arena of life except one, and that is, how come I don’t’ have intimacy with God, I follow what the rabbi says or I didn’t, you still don’t have intimacy with God, there is something missing, I will tell you what is missing, Jesus, it is that simple.
SID: Now Michael, you wrote a book which is wonderful, it is called “What Do Jewish People Think about Jesus” and other questions. It is sort of like every question you would like to go to your rabbi and ask and you don’t even have a rabbi, you are not even Jewish. But for instance, let’s take the New Testament, it you read the New Testament through Jewish eyes will you get a different spin on it than reading it through King James eyes?
MICHAEL: Listen; let’s just think of this, if I said, Jesus Christ the Son of Mary, that sounds very catholic, very Christian, very gentile. If I say Yeshua, the Messiah, the son of Marion, suddenly it sounds different. If I say Abraham, Isaac and James, oh you are mixing religions, no in the New Testament the letter James or any of the apostles named James, the Greek says Jacob. In the days before King James it got changed, I document that right there in the book, how we got from Jacob to James.
SID: Why did they change and gentilize it rather than letting it be a Jewish book?
MICHAEL: It happened from the way it went from Greek to Latin to English, it just got changed so now it is the Letter of James the Servant of Jesus Christ as opposed to the Letter of Jacob Servant of Yeshua the Messiah. Suddenly even those little cosmetic changes, things start to feel different as you read it. You guys wait, wait, this is not some foreign book, this is not some alien book, this breathes the very spirit that was breathed by Moses and the prophets. When we read now, Jesus, Yeshua saying that he came to fulfill what was written in Moses and the prophets, hey, this makes sense, and they called him Rabbi, not reverend.
SID: And you know what I find real interesting, great confusion on the Biblical festivals versus the Christian festivals, the Sabbath on Saturday versus the Sabbath on Sunday, if you just understood your Jewish roots you would have good, honest answers to these questions. And that is why Dr. Brown wrote this book. How many years of research would you say went into this?
MICHAEL: It is kind of a lifetime, I just put it together for this, but these are things I have studied on and off for several decades.
SID: We are going to find out what the real Sabbath is.
