a while back a number of gentiles expressed to me that they had been taught that Jews don’t consider Jesus Christ to be the Messiah, but that he is considered a prophet in Judaism.
idk where this is coming from, but for the record, Jesus Christ has absolutely no religious significance in Judaism. he was not a prophet. he was certainly not the messiah. he does not play any role whatsoever in Judaism
It’s because there are two types of Judaism: the Mesianic, which believes Jesus came again and Sephartic doesn’t. At least from what I remember.
this is wrong on so many levels
most importantly, “Messianic Judaism” is a recent Christian invention designed to trick Jews into converting to Judaism, and to justify appropriating Jewish traditions. it is not a form of Judaism by any means.
Not according to all the congregations we’ve been to. My family has always been Messianic Jews. I’ve never been told different. We celebrate all the same holidays and do the same things.
Oh, so if the people tricking you into being Christian didnt tell you that they were tricking you, they must not be tricking you. Just fucking google “origins of messianic judaism.” Read the “history” tab in the wikipedia page on messianic “judaism.” Its well documented that messianic Judaism was invented by Christians’s to trick Jews into accepting Christ. It always has been.
Oh boy @twilightsky15
I’m not going to yell at someone for not knowing any better, but you’ve been lied to. Maybe the people who lied to you know it, or maybe they were also deceived, but OP is right, he has absolutely no place in any Jewish denomination or tradition. If you follow his teachings, your religion is Christianity. It’s not Judaism.
You have a lot of misinformation about Jewish groups so let me try to give a nutshell version of it. Jews are a diasporic ethnoreligion. This means Jewishness is both an ethnicity and a religion. People who are ethnically Jewish are indigenous to the Levant, which is now the state of Israel. They were forced into exile and now live all over the world.
Sephardic Jews are Jews whose ancestors lived in North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. Ashkenazi Jews are Jews whose ancestors lived in central/Eastern Europe. They developed different customs and cultural traditions because they were in different regions, but they are all Jews. There are also distinct Jewish groups in Africa, India, China, South America, and of course, the Middle East. They may eat different foods, wear different clothes, use different colloquial languages (Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic), have different holiday customs, or pronounce Hebrew differently, but religious Jews follow the same halacha (religious law) no matter where they (or their ancestors) come from. None of them believe that he was the messiah (and in fact, he doesn’t fit the description for who the messiah is or what he’s supposed to do. Everything you’ve been told to the contrary is based on a retroactive Christian reading of scripture, which is NOT how it was/is interpreted by Jews). Anyone who does is a Christian. It is possible to have an ethnically Jewish background and be Christian but if you believe this then your religion is still Christianity and absolutely not Judaism.
There are different denominations among Jews, related to their observance of and belief about Jewish law. Again, none of them believe he was the messiah. No Jewish organization recognizes “messianic Judaism” as a legitimate Jewish denomination. It is Christian. You are Christian.
“Messianic Judaism” is a scam designed to trick Jews into converting to Christianity by making them think that the two religions are basically the same and they are NOT. It is ahistorical and dishonest. I feel legitimately sorry for anyone who was duped by this fraudulent movement, but I cannot soften my criticism. “Messianic Judaism” is an act of attempted cultural genocide. It steals Jewish symbols and rituals without preserving their context or meaning. You claim that this is your religion, yet your comments show that you don’t know anything about Judaism. It is not about blowing a shofar or wearing a tallit. Judaism and Christianity have fundamentally different world views and beliefs about G-d. The goal of “Messianic Judaism” is to get Jews to STOP BEING JEWISH because Judaism and Christianity are not and never will be compatible.
I am sorry for anyone who has been taught this and does not know any better. But now you do. I am not telling you not to be a Christian. Judaism does not believe in proselytizing, or say that you have to be Jewish to be a good person. But do not call your religion Judaism when it is not, because that is an act of violence against Judaism, and now that we have told you, you can no longer be excused on account of ignorance.
This is possibly the best and most polite explanation I’ve read of what is inherently wrong with Messianics. Well said @chiribomb!
I wrote a paper on Messianic “Judaism” for a class many years ago and as a part of that paper, I interviewed Karl Desouza, who was a spokesman for Jews for Jesus in Montreal. I’ll never forget the way he basically admitted that yes, at the end of the day, they were a Christian organization.
J4J and other Messianic groups are especially successful in countries or cities with a large population of descendants of marranos – that is, the Jews who had to convert or die in 15th century Spain. Picture this, if you will. You’re doing your family tree and you discover that your 9th great-grandmother was Jewish and she had to convert or risk getting kicked out of Spain. Maybe she passes down a few customs to her grandchildren, who head to the New World full of vim and vigor and love for Jesus, but they also light candles on Friday night even if they don’t know why. The family continues and here you are, in 2018, discovering that you have maternal Jewish ancestry. You don’t know what to do with that information, so you head to the nearest synagogue in town. Unfortunately, it’s a Messianic synagogue. Now you’re being told that this is Judaism, this is the way you can embrace your heritage but it’s totally cool that you also love Jesus.
I went to a Shabbat service at a Messianic temple in Montreal, also as part of the paper I was writing, and at least 80% of the congregants were of Latin American and African heritage. I would not have been at all surprised if a number of them did actually have Jewish ancestry. Messianics who claim to be Jewish are predators posing as lambs.
For those reading this who are curious about the earlier point about Jesus not meeting the qualifications for “Messiah” as that role is understood within Judaism, I want to explore that further so you can understand just how theologically bankrupt this scam is.
You see the Messiah, as that figure tends to be understood in Judaism, is going to end all hunger. Heal all sickness. End all war. When the Messiah comes, everyone is coming back from the dead.
But the Proto-Christian sects, way back in the Second Temple Period, were heavily into a radical concept of individualism. They argued that when an action happened to just one person, it was the same as if it had happened to the entire world. So to qualify as the Messiah, a person would only have to bring one person back from the dead, end hunger for one person, so on and such forth.
This argument was going on loooong before anyone started saying the Messiah had already come and he was a guy named Yeshua. It is one of the most fundamental things to understand when it comes to why Jesus literally can not possibly be the Messiah when a person understands that term within a Jewish context.
From the Jewish perspective, the Messiah seriously changes things. The Messiah alters the fundamental nature of the universe and is linked to concepts like the closest thing Rabbinic Judaism has to an afterlife (עולם הבא/Olam HaBa/The World to Come) since well… people returning from the dead when the Messiah comes is basically our entire afterlife concept.
So you see, in order for Messianic “Judaism” to argue that Jesus was the Messiah, they have revisit and renegotiate this big ole argument from the ancient world. An argument that touches on key philosophical understandings of the world around us (we’re still heavy on the communal emphasis to this day) and the only answer anyone in Judaism really has to the whole death question (luckily that isn’t that big a deal, as we tend to think what happens in the here and now is a billion times more important than anything else).
But they aren’t interested in any of that. Instead they are just taking Christianity and sticking some Jewish trappings on it and then are saying that is that.
Like you literally can not have a group that believes Jesus was the Messiah and have that group be Jewish all at the same time. It is a theological nightmare.
One they have no care to address, because their goal is simply getting people to convert.
So yeah, Messianic “Judaism” is nothing but a scam designed to trick Jews into converting to Christianity. They’re not even putting forth something theologically interesting, they’re just straight up advocating for Christian conversion (the same as any number of antisemitic groups throughout history).
In short: Messianic “Judaism” is just evil.
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