He lived at a time when the Roman Empire ruled what is now Israel and sectarianism was rife, with major tensions among Jews not only over how much to cooperate with the Romans but also how to interpret Torah.
It was also, for some, a restive time when displeasure with Roman policies, as well as with the Temple high priests, bred hopes for a messianic redeemer who would throw off the foreign occupiers and restore Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
Illustration depicting Jesus fishing in the Sea of Galilee with some of his followers. By the first century, the view developed that the messianic age would witness a general resurrection of the dead, the in-gathering of all the Jews, including the 10 lost tribes , to the land of Israel, a final judgment and universal peace.
The Dead Sea Scrolls speak of two messiahs: one a military leader and the other a priest. Still other Jews expected the prophet Elijah, or the angel Michael, or Enoch, or any number of other figures to usher in the messianic age. Stories in the Gospels about Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead, and proclaiming the imminence of the kingdom of heaven suggest that his followers regarded him as appointed by God to bring about the messianic age.
Jews for Jesus is one branch of a wider movement called Messianic Jews. Members of this movement are not accepted as Jewish by the broader Jewish community, even though some adherents may have been born Jewish and their ritual life includes Jewish practices. Jesus was executed by the Romans. Crucifixion was a Roman form of execution, not a Jewish one.
For most of Christian history, Jews were held responsible for the death of Jesus. This is because the New Testament tends to place the blame specifically on the Temple leadership and more generally on Jewish people.
This text paved the way for a historic rapprochement between Jews and Catholics. This understanding of what Christians mean by salvation — known technically as penal substitutionary atonement — was actually unknown in the early church, though some Christians seem to think it is the only way of understanding the cross. They ignore the fact that it transforms God into some sort of psychopath who murders his own son as a magical way of dealing with endemic human wickedness.
When set in the Holocaust, it doubles the offence by implying that the gas chambers are also a sort of payback by God for human wrongdoing. Even in terms of Christian theology, penal substitution is a mistake, not least because it doesn't give the resurrection any work to do in the economy of human salvation. Indeed, there are multiple other readings of the cross, which do not rely on this payback model but, out of respect, I am not going to go into that here.
While Christians regard the cross as an inevitable part of human salvation, for Jews it remains a symbol of centuries of oppression. And the right and proper Christian response to this is a confession of complicity, not a trumpeting of theological superiority.
This article is more than 7 years old. Giles Fraser. Few ideas can have been as poisonous as, or inspired more murderousness than, the idea that Jews were the Christ-killers. It is often assumed that the God of Islam is a fierce war-like deity , in contrast to the God of Christianity and Judaism, who is one of love and mercy.
And yet, despite the manifest differences in how they practise their religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same God. The founder of Islam, Muhammad, saw himself as the last in a line of prophets that reached back through Jesus to Moses, beyond him to Abraham and as far back as Noah. According to the Quran, God known as Allah revealed to Muhammad:. Thus, since Muhammad inherited the Jewish and Christian understandings of God, it is not surprising that the God of Muhammad, Jesus and Moses has a similarly complex and ambivalent character — a blend of benevolence and compassion, combined with wrath and anger.
If you were obedient to his commands, he could be all sweetness and light. To those who turned to him in repentance, this God was above all else merciful and all-forgiving.
But those who failed to find the path or, having found it failed to follow it, would know his judgment and wrath. The God of the Old Testament was both good and evil. He went way beyond the good when he told Abraham to offer his son to God as a burnt sacrifice. He was a warrior God who murdered the firstborn of Egypt and drowned the army of Pharaoh. Yet he was also a compassionate and loving God, one who in the well-known words of Psalm 23 in the Book of Psalms was a shepherd whose goodness and mercy supported his followers all the days of their lives.
He loved Israel like a father loves his son. Yet, behind this God of tenderness and love, there remained a ruthless God of justice. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus preached doom and gloom.
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