Help for my crisis of faith: Inquiries about Judaism

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Greetings,

I have a couple of questions. I am a Roman Catholic but has recently started to doubt Christianity in general.
  1. We claim that Catholicism is right and that the Protestants are wrong when it comes to interpreting the New Testament since the Church leaders are successors of Christ’s Apostles and that the NT itself was compiled by the Church.
However, why do we say that Judaism is wrong in interpreting the prophecies about the Messiah, the nature of the One True God, the observance of Moses’ law, atonement of sins, the nature of Satan, and afterlife if the Old Testament of our Bible came from them and they have the authority to implement and interpret them (Moses’ seat)?

Are we not doing to Jews what Protestants are doing to Catholics? That our interpretation is correct and the ones who were originally right are now wrong? Protestants claim that the Catholics got the Gospels wrong the same way the Catholics claim that the Jews made a mistake about interpreting the Old Testament?
  1. Why die God allow the Jews to be taught strictly from childhood that there is One True God without hinting about multiple persons and provide stories of God punishing His people when they try to worship other gods, and then expect them to accept Jesus as God? The Jews were even taught how to recognize a false prophet: by checking if he is making people not observe the Torah, even if that person could perform miracles.
Just imagine, as a Catholic, we were taught that we have the right understanding of the Eucharist, the Sacraments, Salvation, etc. so when a Protestant tells us something different from what we have been strictly taught, we can reject his or her teachings.

Isn’t that what happened to the Jews? They heard the teachings of Christ’s disciples as foreign from what they have been taught about God so they rejected Christianity? Isn’t that why the majority of the Jews rejected Jesus but the Gentile world, whose people were not as knowledgeable as the Jews about the Old Testament, were more ready to accept Christ? Just like a cafeteria Catholic would be more ready to accept protestant teachings compared to a traditional Catholic?
Thank you in advance for your response and please pray for me.
 
This sounds like something you should talk to a priest about or even the head of RCIA. I wish I knew the answer for you and you have very good questions. Hopefully someone well knowledgable can answer it here for you but just in case they miss your question or don’t know…then definitly reach out to the ones i mentioned above.
 
I’ll try to help,
Nowhere are the people in Moses’ seat said to be able to speak infallibly. Also some of the targums (commentaries on the Old Testament) show that some prophecies that later Jews said didnt refer to the Messiah were considered by Jews of that time to be messianic. And the Jewish leaders dont have any Spiritual authority in the New Covenant anymore.

There are hints in the Old Testament of the Trinity, like God speaking in Plural for example when he says “let us Make man”, then we know he’s not speaking to the angels because the didnt help in the Creation of Man. I think its in the Haydock Bible commentary for Genesis 1 where he quotes another person (Maybe Calmet) who says the Jews weren’t required to believe the Trinity because they were prone to idolatry. Correct me if I’ve said anything wrong.

Thanks

God Bless
 
The Catholic Church does not denigrate our Jewish brothers and sisters in fact if one reads great books like A Biblical Walk Through The Mass you will very quickly see that we draw most of our liturgy from our Jewish background.

The fact that we differ as to the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity are New Testament differences that are the result of the advent, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I can only suggest that you read the Bible and particularly the New Testament and see if that does not resolve your thinking.

Many Protestants have varying levels of truth in their teachings and a great deal of error in their Biblical interpretations and no one in authority to set them straight as the New Testament plainly tells us the church should. That’s vastly different than the differences between us Catholics and our Jewish friends.
 
rabbitdonkey said:
I’ll try to help,
Nowhere are the people in Moses’ seat said to be able to speak infallibly. Also some of the targums (commentaries on the Old Testament) show that some prophecies that later Jews said didnt refer to the Messiah were considered by Jews of that time to be messianic. And the Jewish leaders dont have any Spiritual authority in the New Covenant anymore.

There are hints in the Old Testament of the Trinity, like God speaking in Plural for example when he says “let us Make man”, then we know he’s not speaking to the angels because the didnt help in the Creation of Man. I think its in the Haydock Bible commentary for Genesis 1 where he quotes another person (Maybe Calmet) who says the Jews weren’t required to believe the Trinity because they were prone to idolatry. Correct me if I’ve said anything wrong.

Thanks

God Bless
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This response is actually a great one, especially the part about the Jewish leaders not being considered infallible unlike the Catholic Church’s Magisterium.

I’ll reflect on it and post again later on.

Thanks for the help.
 
The acceptableness of Christianity’s reinterpretation of Jewish Scriptures and Christianity’s more developed understanding of the one God, as three distinct but inseparable divine persons, ultimately rests on the divine approval evidenced by Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead. As St Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:14)

As far as I know, Protestant reinterpretation of Catholic Scriptures has no such divine approval and the bodies of all so-called Protestant Reformers are still very dead.
 
The modern religion that calls itself “Judaism” is ** not** the religion of the Old Testament or the time of Jesus. That religion perished temporally in AD 70 when the Temple was destroyed. Modern Judaism is based on the Talmud, a collection of Jewish oral traditions and commentary on them. The Talmud contains horrible blasphemy against Christ and His Blessed Mother.
 
I would like to thank everyone for their help, especially to rabbitdonkey, your post has enlightened me. Thanks be to God.
 
I can’t recommend highly enough the talks by Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God (formally Rosalind Moss, Jewish convert).

There are lots of talks of hers. Start with her conversion stories on YouTube and you could progress to listening to her radio programme, Heart to Heart with Mother Miriam (Listen online at Immaculate Heart radio). You will not be disappointed and will, I’m sure, fall in love with his beautiful soul and warrior for Christ.
 
Michael85 said:
The modern religion that calls itself “Judaism” is ** not** the religion of the Old Testament or the time of Jesus. That religion perished temporally in AD 70 when the Temple was destroyed. Modern Judaism is based on the Talmud, a collection of Jewish oral traditions and commentary on them. The Talmud contains horrible blasphemy against Christ and His Blessed Mother.
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This is true, and even the Jewish scripture was modified, so a priest told me recently, to ‘de-Christianise’ it (i.e. the prophesies).
 
Old Testament Judaism doesn’t exist anymore. It was destroyed along with the Temple in 70 AD. All the sacrifices required to be performed at the Temple haven’t been performed for 1953 years.

Jews today follow the Talmud, which is their interpretation of the Old Testament that was written centuries after the New Testament. So Christianity is actually older than modern Judaism.

Plus, Judaism today is ultimately based on Kabbalah, which was invented much, much later and is obviously based on Neoplatonism, and basically a syncretism of esoteric Hermeticism with a magical interpretation of the Old Testament.
 
Michael85 said:
The modern religion that calls itself “Judaism” is ** not** the religion of the Old Testament or the time of Jesus. That religion perished temporally in AD 70 when the Temple was destroyed. Modern Judaism is based on the Talmud, a collection of Jewish oral traditions and commentary on them. The Talmud contains horrible blasphemy against Christ and His Blessed Mother.
Click to expand...
This is incorrect. The Talmud does NOT contain “blasphemy against Christ and His Blessed Mother.” Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially by anti-Semitic groups such as Stormfront! So-called modern Judaism is in DIRECT LINE from the Judaism of the Ancient Hebrews, mainly in the Pharasaic tradition. Orthodox Jews, in particular, believe the Oral Torah or Talmud was given to Moses and the Jewish people together with the Written Torah. The commentaries written in the Talmud came later since the Talmud is divided into two parts: the Mishnah (Oral Law and tradition) and the Gemara (rabbinical commentaries on the Law). Further, there are different versions of the Talmud, but each is a codification of the (Oral) Law.
 
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