Adonael

I got into a discussion today with a non-Christian about whether Jesus was a Jew or not. They could not provide any reasons for believing so other than what some "scholars" had reported to her in passing. I believe that I soundly confuted her, but I am now suspicious whether there are grounds to believe otherwise.


Help?

Toto

Our major source of information for Jesus is the gospels. If you think that there was a historical person behind the gospel Jesus, that person was undoubtedly a Jew, born to a Jewish mother, preaching to Jews.

Some of the gnostics like Marcion did not believe that Jesus was born in this world, and I think did not consider him to be Jewish. But they considered the Jewish god to be an evil secondary god, and thought that Jesus was sent by the real god (the good one) to rescue mankind from the evil god's clutches.

It is not clear from your confused syntax what argument you confuted.

aa5874

There is no known credible information about Jesus of the NT.
But, if you believe Jesus existed, then you are free to guess his nationality.

Adonael

I confuted her belief that jesus was not a jew albeit this is based on an understanding that there is a historical jesus that the Biblical documents can reveal. I should also note that if there was no historical jesus, then there is no existential import and thus (under a boolean interpretation) one could say anything about jesus.

Toto

There are people who will argue that Jesus was not a "Jew" because there were no Jews by the modern definition at the time. But clearly the Jesus depicted in the gospels was part of the Judean society that evolved into modern rabbinical Judaism.

If you Google "Jesus was not a Jew" you find a lot of anti-Semitic and racialist crap. Hitler claimed that Jesus was not a Jew (see Race_of_Jesus) based on some of the thinking of German scholars, who theorized that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. After the Holocaust, some Christians responded by emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus. Others haven't gotten the message.

E.g. - Jesus was not a Jew (warning - bizarre racialist theories based on the Bible.)

No Robots

Atheist NT scholar William Arnal (The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism, and the Construction of Contemporary Identity, p. 5) writes:

No one in mainstream New Testament scholarship denies that Jesus was a Jew.

The entire New Testament was created by, for and about Jews; it belongs wholly to Jewish literature.

Toto

But why did she think that Jesus was not a Jew?

aa5874

You confuted her by just saying Jesus was a Jew because the Bible says so?

And by the way, in the NT Jesus was not a Jew, he was an IMPLAUSIBILITY, commonly called a God, from the same "country" as his Father, heaven.

John 8.23 Upon reflection, you may be right, Jesus of the NT could have been a Jew, but a MYTHICAL Jew, one that is not of this world.

Adonael

Because some scholar had said it to her in passing. Regrettably, it passed my mind to ask who the scholar was and whether the scholar had relevant background. I understand that her case, (if one would be inclined to call it a "case") is remarkably weak; I just wanted to make sure I'm not missing anything other than the quackery of quacks.

Toto

There was a scholar who was quoted here recently as saying that the Qumran community was not Jewish, but this was based on the idea that "Jews" were a later development, and there were no Jews in the first century. Note that this is using the term "Jewish" in a specialized sense, contrary to popular usage.

The Jesus depicted in the gospels read the Hebrew scriptures, was circumcized, went to the Temple, and was as Jewish as anyone else.

This is a very different argument from the Aryan-Jesus claim, which is quackery at best.