Jews and the Divinity of Christ

[binky]

then JESUS THE CHRIST would be their MESSIAH meaning they would still be JEWS / as i read biblical script ( right or wrongly )

it appears JESUS THE CHRIST preached to the JEWS for their salvation and the gift of salvation was extended to the gentiles

 

[Toledo]

Hello, I’ve been reading the forum for years and finally decided to participate.

My question to the Jewish posters here is not whether they believe Jesus is God, but to define what they believe about Jesus.

Was Jesus (as portrayed in the New Testament) a teacher of some local note (regardless of whether he was Divine or not) or was he a literary/cultural creation who didn’t exist? I think most of the posters here agree that he existed, but I have heard the second viewpoint.

If he existed, did he die on the cross as depicted in the Gospels or was he not crucified? Generally most Jewish people I’ve met/discussed this with believe he was crucified.

Next, if he was crucified, was he raised from the dead? Note that this doesn’t necessarily make him God from a Jewish perspective. I think this is the crux discussion point where viewpoints start to vary.

If he did physically rise from the dead (assuming you don’t believe he is God), does that give him special relevance to God? If so, does that make Christianity somewhat important relevant to further developing Jewish beliefs, even if the Christians mistakenly believe Jesus is God?

If he didn’t rise from the dead, how did the earliest Christians begin their beliefs? I’ve come up with the following thoughts and possibilities, let me know if I’ve missed any general categories:

A) God let Jesus appear to his Disciples and Apostles as a vision of some sort? This ties into the previous point of Christianity having some valid development of Jewish beliefs.
B) The immediate followers of Jesus wanted to believe and had a suspension of disbelief and created the Resurrection narrative as the believed this is what God (not necessarily Jesus perhaps) would want them to do.
C) The immediate followers of Jesus with foreknowledge and intent created Christianity as they didn’t want their previous efforts to go to waste. This could imply either positive or negative intentions.

Lastly, the old “Lord, Lunatic, Liar” question - how would that apply to Jesus? He specifically said he was God (unless you believe that was added later as the New Testament books were written). If he isn’t God, did that make him a lunatic (or slightly deluded perhaps) or did he lie and say that to intentionally deceive for his benefit in some way.

No offense meant in any question, I’m wondering what our Jewish friends believe about the man Jesus.

Thanks

Toledo

 

[Wesrock]

Hello, I’ve been reading the forum for years and finally decided to participate.

My question to the Jewish posters here is not whether they believe Jesus is God, but to define what they believe about Jesus.

Was Jesus (as portrayed in the New Testament) a teacher of some local note (regardless of whether he was Divine or not) or was he a literary/cultural creation who didn’t exist? I think most of the posters here agree that he existed, but I have heard the second viewpoint.

If he existed, did he die on the cross as depicted in the Gospels or was he not crucified? Generally most Jewish people I’ve met/discussed this with believe he was crucified.

Next, if he was crucified, was he raised from the dead? Note that this doesn’t necessarily make him God from a Jewish perspective. I think this is the crux discussion point where viewpoints start to vary.

If he did physically rise from the dead (assuming you don’t believe he is God), does that give him special relevance to God? If so, does that make Christianity somewhat important relevant to Jewish beliefs, even if the Christians mistakenly believe Jesus is God?

If he didn’t rise from the dead, how did the earliest Christians begin their beliefs? I’ve come up with the following thoughts and possibilities, let me know if I’ve missed any general categories:

A) God let Jesus appear to his Disciples and Apostles as a vision of some sort? This ties into the previous point of Christianity having some valid development of Jewish beliefs.
B) The immediate followers of Jesus wanted to believe and had a suspension of disbelief and created the Resurrection narrative as the believed this is what God (not necessarily Jesus perhaps) would want them to do.
C) The immediate followers of Jesus with foreknowledge and intent created Christianity as they didn’t want their previous efforts to go to waste. This could imply either positive or negative intentions.

Lastly, the old “Lord, Lunatic, Liar” question - how would that apply to Jesus? He specifically said he was God (unless you believe that was added later as the New Testament books were written). If he isn’t God, did that make him a lunatic (or slightly deluded perhaps) or did he say that to intentionally deceive for his benefit in some way.

No offense meant in any question, I’m wondering what our Jewish friends believe about the man Jesus.

Thanks

Toledo

Truth is, I don’t think most Jews think about Jesus at all. Historical? Myth? Doesn’t really matter to them. That’s what I’ve been told by many, though I’m certain there are outliers.

 

[Toledo]

Wesrock, wouldn’t that be a huge question though? If He’s a fake, sure then He could be irrelevant to Jewish belief. But if He was somehow risen or given as a vision to his followers, wouldn’t that be important for further development of the Jewish faith, even if He wasn’t God?

 

[meltzerboy2]

In Hebrew school, rarely did my rabbi speak of Jesus. When he did, it was only to answer a student’s question about Him. I recall my rabbi said about Jesus (and take this memory for what it’s worth because we’re talking about a time when I was only about 10 years old, and that was close to 60 years ago) that He was a good man, a revered rabbi, but not a prophet (he didn’t call him a false prophet), not the Messiah, and certainly not Gd. He added that the Messiah was supposed to bring peace and harmony to the world but Jesus brought misery and destruction. That was all my rabbi said about Jesus. And, to this day, I have kept that memory (more or less) about Jesus. Sure, afterward, I heard Jews sometimes state He is considered a false prophet (never directly saying He was either a liar, a lunatic, or delusional); but, all in all, very little attention is paid to Jesus, particularly by more religious Jews. I am a Reform Jew basically, and pay somewhat more attention to Jesus than many perhaps. Still, the words of my childhood rabbi remain with me, for the most part. I would add that I regard Jesus as a rather revolutionary rabbi and man, a political leftist, if you will. Not so much a “fulfiller” of Judaism as someone Who wanted to shake up the establishment and modernize the old order and its way of doing things. He judged Judaism rather harshly in an effort to make it more worthy of its holy origins.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Thanks for this, Wesrock. It reminds me of a Talmudic argument.

 

[Pattylt]

I’ll bite because I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking through my beliefs.

I do not completely rule out the possibility of Jesus being a Pesher type construct read out of the OT. I have little problem visualizing some very charismatic Jews interpreting scripture to tell of an exalted angel having come to earth or the lower heavens to die and resurrect for mankind that later was brought to earth as stories of a real man that accomplished this. This is the Richard Carrier version.

However, I think it is much more likely that a real man walked the earth and gathered followers which later became the Gospels and Paul’s beliefs. He lived and preached a coming judgement of the earth, upset a whole bunch of people and wound up getting crucified by Pontius Pilot.

I do not believe He physically rose from the dead. I think the original followers believed He was somehow spiritually elevate by God which evolved into a physical resurrection.

Why did Christianity take off? When the Jews realized that there was no way to overcome the might of the Roman Empire they will look for a spiritual way to feel vindicated. We can’t beat Rome now but justice will be served in the next life. This evolution of spiritual vindication has been shown to happen in other situations like the Jews were facing. Many Jews already believed in an afterlife and had martyrs that had died to vindicate their sins and believed in resurrection. Those we’re the Jews that were ripe for a shift in Jewish beliefs.

C.S. Lewis’ liar, lunatic or lord leaves out the best explanation for me…legend. Stories were told and retold and added to and enhanced until the Gospels were written. The process even continued after the Gospels…Infancy Gospel, Gospel of Peter and many more. There were many Christianity’s circulating in the first 150 years until the proto Orthodox became the winners(so to speak) and determined the beliefs and condemned the heresies, putting together what agreed with their beliefs into a Canon. Secular NT scholarship agrees with this scenario in general. It isn’t what Catholics believe but I do. These proto Orthodox became the Orthodox and Catholic Church.

Well, you asked! Hope this helps somehow?

 

[niceatheist]

Wesrock, wouldn’t that be a huge question though? If He’s a fake, sure then He could be irrelevant to Jewish belief. But if He was somehow risen or given as a vision to his followers, wouldn’t that be important for further development of the Jewish faith, even if He wasn’t God?

You do understand there were Jews at the time of Christ’s execution, right? Some of them became Christians, but it was a small number compared to the number of Jews in Judea, the Roman province of Palestine, and the large number of ex-pat Jewish communities all over the Roman Empire. Those that remained Observant and Hellenic Jews for the most part, while likely accepting that Jesus existed, did not put much stock in the stories of his miracles or of his resurrection. The Jews you see today are by and large the descendants of the First Century Jews whose religious beliefs survived the destruction of the Temple, and still persisted in remaining religiously observant Jews (though even after the Romans knocked the Temple down, adherents to the Jewish faith were hardly homogeneous in their beliefs).

The sentiment underlying your post is the sentiment that bedeviled the first generations of Christians, which confused Early Christians, which angered Medieval Christianity to varying degrees, which rendered Martin Luther apoplectic (he seemed to think that with his new and improved Christianity 2.0, the Jews would just come flocking into Lutheran churches, because they’d been waiting 1500 years for Christianity to be fixed), and lead to a whole lot of misery for European Jews for centuries afterwards.

Simply put, Jews were left with no doubt as to the importance of Jesus, seeing as so many of them were persecuted and even murdered for the high crimes of having some nebulous relation to some cranky First Century Jewish ideologues in Jerusalem, and refusing to accept the Gospels as, how shall I put it, the gospel truth on the matter of Jesus Christ. Jews who remained observant didn’t accept that Jesus was any more than a holy man (of genuine or dubious origins), certainly didn’t accept the evolving nature of Christian thought on the nature of God, hence rejecting Trinitarian notions of God, and thus felt no compulsion (beyond forced conversions here and there) to give up their religious beliefs to what they viewed as an alien belief system that Christology represented to them.

 

[meltzerboy2]

I can agree with this. It’s in the domain of legend, as you say, myth (but not falsehood), and the evolution of ideas, which, both in Christianity and Judaism, continue to the present day. Just as Judaism had not been born fully grown, so too Catholicsm and Orthodox. There were most probably many Christianities, as there were many Judaisms. No, it’s not what many Catholics (or Jews) like to hear, but it makes sense from a historical perspective.

 

[niceatheist]

There certainly were many Christianities, most of which were either declared heretical or were far away from the Roman Empire, and thus out of the range of Constantine and his heirs. There was never one Christianity, though, up until the Great Schism of 1054, it could be said most Christians were at least nominally united as “Chalcedonian” for about 600 years (and a lot longer, in reality, since Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and most strains of Protestantism remain fundamentally Chalcedonian in character).

 

[AlNg]

“Nor the Son” actually isn’t included in all manuscripts.

Still, it reads the Father alone knows the day or the hour. That would be one Person, the Father alone, or in other versions, only the Father. But the Son as God and as Divine should know the day or the hour, even though it may be true that his human knowledge did not extend to that.

 

[Isearch]

Christ listed men, angels, and the Father in the Olivet Discourse (assuming the Son wasn’t included in the other ancient manuscripts). Among these, only the Father knows the Day and Hour.

But if the Son were indeed included in the original manuscripts, the words “only the Father knows” would have to mean: the Father’s only intellect, which is uncreated, knows the Day and Hour, as opposed to the created intellects of men, angels, and the Son.

 

[Kaninchen]

I’m wondering what our Jewish friends believe about the man Jesus.

I think that arguing about whether ‘Jesus’ existed, or not, is pretty futile.

Q: Was there an itinerant rabbi of rather pharisaic views who lies behind the NT figure of Jesus?
A: Very likely.

Q: Was the figure of the Gospels, with views as expounded/expanded by Paul, ‘real’?
A: No, that’s a figure in a story, a powerful story with common themes but a literary character, nevertheless.

In other words, the ‘NT’ isn’t reportage, it’s a construction.

Lastly, the old “Lord, Lunatic, Liar” question - how would that apply to Jesus?

Not Lord, not Lunatic, not a liar, just a character in a story.

 

[Toledo]

Thanks for all the responses; I appreciate the time you took to type out your beliefs.

 

[karolinebeth]

Actually, some Jews do! My cousin married a Jewish man who was initially an atheist. He became a believer in Christ and a Messianic Jewish rabbi. He’s had a messianic Jewish congregation in Rochester NY for a few decades now. Not to be confused with Jews for Jesus.

 

[Cheryl66]

Because the concept is completly anti Torah
G’d is not a man
G’d has no image
It is forbidden to even imagine an image
So not put an image on my face

Second the moshiah is not Gd
He will be a king that serves G’d
Infact the whole moshiah includes the nation of Israel
So yes the moshia is here
It is Israel

 

[AlNg]

So yes the moshia is here
It is Israel

The moshia is Israel??? Why did the moshia kill so many children in Lebanon and in Gaza? Children were just standing outside their houses in southern Lebanon in 2006 and they were killed on the spot by the moshia?
Please watch the movie: Sous les bombes or Under the bombs:

Under the Bombs (2007)

 

[Cheryl66]

Don’t attack Israel
Israel won’t respond
Simple
Read your Bible