Was Jesus Jewish?

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I have often heard people say that Jesus was Jewish, yet I can’t help but wonder how He could be Jewish since He is God. It would seem to me that Jesus did not have a religious faith because He was God.
 
I agree, religion is something humans have and not the God-man.

However, as a shorthand way of saying ‘Jesus observed most of the Torah, kept all the Jewish feasts, went to synagogue, was circumcised, otherwise pretty much lived as a Jew, etc etc’, then it’s OK to say He was Jewish.
 
Of course he was an observant Jew.

Helps to read the source material.
 
Devoutly Jewish. In fact, he was the most perfect Jew who ever lived because he was the author of the Law. He not only lived by the Law, he also revealed the Law in it’s beautiful entirety.
 
As Jesus Himself said He came to fulfill the law.

Yes Jesus was most certainly Jewish.
 
He was a Jew and came to fulfill the Jewish Law. What I wonder are we now the new Jews? I mean Jesus fulfilled the Jewish Law and opened it up to all mankind so would people in his Church be Jewish? Christians/Catholic/Orthodox are all manmade names so my thoughts are what does Jesus (God) look at us as?

Kinds weird questions I know! 😊
 
Yes, he was Jewish, born to Jewish woman, who followed the precepts of the Jewish Law, went to the Temple, and became a Rabbi. When he began to preach, he preached to Jews. His Apostles were Jews, his followers were Jews.

He was the Jewish Messiah, who followed and perfected the old covenant, finally opening it to all. The 1st Century Roman government considered the new Christians to be merely a Jewish sect.

When Gentiles began to be converted in large numbers, one of the first questions that had to be settled was whether or not they had to follow the Jewish law in order to become Christians. That was settled at the Council of Jerusalem. They didn’t, because as followers of Christ they were perfectly incorporated into salvation history going back to Abraham and to Adam.
 
Why would anyone doubt this?

“Salvation is from the Jews” --Words of our Lord in John 4:22

“They are Israelites; theirs the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; theirs the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Messiah.” --Romans 9:4-5

We, in the Church, are the new Israel of God!

In this year of St. Paul, let us re-acquaint ourselves with this Truth and the corresponding Pauline teaching and terminology.

God bless,

Fr. Boyd
 
brigantine said:
He was a Jew and came to fulfill the Jewish Law. What I wonder are we now the new Jews? I mean Jesus fulfilled the Jewish Law and opened it up to all mankind so would people in his Church be Jewish? Christians/Catholic/Orthodox are all manmade names so my thoughts are what does Jesus (God) look at us as?

Kinds weird questions I know! 😊
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Technically speaking the Catholic Faith is the continuation of Judaism in the light of the coming of the Messiah and the Incarnation. From our perspective we are the “real Jews” who have maintained the true Covenant with God.

The writings of the Apostles makes this explicitely clear, saying that those who followed what would become Rabbinical Judaism (what we typically refer to as Judaism today) were not really carrying on the true Jewish tradition (Revelation 2:9, Romans 11), and were in fact breaking with the Faith. Obviously those people and their spiritual descendants disagree with this assessment, and regard us as the “fallen branches”.

Historically speaking we can speak of the divergence between Apostolic Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism as a split in the single Jewish religion (which is exactly how it was understood from all sides at the time of Christianity’s emergence), rather than two seperate Faiths. To put it in a modern perspective, it would be as if the Lubavitcher Orthdox Jews firmly acted on the belief that the Messiah had come, and began the process of bringing the Gentiles to the Faith (as is supposed to occur with the coming of the Messiah). The Apostolic Christians could be viewed, historically speaking, as an ancient analog to the modern Chabad movement.

Peace and God bless!
 
Also don’t forget that Jesus was a fully human person - the second divine Person of the Trinity, but with a fully intact humanity that included a human soul with the mental processes that come with it. Thus it is not completely inappropriate to attribute to him human virtues like faith and hope, although they have to be understood in a different way in light of His already possessing their perfection. Think of it this way: faith is the knowledge of things hoped for, but would you be nitpicky enough to say that there are no Christians in heaven because, seeing what they have hoped for, they no longer have “religious faith”?
 
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