greenbear

"All in all, all evidence leads us to the conclusion that those Jews who did not accept Jesus Christ as the prophesied messiah were in the minority."


"Christianity, without all of the trappings of the Roman Empire, is more a continuation of the ancient Jewish faith from the time of Jesus Christ than today's Judaism is."


These statements strike me as counterintuitive if not downright historically inaccurate.

I don't know enough Jewish religious history to properly assess the merits of these claims.

Can they possibly be correct?

No Robots

Whom are you quoting?

greenbear

Christian guy on another forum.

He seems fairly knowledgeable on religious matters.

Toto

Google says this comes from HVAC talk a forum for the contracting business.

That post is a confused rewriting of history.

Toto

This is not true of the Pharisees. None of them were appointed by Rome. It sounds like it might be true of the Herodians, but they were a ruling dynasty, not a sect.

The Jesus portrayed in the gospels is Jewish, but the NT does not say that most Jews followed him or his teachings.

I think that this poster, like many Christians, is repeating stuff that he doesn't quite understand, but his beliefs give him a lot of confidence.

greenbear

Yes, that is the source of the quotes.

No Robots

The poster presents a fascinating mixture of fact and fiction. Christ's original followership was Jewish, but it was small. Christianity, stripped of pagan trappings, is indeed the purest Judaism.

Christians are struggling with the ever-growing realization that Christ can only be understood in terms of Judaism. This poster seems to have done some work on this, but he has a way to go.

show_no_mercy

No, it can't possibly be correct. Read the works of the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote his histories of the Jewish people at the end of the 1st century. He makes no mention about how the vast majority of Jews followed Jesus.

Barring the suspect "Testimonium", he only mentions by name four sects of Judaism (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots). All of which have nothing to do with the Nazarene Jesus.

There are also some other Jewish writers in the first century like Philo, Greco-Romans who wrote about the events and/or sects in the first century like Pliny and Tacitus. Out of these, only Tacitus mentions Jesus and Christians, and he doesn't mention anything about any vast number of Jews being followers of Jesus.

It seems as though whoever you're quoting from is naively reading the NT and thinking that this was the only writing about Judaism in the 1st century.

No Robots

If you are participating in the thread, you might suggest that the poster take a look at Jewish believers in Jesus: the early centuries.

McNamara

Jesus doesn't meet the requirements set forth in the Hebrew Bible to be the Messiah. He did not fulfill the messianic prophecies (nor was he expected to do this in any "second coming" as Christians propose), he lacked the personal characteristics of the Messiah, and he claimed that many of the laws of the Torah were no longer applicable - Deuteronomy said that anyone coming to change these laws should be regarded as a false prophet. There are plenty of other reasons but I don't want to go on a Bible-quoting spree. Many Jewish apologetic websites and books are out there with the explicit purpose of contradicting Christian claims, mostly to give Jews some ammunition against Christians who try to convert them.

Essentially, it would have been incredibly unlikely for a majority of Jews to regard him as the Messiah since he just didn't fit the part. Founder of a new religion, fine. Messiah of the Jewish people, no.