#judaism does not care about jesus – @aph-japan on Tumblr

Anonymous asked:

Hi! I wanted to ask you, who exactly is Jesus in Judaism? Is he just a normal person? And if yes, does Judaism deny all the facts and miracles that are described in the gospels?

progressivejudaism answered:

Hi there,

Thank you for writing to me!

Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, that Jesus had any sort of divine power, had any sort of special connection to God, or that he is/was a god. If Jesus existed, most Jews believe that he was just a Jewish man. That’s it.

Additionally, no Jewish person would argue that the miracles described in the Gospels were factual.Actually, some Jews deny Jesus’s existence completely for both theological reasons and due to rampant antisemitism ‘in the name of Jesus’ throughout the past nearly 2000 years.

On the subject of the Jewish use of the Gospels, they are actually pretty useful in academia. For many Christians, these are holy documents- but for those studying Judaism, we learn insights into how the Jewish world might have operated. In my Rabbinical School, we sometimes will draw from these texts to learn about this period in Jewish history.

So you might ask, so ‘why do you Jews believe in your miracles but not ours’? I would respond to this question with a question of my own, ‘why do you think that we Jews believe that all of the miracles described throughout the Tanakh and Rabbinic Literature happened exactly in the way that the text describes them?’

I would be happy to chat with anyone further on any of these topics if you would like. Feel free to send me a direct message!

PJ

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

dikleyt

I grew up largely being told that we read the Bible and Christians also read the Bible, but that Christians have another book they call the “New Testament” and that they misunderstand our Bible.

Then I kept hearing “the Bible says this,” “the Bible says that” from Christians, and they were either talking about the “NT” or misinterpreting the “Jewish Bible” - OK, checks out. And I kept hearing from atheists “the Bible says this” in a disparaging fashion, or “the Bible says that.” And I’d say “no, actually, you’re talking about the Christian Bible,” and they would say “oh the Jewish Bible is even worse, Old Testament God etc.,” and I’d explain to them they were talking about the Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish Bible, and this would end up being completely unproductive. The assumption among all of these atheists remained that Christianity was right about Judaism.

Then I learned that in Yiddish, bibl refers to the Christian Bible, and we only use the term tanakh. I knew the word tanakh, but I always thought it was just something people said for no reason when they could just as easily say Bible or Jewish Bible. But suddenly I understood completely the importance of the distinction.

aph-japan reblogged

koushirouizumi

huzzahitsthedoctor

In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of ‘missing the target.’ When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly

Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking (via huzzahitsthedoctor)

#jewish tag #jewish #jewish issues #jewish psa #jewish views #judaism is not judeo christian #judaism is not xtianity #judaism does not care about jesus #original sin is not jewish #sin #hebrew #*Reblogging for the Commentary #*GOYIM DO NOT reblog to argue or debate Or I WILL BLOCK #*GOYIM DO NOT Add Commentary Please #(Sits)#(Points)