greyline

Jews for Judaism answers the question here:
http://www.jewsforjudaism.org/web/faq/faq123.html

I have also just read (on another board) some posts by a well-educated Jew who is adamant that Jews do not believe in original sin and that their religion does not focus around the "messiah" (to them it means annointed one, ie. a king), and that this messiah when he does come will be 100% man. The idea of God becoming man is, again, foreign to them.

This is kind of tough for Christians to accept because it begs the question - where did the early Christians get all their new theology from? Certainly it doesn't follow from the OT and nor did Jesus talk about it in the terms the Church ended up establishing.

Anat

Man's sinful nature can mean several very different things. In Jewish thought it is generally interpreted as man having a tendency to sin, as opposed to the Christian view that man is already tainted with sin at birth. The difference in subtle but significant.

Anat

I don't know how it felt to people of those times, but I see a significant difference between everlasting shame and everlasting torture.

greyline

... especially since Christianity stands or falls on the idea that we need to be saved from that inborn taint of sin or face everlasting damnation.

If that sin was never there to begin with - Jesus' death becomes irrelevant (and not even he said that was the purpose of his death).

Decypher

What do you mean exactly?

It would be impossible for anyone to fulfill every law in the Torah, because they would never all apply to any particular person.

What laws do apply, may not be kept perfectly of course, but the Torah provides ways to atone for sin so apparently it wasn't expected.

TomboyMom

I was raised reform Jewish and taught that people are born morally nuetral, with the potential to do good or evil. Kind of like right in the middle of the see-saw, and can go either way.

greyline

Would I be correct in thinking that from the Jewish perspective, the consequences of Adam & Eve's disobedience was just as stated in Genesis 3 (weeds in the field and pain in childbirth) and expulsion from Eden (so they didn't eat from the Tree of Life) - and not a taint of sin to be passed along to all their descendants that condemned them by default to hell?

My question is really, how do Jews interpret that story? (What value do they find in it?)

Gamera

Paul never mentions original sin, nor does any scripture. It is an artifact of later clerics, who attempted, rather badly, to explain the need for salvation and lacked the language to describe it any other way.

Chris Weimer

I didn't say he mentioned it. I say he understood.

Gamera

Given that he didn't mention it, it's a bold statement indeed to say he understood it.

It simply isn't part of the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. It's a later and (to my mind) unecessary development that has nothing to do with the gospel message.