Introduction
However, to limit the scope of this content, I’ll be addressing only these Christian misconceptions about Judaism and not in general. The reason for that is that the great majority of misconceptions about Judaism are basically the same as those that exist about Christianity, and Islam, in general. For that reason I have chosen to limit the scope only to the major misconceptions about Judaism from the Christian perspective.
Jesus was a Jew Means that He Could Have been the Messiah
While Jesus' being a Jew means that he could have been the Messiah, studying Jewish sources indicates that this alone is an insufficient qualification. This claim is often advanced to disarm Jews who may be strongly resistant even to hearing the name “Jesus,” which they register as signifying fundamental opposition to their Jewish identity.
The main purpose of relating this fact is to try to put Jesus back into a Jewish context. Missionaries understand that the long Christian tradition of depicting Jesus as being "un-Jewish" has repelled many Jews from thinking about him positively. While true, seeing Jesus in a Jewish context is insufficient for qualifying him as the Messiah. However, the purpose of this argument is not to convince, but to overcome the emotional barrier that most Jews have to Jesus.
However, this approach inadvertently treats us as simpletons unable to think or understand why we believe what we do. It's similar to manipulating a young child to take his medicine by convincing him that it's candy.
To directly address the points in the video above, a Jew qualifies as the Messiah when the Tanakh’s Messianic prophecies are fulfilled in his lifetime. This is a necessary condition because the Messiah ushers in the era described in these Messianic prophecies, which the Torah never splits into two phases. The premature death of Jesus forced the early Church to grapple with the Messianic prophecies that he left unfulfilled. This led to the creation of the doctrine of the Second Coming, which states that Jesus will fulfill the remainder of the prophecies when he returns at the End of Days.
Further, the Church created its own Messianic re-interpretation of a large number of verses in the Tanakh. Read plainly, it is clear that Jews never considered the majority of these verses to be Messianic. In other words, it invented an alternative Messianic tradition to bolster the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.
How do Jews Atone With No Temple Or Sacrifices?
This is one of the most common challenge presented to Jews by Christians.
The answer to the gentleman's question is found in Hosea 14:2-3, which says, “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled in your iniquity. Take words with yourselves and return to the Lord. Say, "You shall forgive all iniquity and teach us [the] good [way], and let us render [for] bulls [the offering of] our lips.”
The meaning of these verses is that God accepts prayer as a substitute for sacrifices as long as there is no Temple. It should be noted that prayer was a required component of repentance even when the Temples were standing. In their absence, it was accepted as the sole substitute for sacrifices. It is strange to consider that this gentleman has never come across these verses while studying the Bible.
According to the NIV translation of the book of Hebrews 9:22 written by Paul, "In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness." This seems to be directly contradicted by Hosea 14:2-3.
The gentleman in the video above makes two very big mistakes.
The first mistake is to assume that for nearly 2,000 years that Jews have somehow failed to realize that there was no Temple and no sacrifices. The First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE and rebuilt in 515 BCE, meaning that there were no sacrifices for 71 years. The Second Temple was destroyed around 1,950 years ago. How did they reconcile the destruction of the Temple with their apparent inability to bring sacrifices, and therefore to atone, and how do we reconcile it today?
The second mistake is that assumes that God left them and us with no way to atone for both periods of time. It also brings up an interesting question: why did God allow for the Temple to be rebuilt if His goal was to replace sacrifices?
It should also be noted that the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. If Jesus died in 33 (or 37) CE, the Second Temple served no purpose for 37 years until its destruction. This is related to the prophecy found in Daniel 9:24.
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