Ok – I understand that the title of this post – Why don’t the Jews believe in Jesus – is a generalization.  It is understood that there are a good many of Jews that do believe.  We recognize the forefathers of our faith were Jewish, and by and large from the sect of the Pharisees.  However, in the interest of debate, the position espoused by aish.com was presented as a tool to sharpen our response to those Jewish and non-Jewish alike who question the validity in a faith in Messiah Yeshua.

There were 4 statements posed and discussed:

▪Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies.

▪Jesus did not embody the personal qualifications of the Messiah.

▪Biblical verses “referring” to Jesus are mistranslations.

▪Jewish belief is based on national revelation.

One of the concepts that seemed most applicable to all the statements is to realize that, by and large, the church’s representation of our Messiah has been less than stellar over the last 2000 years.  However, this is a topic we are discussing on the 2nd and 4th monthly Sabbaths, so I won’t belabour it here.  When approaching the positions above, it is important to identify the presuppositions contained therein.

The first argument (Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies) rooted in the assumption that all the messianic prophecies must fulfilled in the initial advent of the messiah.  We demonstrated that there are prophetic statements indicating the messiah will suffer (Isaiah 53, Daniel 9:24-27 and others) but others making it clear that He will reign as king (2 Samuel 7:1ff).  Those proclaiming Yeshua as the Messiah, believe he came 2000 years ago as the suffering Messiah, but will come one day soon as a conquering King.  If the dual nature of the Messiah can be agreed upon, then the debate is really one of whether a single Messiah coming twice has any less merit than an understanding that two different messiahs fulfill these two roles.

Points 2 and 3 are really a result of a misunderstanding of who Yeshua is as presented by the gospels.  A better understanding of what the biblical (and cultural) view is of the virgin birth (Mat 1 and Luke 3) and that Yeshua was indeed submissive to the Torah (Mat 5:17-19), and in fact his followers taught a zealousness for torah (1 John 5:3) could be used to generate a quality discussion with the questioner.

I think it was a great discussion and found it stretching to approach these points of view from a different angle…I hope you did too.

Next week we look at a defence of why a goy would ever want to walk out the Torah.  See you Tuesday!

…for Yeshua (salvation) is from the Jews… Yeshua of Nazareth John 4:22

Why the Jews don’t believe – presentation