How will the Jews know who the Messiah will be?

[mystic]

I've been told by some Jews that the main reason why the Jews rejects Christ is because the does not state who the Messiah will be, it does not give a name. So my question please would be how will the Jews know who the Messiah will be?

[alon]

Mar 9, 2019 5:26:16 GMT -8 mystic said:

I've been told by some Jews that the main reason why the Jews rejects Christ is because the does not state who the Messiah will be, it does not give a name. So my question please would be how will the Jews know who the Messiah will be?

Many already know. As a percentage, more Jews believe Yeshua is HaMoshiach than Gentiles.

They have scriptures, prophecies of the Messiah; they need nothing more.

Dan C

[mystic]

This in an answer I got from one Orthodox:

We reject him because:
-He didn't fulfill the messianic prophecies (building 3rd temple, bringing all Jews back to Israel,bringing in world peace,making G-d's presence known to the world). I know Christians think he's coming back to finish that work, but a true messiah would do it at one time. A failed one wouldn't and would need the excuse of a second coming.
-He is not a descendent of David. If he has no father, then he has no tribe. He needs to have tribal affiliation in order to be a king.
-Speaking of prophecies, biblical prophecies as seen by Christians are not seen as prophecies by Jews, and Christians commonly base them on mistranslations.
-The role of the messiah is not to redeem us from personal sin, but to rule over all Israel, protect us from our enemies, and lead us in .
-Jesus can't be a sacrifice because it is abhorrent to think human sacrifice is acceptable, he was not sacrificed in the way prescribed in the , nor in a proper place.
-As to how we will know when the messiah arrives-we believe in national revelation. It will be obvious when the messiah comes because G-d will reveal it to us all, and the actions of the messiah (being a warrior king and fulfilling all the messianic prophecies the first time through) will be evidence of who the messiah is.
Christians obviously will argue about all of this, which is fine with me. They have it wrong, and some day they will become aware of this-when the real messiah comes.

[alon]

Mar 10, 2019 4:58:02 GMT -8 mystic said:

This in an answer I got from one Orthodox:

We reject him because:
-He didn't fulfill the messianic prophecies (building 3rd temple, bringing all Jews back to Israel,bringing in world peace,making G-d's presence known to the world). I know Christians think he's coming back to finish that work, but a true messiah would do it at one time. A failed one wouldn't and would need the excuse of a second coming.
-He is not a descendent of David. If he has no father, then he has no tribe. He needs to have tribal affiliation in order to be a king.
-Speaking of prophecies, biblical prophecies as seen by Christians are not seen as prophecies by Jews, and Christians commonly base them on mistranslations.
-The role of the messiah is not to redeem us from personal sin, but to rule over all Israel, protect us from our enemies, and lead us in .
-Jesus can't be a sacrifice because it is abhorrent to think human sacrifice is acceptable, he was not sacrificed in the way prescribed in the , nor in a proper place.
-As to how we will know when the messiah arrives-we believe in national revelation. It will be obvious when the messiah comes because G-d will reveal it to us all, and the actions of the messiah (being a warrior king and fulfilling all the messianic prophecies the first time through) will be evidence of who the messiah is.
Christians obviously will argue about all of this, which is fine with me. They have it wrong, and some day they will become aware of this-when the real messiah comes.

Like the church, Judaism has purposely misinterpreted scripture to their own ends. Many of those prophecies, when read with an open mind, do point to 2 major advents of Messiah. In the centuries just before Yeshua, one of the topics of hot debate was how Messiah could be the Suffering Servant and also be the Warrior King. Some thought there would be two messiah's- Moshiach ben'Yoseph and Moshiach ben'Dovid. Since Yeshua, those who reject Him must come up with reasons for one messiah who comes and does it all at one time. Yet nowhere in scripture does it say that.

Yeshua is a direct descendant of David by blood on His mother's side. And you might point out that today being considered Jewish is strictly matrilineal, and no one can say when that started. Joseph was also a direct descendent of David, and he adopted Yeshua as his own, giving Him all the rights of a natural son. And finally, Yeshua was partly the work of the Ruach HaKodesh. He was both of God and at the same time God. That plus being of the line of David makes Him king of kings as well as king of Israel!

Jews today tend to think more of a national salvation, while Christians think only of a personal salvation. Both are wrong. But both have a narrow focus that supports their own theology.

Human sacrifice is abhorrent, and against . However there is nothing that says one cannot sacrifice himself to save another. And this was clearly prophesied:

Isaiah 53:10  (ESV)
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

And there was already a national revelation. Some accepted it and some did not. 

Mainstream Jews, like Christians prefer to believe what they've been told for centuries by their leaders. It is difficult to overcome this. We as Messianics prefer to read the Word with open eyes, evaluating what it says rather than what we are told it means by either camp. We may look at what both sides say about it, but we make up our own minds. We are after the truth, not religious dogma. Until your friend comes to that point where he accepts the calling of the Ruach and looks at scripture through clear eyes, then he, like the Christians will continue to have scales before his eyes.

Dan C

[Elizabeth]

The nagging issue I think modern Judaism repeatedly runs into is that it doesn't answer enough questions. There is no resolution to humanity's dissonance and issues with G-d unless G-d does away with sin, but we have to choose that in gratitude and submission.

instructs us how to deal with sin, what to do with it because it's here, but it doesn't do away with it. So they're not dealing with the underlying problem.

They also still have to answer to the original issue - choice and freedom to choose and the truth that people will have to choose sinlessness- not just repentance. Otherwise, G-d's first words that went out remain unfulfilled- that it was good and all His work complete.

It seems like they have this almost magical idea that one day everyone will just decide to be righteous and willingly follow , that's just not the nature of all people and it's not the nature of G-d to force us to choose Him in the opposite of love. Then what's beyond ? In the end there will be no need for because there will be no sin. So again, the question how is that accomplished according to G-d's perfect nature and our imperfect rebellious one?

Modern day Judaism isn't answering the original and ongoing problems; the human issues underlying our predicament- why we need to begin with. Further, what has to happen for G-d in the end to do away with . Perfection has to happen, but people have to sincerely and completely choose it in love, submission, and humility. He has to do away with sin while allowing us to choose, and our human nature has proven time and again we don't naturally choose that so there has to be more to His plan then what they say or are willing to see in Scripture. We are made new in Yeshua and that's why we can be apart of a new creation that will not tolerate sin.

I don't know, hard to explain, but the will of G-d and His creation has to meet in a way they aren't addressing because we have to choose His way and stop repeating the same cycle of sin and repentance over and over. If you look at Israel's history, that's the ongoing problem and they aren't answering how it is overcome.

[rakovsky]

Mar 10, 2019 4:58:02 GMT -8 mystic said:

This in an answer I got from one Orthodox:

We reject him because:
-He didn't fulfill the messianic prophecies (building 3rd temple, bringing all Jews back to Israel,bringing in world peace,making G-d's presence known to the world). I know Christians think he's coming back to finish that work, but a true messiah would do it at one time. A failed one wouldn't and would need the excuse of a second coming.
-He is not a descendent of David. If he has no father, then he has no tribe. He needs to have tribal affiliation in order to be a king.
-Speaking of prophecies, biblical prophecies as seen by Christians are not seen as prophecies by Jews, and Christians commonly base them on mistranslations.
-The role of the messiah is not to redeem us from personal sin, but to rule over all Israel, protect us from our enemies, and lead us in .
-Jesus can't be a sacrifice because it is abhorrent to think human sacrifice is acceptable, he was not sacrificed in the way prescribed in the , nor in a proper place.
-As to how we will know when the messiah arrives-we believe in national revelation. It will be obvious when the messiah comes because G-d will reveal it to us all, and the actions of the messiah (being a warrior king and fulfilling all the messianic prophecies the first time through) will be evidence of who the messiah is.
Christians obviously will argue about all of this, which is fine with me. They have it wrong, and some day they will become aware of this-when the real messiah comes.

Alot of the rabbinical objections to Jesus and the Christian responses are abstract or arbitrarily philosophical, and so they aren't something that can be proven or disproven easily and inarguably. For example, AFAIK there is no verse saying that the Messiah needs to be the one who will build the 3rd Temple and shepherd the exiles back, but rather these are expectations of what would happen due to the Messianic era. The 3rd Temple could be interpreted allegorically. Or else Yeshua could rebuild it when he returned in the Second Coming. Likewise, the return of the exiles could be interpreted allegorically, in that by joining Yeshua's spiritual community they allegorically return to the Lord's promised kingdom. Or it could be interpreted literally as something that would happen in apocalyptic End Times related to the Second Coming.

Actually, I do think that over the centuries, quite a major portion of the Jewish community did accept Yeshua as being the Messiah. But I think that they tended to merge into the existing Christian or Jewish populations, rather than maintaining a separate Jewish Christian identity. Take for example the Jewish Christians in the Galilee. Over the centuries they would have been identified as native Galilean Christians of their region, which the Romans and later rulers named Palestine. There is tons of evidence that the Jewish Christians in the Middle East are a major ethnic component of the Middle East's Christian populations today in the Levant.

It does seem an irony or remarkable part of history that while the giant Roman empire and the Sanhedrin both rejected and were apparently complicit in killing Yeshua, and both were presented with and had available to them approximately the same evidence, the same traditions, and books (the Tanakh), only Rome as a society as a whole formally accepted Christianity. I suppose that one factor is what He said in Mark 6:4, "A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house." And in addition, he set himself up as a major critic of the religious authorities of his time, analogous to previous prophets in previous centuries (like Isaiah and Jeremiah) criticizing the authorities and rulers of their era. This created a situation of conflict that has naturally made it harder for those same authorities and rulers to accept Yeshua.

[alon]

I know the church teaches that Jewish believers were absorbed into the Christian church. They also teach that church was formed in Acts. However their own church fathers writings give the lie to what they are telling us. They wrote of their violent disagreements on theology up to the Council of Nicea united them and laid down their basic dogma in 325 CE. And they wrote how the Nazarines were a completely separate and viable sect at about the time the church was formed then, in the early/mid 4th cen. CE:

Church Father St Epiphanius (310 AD):

“These sectarians didn’t call themselves Christians but Nazarenes, however they are simply complete Jews. They use not only the New Testament but the Old Testament as well. They have no different ideas but profess everything exactly as the Law proclaims it in the Jewish fashion. Except for their belief in Messiah if you please! For they acknowledge the resurrection of the dead and the divine creation of all things and declare that God is one and that his son, Yeshua is the Messiah. They are trained to a nicety in Hebrew for among them the entire Law, the prophets and the entire Writings are read in Hebrew as they surely are by the Jews. They disagree with Jews because they have come to faith in Messiah but since they are still fettered in the Law, circumcision, the Sabbath and the rest they are not in accord with Christians, they are nothing but Jews. They have the good news in Mathew in it’s entirety in Hebrew. For it is clear that they still preserve this in the Hebrew alphabet as it was originally written.  (Epiphanius; Panarion 29)

But as the Catholic Church grew stronger they began to persecute the Jews, and especially the Nazarenes more and more. The Nazarenes were hated by both the church because they accepted Yeshua but not church dogma and authority, and the Jews as we've discussed before blamed them for the loss of the revolt and subsequent expulsion to the diaspora. Persecuted by both (but especially the church), they still held on for centuries. The Byzantine Emperor, Leo the Third, outlawed Judaism and herded all Jews who refused to accept the Eastern Orthodox Religion into their Synagogues, where they were burned alive. 

Despite all this, the sect of the Nots'rim lasted as a viable entity at least well into the 15th cen. A siddur was found in a geniza which dated back to 1426, and the birkat ha'minim still contained the line "may the nozrim and the minim perish in a moment." This prayer was added to the semoheh'esreh, or Amidah, the standing prayer said daily by observant Jews and more importantly in their synagogues. It was a curse on the Nazarene sect, and anyone not clearly saying this was immediately suspect. It prevented believers from worshiping in mainstream synagogues. In more recent centuries when the threat was not so prevalent the line was changed and many Jews deny it was ever there. But historically and evidentially it was. It is also evidence that the sect of the Nots'rim coexisted with both Christianity and Judism as a separate entity for over a millennia and a half at least. They were never absorbed wholesale into either Christianity or Judaism. More likely they were persecuted to extinction by the church, who hated them even well after the Reformation. In fact, it is only very recently that Evangelicals have started to warm up to the plight of the Jews, mostly due to the aftermath of WWII. Catholicism has reluctantly followed suit. But in manyCatholic regions and many Protestant denominations virulent anti-Semitism is still the norm. And if they hate mainstream Judaism, they loath and despise Messianics.

So the church teachings that they were the inheritors of the true faith, and that the sect of Yeshua, Paul and the apostles was somehow absorbed into their church are false, by their own founders words and by history itself. And as much as possible, it is Nazarene Judaism, the faith of Yeshua and these early, great men who gave all to follow Him that contemporary Meshiachim try to recreate.

Dan C 

[rakovsky]

Dan,

I am not arguing against your thesis, which is based on records like you cite, that there remained a Nazarene sect or group of observant followers of Yeshua for centuries.

Rather, my main point is that over the centuries an accumulated, significant portion of the Jewish community has in fact accepted Yeshua. There are many examples of this. I am not sure if their accumulated number would be half. The Jewish population in the Galilee was the main example that I cited. It's hard for me to say how many of them accepted Yeshua. But for example in early Byzantine times the Jewish Christian Joseph of Tiberias was involved in building churches in that region with imperial approval or support. His biography as well as his building of the churches serves as evidence of his community in that region.

I hope that you will be patient with me when I use terms like Christian or describing the Jewish Christian situation in the early period. Sometimes I use terms or make portrayals in a simplistic way for ease of use.

[alon]

May 10, 2019 12:35:25 GMT -8 rakovsky said:

Dan,

I am not arguing against your thesis, which is based on records like you cite, that there remained a Nazarene sect or group of observant followers of Yeshua for centuries.

Rather, my main point is that over the centuries an accumulated, significant portion of the Jewish community has in fact accepted Yeshua. There are many examples of this. I am not sure if their accumulated number would be half. The Jewish population in the Galilee was the main example that I cited. It's hard for me to say how many of them accepted Yeshua. But for example in early Byzantine times the Jewish Christian Joseph of Tiberias was involved in building churches in that region with imperial approval or support. His biography as well as his building of the churches serves as evidence of his community in that region.

I hope that you will be patient with me when I use terms like Christian or describing the Jewish Christian situation in the early period. Sometimes I use terms or make portrayals in a simplistic way for ease of use.

My Rabbi can show in the NT that it's possible over half of Israel believed in Yeshua. Other estimates are far lower, however enough left the Bar Kochba Rebellion to have swung victory to the Roman side, so the number was significant.

Terms are often problematic, but they can be resolved as long as everyone is willing to work to an understanding.

History is history, and it is important. Especially to those of us wishing to recreate history to an extent. And not just history, but beliefs and the truth of God's word. It is important to know and understand that not only was this how it was in the 1st cen for believers, but that despite the persecution from pagans, Jews, and most of all the Christian Church this system of belief, this sect lasted unchanged as an independent entity for centuries. Because a faith that could so quickly and easily be assimilated is not a true faith. It would lend credence to the church's claims of being the true faith. That is why the church teaches as it does, never telling you about these kinds of quotes by its' own founders. And there are more. 

They also teach you to listen to them and not to question. Because if you think clearly, you'll see that if the faith of Yeshua and the Apostles was so quickly subsumed under the authority of a totally different religion then it would itself be a false religion and Yeshua just another false messiah. History matters.

Dan C