Name:Tara •
Title: Jesus was Jewish •
Date posted: 03/06/07 2:24
Q: I really would love if people would dicuss the fat the Jesus was Jewish, and that there was a time when people followed both the Jewish tradition, and the word of Jesus.
There is a lot of history to support this, and I can't help but wonder if an understanding of Jewish tradition might help us understand this better.
I have learned alot from the site so far, but I believe there is so much more.
Name:samepstein •
Date: 03/06/07 20:00
A: I am Roman Catholic and my husband is Jewish. We agreed to raise our children as Catholics but we still participate in Hannukah and Passover. It is very "eye opening." I love the fact that during Sader we are reliving a lot of the last supper. I love learning about my husband's religion b/c I believe it brings me closer to Jesus. It is how he lived his life.
Jesus did not want anyone to be judgemental and I think many christians forget this. If you read through this site people are not only criticizing non-believers but also Catholocism and other christian denominations. It is very sad.
Learning more about the tomb and its possibilities is not a sin.
Name:Jack D Viau •
Date: 03/07/07 5:11
A: Jesus did not cling to faith in God as would a struggling soul at war with the universe and at death grips with a hostile and sinful world; he did not resort to faith merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a comfort in threatened despair;
faith was not just an illusory compensation for the unpleasant realities and the sorrows of living. In the very face of all the natural difficulties and the temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he experienced the tranquillity of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very presence of the heavenly Father. And this triumphant faith was a living experience of actual spirit attainment.
Jesus' great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of living faith in God.
Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of any one mortal, did God ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus' devotion to the Father's will and the service of man was even more than mortal decision and human determination; it was a wholehearted consecration of himself to such an unreserved bestowal of love. No matter how great the fact of the his sovereignty , you must not take the human Jesus away from men.
The Master has ascended on high as a man, as well as God; he belongs to men; men belong to him. How unfortunate that religion itself should be so misinterpreted as to take the human Jesus away from struggling mortals! Let not the discussions of the humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure the saving truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith, achieved the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most truly religious man who has ever lived on the Planet.
The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions!
Surely the Christian fellowship of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices of living as will enable it to "follow after" the Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father's will and of consecration to the unselfish service of man.
Do professed Christians fear the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment?
Does institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.
At the time of the writing of the New Testament, the authors not only most profoundly believed in the divinity of the risen Christ, but they also devotedly and sincerely believed in his immediate return to earth to consummate the heavenly kingdom. This strong faith in the Lord's immediate return had much to do with the tendency to omit from the record those references which portrayed the purely human experiences and attributes of the Master. The whole Christian movement tended away from the human picture of Jesus of Nazareth toward the exaltation of the risen Christ, the glorified and soon-returning Lord Jesus Christ.
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/07/07 7:14
A: Actually, I've discussed this a bit in various places. An understanding of Jewish culture is quite helpful for studying the New Testament and a lot of the material in the gospels is much easier to understand if you have a grasp of the history of the inter-testimental period.
One problem, however, is that the Jewish tradition isn't static, and a lot of it wasn't written down until well after the Christian era; I think there is some evidence to indicate that Christianity itself brought about some changes in Jewish belief and practice as well. A second problem is the sources available. First century Judaism seems to have been far less unified in its interpretations than it is now. We have two primary sets of sources, the first are the theological descendants of the Pharisees who wrote the Talmud, and other works. Most of these were from the school of Hillel, I think the evidence of the New Testament might indicate that a competing school of Pharisees may have been more common in the first century, however. The second is the Qumran texts (more popularly known as the dead sea scrolls). These come from a rather obscure sect of aesetic Jews known as Essenes, who essentially felt all the rest of the Jews were appostates (they considered the Pharisees to lax in their religious practices). They preserved a lot of things, some Biblical manuscripts (the oldest extant copies of every book of the Old Testament but the book of Esther, a few of which seem to be related to the texts the Septuagent was translated from, documents that would probably have been common to most Jews, and their own internal works and commentaries). Its useful info, but you have to do some double checking, etc., when you use it.
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/07/07 7:21
A: One other source I missed (getting late), and that is the historian Josephus. He was a Pharisee who basically sided with the Romans early in the war. However, his works are primarily historical, and in some places they are pretty self-serving. He's useful in understanding the Pharisees, but a lot of people question some of his information about other sects - I think he's more honest than dishonest on the whole, but he claims to have had personal experience with all of these groups and some of that experience seems far-fetched.
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/07/07 7:56
A: As for Christians in Judaism, Christians were forced out of the synagogues between AD 70-90. The first person to cite a difference between Christianity and Judaism is the apostle Paul in AD 49 (a lot of scholars date this to between 54-56), this is found in Galatians 1:13-14, though he doesn't completely disavow his connection to being Jewish (Romans 9:1-3, Romans 11:1-2). Most people think of Paul in association with Greek Christians (and some consider him to have been anti-semitic). However, curiously enough, he indicates in several places that Jewish Christians should still remain observant - his contention with the party that would later be known as the Ebionites was about the efficacy of the law and its application to gentile converts. He also circumcised one of his two major students (Timothy, who had a Jewish mother and a Greek father), but did not circumcise the other (Titus, was a Greek). Ultimately, the Ebionites seem to have broken ties with the rest of the Christian community over this issue.
The first era of persecution, however, was also done by the Jewish authorities (Paul, for example states he was working for the Sanhedrin when he was a persecutor), but this wasn't true of all. It seems like the Jewish Christians were the source of a lot of dissention and strife within the Jewish community. This seems to have included some economic discrimination, and Paul in several letters notes the need to collect money for the poor believers who were suffering through a famine in Jerusalem, and seemed to have a problem buying food with the resultant inflated prices. Tacitus indicates that the Jews were expelled from Rome by Claudius in AD 50 due to this strife, so it must have been pretty volitle.
The Roman authorities seem to have assumed that Christians were simply a sect of Judaism (due, in part to a ruling recorded in Acts 18:13-17 by an important Roman official). Under Domitian we have records from Christians of a persecution, where no Roman records record a specifically Christian persecution. However, the archeological evidence indicates that Christians were persecuted and this may be connected to Domitian's anti-Jewish policies which included persecution of Jews, and Christians were probably included.
Name:Historian •
Date: 03/07/07 16:42
A: Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, and died a Jew. He said, if you will forgive me from departing slightly from the King James Bible interpretation of the original archaic Greek, "I came not to change the law, but to strengthen it." Jesus never intended to harm Judaism, only to transform it into a more warm and loving way of life. He never contemplated a church in his name. Today, there are many "Christian Jews" who attend the Synagogue faithfully, but temper their religion with the principles that Jesus taught. They may be closer to the truth than any of us.
Name:samepstein •
Date: 03/07/07 17:05
A: Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, and died a Jew. He said, if you will forgive me from departing slightly from the King James Bible interpretation of the original archaic Greek, "I came not to change the law, but to strengthen it." Jesus never intended to harm Judaism, only to transform it into a more warm and loving way of life. He never contemplated a church in his name. Today, there are many "Christian Jews" who attend the Synagogue faithfully, but temper their religion with the principles that Jesus taught. They may be closer to the truth than any of us.
This is wonderful and thank you. I will refer back to this when my children start asking questions. Well said!!!
Also, to Jack D Viau - also wonderful! Jesus was a wonderful person (and I believe the messiah as well) but christians seem to forget this or simply do not want to think of him like this.
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/07/07 18:49
A: Historian, your translation is impossible from the Greek.
Name:Achaney •
Date: 03/15/07 22:48
A: I got to agree with Historian on this. But, if there is anybody I would choose to follow, I would follow myself. "Ye are Gods"
Name:Anel •
Date: 03/19/08 16:00
A: Hi, I have read all comments, and I want to say something very important. First Yashua was born in Israel, so his name is hebrew, no greek as Jesus (Je-Zeus) see youtube/search word je zeus.
Second, We must consider that the woman with the beast is Rome (The vatican) see the page www.worldslastchance.com.
Third, The masons or well-known as illuminati are a secretc society, which want to governate the world since ancient times. It's very possible they have profane the tomb of Yashua before it had been found by you..
So, if we consider the big lier of Vatican church (with all its economical power) they might have re-order the tomb adding others things... in order to despreciate to Yashua. Think about it. .... A woman called "maria magdalena" loved so much. She was consider as a "lost woman". Why in the book of revelation speaks about a woman with a beast? Then our sorprais !! Yashua was married with a woman who loved so much???
When it supposed he and his talmidim knew all this, so they decide to move his body in order to avoid something....
Name:Chanoch •
Date: 03/26/08 2:48
A: Jesus wasn't Jewish. The person that Christians (and much of the rest of the world) are attempting to refer to was known as Yeshua Ben Yosef, a jew. There is nothing Jewish about the name Jesus and nothing Christian about Yeshua. When are people going to awake from their unconciousness and realize the truth? For more about that discussion, you can read a two page article at http://blog.aynsof.com. As for the entire Judeo-Christian Fiction, go get Rabbi Gershon Winkler's book by that same name.
