Conversion of the Jews (future event)

[3] Pope Benedict XVI in his book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week[4] (2011) has suggested that the church should not be targeting Jews for conversion efforts, since "Israel is in the hands of God, who will save it ‘as a whole’ at the proper time.

Under Spener's successor, August Hermann Francke, the German Pietists from their base at the University of Halle developed sophisticated approaches to Jewish evangelism.

[11][page needed] It was this Pietist influence that impacted British evangelicals in the early 19th century and was clearly behind the establishment of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews in 1809.

Henry Archer, for example, in his 1642 work The Personall Reigne of Christ Upon Earth, predicted the conversion of the Jews to occur in the 1650s, 1290 years (a number derived from Daniel 12:11) after Julian the Apostate.

...A 2011 retranslation now reads: Let us pray also for the Jewish people, to whom the Lord our God spoke first, that he may grant them to advance in love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant... Almighty ever-living God, who bestowed your promises on Abraham and his descendants, hear graciously the prayers of your Church, that the people you first made your own may attain the fullness of redemption....The Directory of Public Worship approved by the Westminster Assembly states that a prayer is to be made for the conversion of the Jews.

The service of Vespers on Great Friday in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Catholic churches uses the expression "impious and transgressing people",[20] but the strongest expressions are in the Orthros of Great Friday, which includes the same phrase,[21] but also speaks of "the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews"[22] and referring to "the assembly of the Jews", prays: "But give them, O Lord, their reward, for they devised vain things against Thee.

"The Conversion of the Jews" is the title of a 1958 short story by Philip Roth, in his collection Goodbye, Columbus, about a Jewish youth, Oscar (Ozzie), who threatens to jump off his synagogue's roof unless his rabbi, mother, and co-religionists state that God could, should he wish to, make a son miraculously, without the common method of intercourse.