gnosis92

in skokie il there recently opened a messianic jewish congregation

http://www.devaremet.org/

Should the Jewish community accept Messianic Judaism as Jews? Should they regard them as Christians in disguise, or is messianic judaism a valid interpretation of Judaism?

personally among the early xian heresies ehrman documents in lost christainities, there r the ebiointies and marcionites, who are at polar ends.

messianic judaism is a return to ebionism - jewish hebrew christianity, with jewish culture practice symbols, and jesus as messiah.

messy jews have adopted jewish life cycles including bar mitvah and keep kosher and know history.

messianic jews r expected to know the torah, know all the jewish symbols

has there been any movement by secular jews, conservative or liberal jews to accept messianic jews as jews?

premjan

Should christians accept legalists (i.e. Muslims)?

Toto

this is more appropriate for GRD

RED DAVE

In my arrogant opinion, messy Jews (love the term) are xtians.

In my contacts with them, I have found that their basic attitude towards Jews is from the outside: we have the answer for you.

Although the issues of Jewish identity are frequently complex and convoluted, it seems to me that once a Jew appropriates the basic xtian belief of JC as the messiah, they've joined the other camp.

Jewish atheists, agnostics, okay. Messies, not okay. Go figure.

RED DAVE

Alethias

In most cases this pans out as another strategy of absorption. With some messianic congregations, they are more structured like a Jewish Synagogue that just-so-happens to believe in Jesus. In some they are more-or-less a Christian church that is extremely Jewish-friendly. In either case, the long-term result/goal is seperating the Jew from his/her participation in the larger Jewish community.

Why should the Jewish community embrace this with open arms?

Alethias,
Jewish by birth, Christian by nurture, Humanistic Naturalist by choice

RED DAVE

From Alethias:
This is an important point. The Jewish atheist, agnostic or heretic is still a part of the community. Whereas the messy is a member of, essentially, another community, regardless or their fantasies.

It's important to see exactly what messy congregations are in practice: xtian churches. They stem from xtianity and their relationships are with xtianity, not judiasm, either spiritually or socially.

Having had some contact with some of these schmucks, they are practicing a very naive form of xtianity, using the one true scotsman fallacy to deal with xtian antisemitism, the holocaust, etc. They remind me, with regard to their religious practices and relationship to the Jewish community, of really dumb hippies. However, when pressed, they tend, in my experience, to get nasty.

RED DAVE

Alethias

I almost missed this.

The Ebionites were considered heretical; little survived the Orthodoxy reforms of the fourth century. Not much is known about the Ebionites, other than that they were considered a distinct branch of the followers of Jesus that was decidedly different than either Pauline Christianity or Gnosticism.

A fair share of modern Messianics consider themselves christian and would assent to either the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed, which are considered standards of orthodoxy. There is enough diversity in the Messianic Community that it is pretty well impossible to make concrete statements about messianics in general.

But it's probably safe to say that it is not a return to Ebionism, since not much has survived with which to make this determination.

Alethias

No Robots

The Ebionites regarded Christ as a man, and denied that he was a god. This is the authentic primitive Christianity that lost out to trinitarianism.

gnosis92

i'm not going to play devil advocate, but who are reform, conservative, humanist, buddhist, atheist jews to say they're jews, but messy jews aren't jews? esp when some messy jews are compliant with orthodox practices like kosher rejected by conservative, rerform, humanist jews, study the torah and jewish history to an extent far greater than non-affliated assimilated jews, etc, and messy jews *want* to be identified and see themselves as jews.