I am writing this response to a YouTube video circulating widely on the internet in in which Eddie Long, the troubled pastor of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta GA is apparently crowned king with the ritual use of a Jewish Torah scroll. (The reader may know him for the recent scandal in which he was accused by five young men of sexual misconduct. After initially denying the allegations, he went into settlement talks with them.) A number of specious claims are made during the ritual which I would like to refute.

The unidentified man who, (in the YouTube video to which I had access he is identified subsequently as Ralph Messer), represents himself as a Jew. He may well be some sort of Messianic Jew, a person who claims Jewish heritage and recognizes Jesus as the Son of God, but who is not part of one of the major Jewish movements: Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, Renewal. He does not, however, represent recognizable Jewish thought or practice in his (mis-) representations of the Torah and other Jewish sancta -- or for that matter, New Testament and Christian biblical interpretation and theology.