Jesus: was he Jewish or Christian?

Jesus, Jew or Christian

The common confusion as to whether Jesus Christ was Jew or Christian basically derives from the unclear or misunderstood relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The importance of this relationship, in turn, derives from the universal view or acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Messiah of the Jews, the fulfillment of Messianic aspirations and the lack of knowledge that Christianity started as a Jewish sect. Many assume that Judaism, the religion of the Jews, and Christianity are two different religions. An overall ignorance of the Bible by professing Christians themselves and a long period of anti-semitism account for the mis-interpretation or misreading of the Bible and the consequent discrediting or hatred of the Jews. This misreading or lack of knowledge of Jesus Christ's Jewish origins has not only obscured His basic message but also resulted in the common confusion on His religion or as to whether He was a Jew or a Christian.

The parents of Jesus, Joseph the carpenter and Miriam or Mary were both Jewish descendants of the royal house of King David (Mat 1; Lk 3). He was born a Jew in Nazareth in Galilee 20 miles of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus was not only a Jew, but also never separated Himself from His Jewish community nor rejected the Jewish Law. Throughout His life, He observed that Law. More than that, He declared that He had come precisely to fulfill it. This claim and His condemnation of the formalism, hypocrisy and materialism of the priests progressively led to His arrest, condemnation and death. And Jesus was not the only Jew who criticized the behavior of the priests, except that He gave the Law a deeper and true ethical substance and meaning in the lives of ordinary people, rather than abandoning it or teaching another religion. He said that He did not come to abolish that Law and the prophets but to fulfill it and declared that anyone who keeps the Law will stand high in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Scriptures reflect His fidelity to the Jewish Law from beginning to end. He was circumcised at birth according to the Law of Moses (Lk 2:21). His parents, grandparents Joachim and Ann, uncle Zachary, aunt Elizabeth and cousin John the Baptist were also loyal observers of the Mosaic Law, described as "righteous... walking in the commandments and ordinances... And blameless (Luke 1:6)." These commandments and ordinances constitute the Jewish Law, which Jesus never abandoned or denounced, but strictly endorsed. He, therefore, practiced Judaism and was a Jew.

Jesus, the Jew, followed the Mosaic Law consistently and perfectly. He attended the Sabbath according to the requirements of the Law and the religious festivals of the Torah. He taught about tithing of agricultural produce (Matt. 23:23-24) and other Jewish practices, thereby agreeing with and confirming their validity, while pointing to the excesses and hypocrisies of the Pharisees. He also dressed as the Law commanded in Numbers 15:37-39 on tassels and criticized the wearing of excessively long fringes.

His religious teachings were also focused on Israel, particularly in declaring that He was sent only the "lost sheep of the House of Israel" and giving them first preference. Jesus taught that salvation came from the Jews in John 4:22 and was therefore delighted to find a Roman centurion who had greater, and exceptional, faith than He had expected of the people of Israel (Matt 8:10). He was the son of the Covenant and a zealously religious, practicing Jew Who started His ministry with a handful of fishermen and peasants, all Jews, and in the Jewish land, Palestine, a place He never left. He taught, preached and spoke with the characteristically Jewish rhythm of expression, balanced repetitions and alliterations of Hebrew poetry in Rabbinic literature of Israel called the midrash. His birth, breeding, occupation, community life, demeanor, clothing, alliances, religious observances and speaking style altogether were typically Jew, and His Jewish-ness was an allegiance He not only never denied but also raised above other races of men. As the true son of the Covenant, He recognized that the Jews had a single and most important mission in the world and a specific and special destiny of their own.

That the Jews were God's chosen people was not only known to Jesus the Nazarene but was also His all-consuming sentiment and the lone objective of His coming to earth. He was to fulfill to the promises of God the Creator to these people in Israel as their Messiah who was spoken of by the prophets and whom they had been waiting for. God's agenda of salvation for humankind, His composite dealing with the world, was designed exclusively for the Jews as His chosen people, whom He had lost because of Adam's sin. The repair of that eternal separation was to through the sin sacrifice of the Messiah Whom was sent to the Jews. The Jews and what happens to them have historically proved to be central to human affairs as the especially chosen people, and what happens to them will dictate the direction that world affairs will take in the future, which is the will of God.

Why are the Jews so special and privileged? The Bible is the instruction manual on how life should be lived on earth. It contains laws that regulate all the aspects of human existence and form the divinely willed basis of human conduct. It establishes only one religion. Only the Jews have obeyed God's laws and standards for living, as set forth in the Bible, and have adopted the only religious mode He approves. This is Judaism, the religion of the Jews, which Jesus the Messiah Himself confirms and practiced. He was, therefore, clearly and, without a doubt, a Jew.

God chose the Jews or Israelites as a pattern or demonstration of how His will works in the world through what happens to these people. When they disobey His laws, He punishes them; when they obey and believe, He greatly rewards them. He intended the Jews to be His representatives on earth, and caused His only begotten Son, the Messiah Yeshua or Jesus to be born and to live among them, as a Jew, to save them from their sins and restore them to a former divine friendship.

Jesus also came from a lineage of preachers, healer and charismatic leaders. Before the start of His public ministry, a cousin, John the Baptist or Baptizer, was already preaching about repentance and cleansing through water immersion. John was part of the Essenes and Qumran community that specialized in this ancient Hebrew cleansing ritual. He was later beheaded by King Herod whom he annoyed for his immorality. John was a forerunner to Jesus who took off from John's message and also took in two of John's former followers. As His public ministry grew, He acquired more local disciples, mostly fishermen in the Lake Kinneret chief among them, Simon Bar Yonah, whom Jesus called Peter.in Greek and Cephas in Aramaic.

When Jesus called Himself the Son of Man, the ascription of made to the Messiah in the Book of Daniel, He did so as a fervent Jew who preached a radically ethical understanding and observance of the Law. He condemned the hypocrisy of the Jewish priests who observed the letter of the Law and not its spirit. He poised the greed or hunger for material wealth against morality and taught that those who did not lust after material prosperity would inherit the Kingdom of His Father. In the beginning, the impact of His radical departure from the ways of the priests was insignificant until He ventured into the Passover festival in Jerusalem where He created waves and drew the annoyance and resentment of public authorities. Their entrance into the holy city in a time of triumph and fashion called the attention of these authorities and the public together. He drove out the money changers who bought sacrifices by the priests and accused them of materialism. When He sensed His persecutors coming after Him, He intimated to Peter that He is really the Christ, the Son of God, but told Peter to first keep it secret. Rumors spread that Roman soldiers were looking for Him to arrest Him for subversion. In the meantime, He held a Passover or last supper with His 12 apostles where He blessed and shared a cup of wine and matzoh bread with them and told them to repeat the act in His memory. In their conversation, Jesus expressed the awareness that they would betray Him. Indeed, Judas sold Him for 30 pieces of silver and betrayed Him with a kiss in the Garden where Jesus sweated blood at His forthcoming execution, and the rest went into hiding or denied even knowing Him, as in His favorite friend Peter's case. Before Pilate, Jesus called Himself King of the Jews and for which He was convicted and sentenced to crucifixion, through the instigation of the priests whose sensitivities Jesus hurt.

Three days after His crucifixion, His body disappeared from the tomb. His followers claimed He had risen as He said He would, bodily appeared to them and then bodily ascended into Heaven, as Elijah prophesied. This experience emboldened them to come out of hiding and they gathered at the upper room of the Cenacle on the Day of the Pentecost. From then on, they openly preached the radical ethic taught by Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is the origin of Christian worship and prayer and it directly links Jesus to God and Jesus has been called Lord, the Christ, the faithful and true witness. His followers who observed and advocated His teachings of the Good News were called Christians. Christianity was later founded and spread by the Roman soldier, Saul, who persecuted the Christians but was converted into an apostle by a direct encounter with Christ on Saul's way to Damascus. He was later renamed Paul.

Jesus as a Jew demanded nothing less than perfect obedience to the Law of Moses, that is, obedience to the spirit of the Law rather than just the letter or eternal ceremonies and observances. He remained a practicing Jew while condemning materialism and hypocrisy of the priests, declared Himself as their much-awaited Messiah and made a new, unprecedented, urgent and free offer of salvation from sin to those who would follow Him. Those who would become His disciples would be freed from the burdens imposed by the Mosaic Law, as He had come to free them from this bondage. Jesus lived what He taught as a person. He was totally abandoned in full trust and love for the living God Whose will and presence consumed Him and, in so doing, defeated the powers of the evil one. In His unrelenting representation of the infinite compassion and generosity of His Father for His people, Jesus worked miracles by healing the sick, turning water into wine and even raising the dead to life.

In His ardor to exemplify the Good News of reconciliation, Jesus boldly crossed traditional socio-religious barriers and sided with hated tax collectors, prostitutes and thieves. He wanted the Good News to exhilarate the long-oppressed and the abandoned and restore their lost sense of belonging to their God and Father. All the time, He openly expressed disapproval of pretentious Temple worship, challenged customs and freely indulged in the company of public sinners in a way that scandalized Jewish rulers and set them wondering who Jesus could really be. But Jesus was much more intensely interested in sending His Father's message of forgiveness and mercy to those who would accept it than on what guilty hypocrites thought about Him and would eventually do to Him. His unparalleled freedom in preaching about the Good News of the Kingdom drew the enthusiasm of crowds, but not long enough. Jesus took the risk of disseminating an insane kind of love that could not be understood or appreciated then, although it addressed the deepest longing of the human spirit. The more immediate fact was that He preached an opposing ethic at a time of political unrest and factionalism that led leaders to think He was a political rebel of some sort, a blasphemer and a daydreaming troublemaker.

The God of the Jews was the Father of Jesus. He was born, lived, preached and died as a faithful Jew. But He taught and lived more than what the Mosaic Law exacted through outward ceremonies and rules, He perfected these through a transcending love that was large enough to absorb and out-suffer the violence and shame of a ghastly and undeserved death on the cross and the abandonment of His friends. Crucifixion was a type of execution reserved for foreign invaders, traitors and slaves, and only someone ignited with the most unusual kind of love for weak and uncaring humanity would be willing to take it out of love and compassion for them. But Jesus was and Jesus did, because of a mission to which He was faithful until death, a mission of spreading His Father's Good News that, through Him, sinful man can now be freed from the bondage of sin and restored to infinite fellowship. What men could not pay back under the Old Law of Moses, Jesus remitted by suffering and dying in their behalf under the New Law.

Jesus was a Jew and observed everything the Jewish Law commanded and went beyond mere compliance. He put in and highlighted the element of love and sincerity that He Himself exemplified. He did not come to start a new religion to replace Judaism but to add the single and most fundamental element that would fulfill the Law in Him but radically alter it. This was what hurt the egos of the Jewish religious authorities. Their idea of worship involved only external performances, which would not require them to give up cherished advantages, convenience and pettiness. They did not want to think that far, while arrogating their privileged status as God's chosen people. Jesus knew what was in their hearts all along and addressed these hearts directly and conclusively. This direct and conclusive assault upon hypocrisy, greed, and conceit caused His cousin John the Baptist his life and then His own.

Pilate, the priests, the Romans and the crowd knew that Jesus did no wrong, but went about His life doing good and giving hope. That He should be sentenced to the most demeaning kind of death only revealed how out of since human beings have gone from God's original purpose. Jesus came into His own, but His own did not welcome him John 1:11) because they no longer have His Spirit, and without His Spirit, even His own would be misguided. They would follow another kind of law in their members that has kept them bondage from the knowledge between good and evil (Gen 3:5). While committing themselves to what was right, they overpowered the weak and separated outsiders through a claim to authority and moral autonomy and, in reality, observed a rule that repaid evil with evil. It was in this historical context that Jesus was born, grew up and conducted His ministry as a genuine, faithful Jew.

But in gathering His first followers, Jews like Himself, Jesus did not promise them a good time. Instead, He warned them that they would suffer persecution, no less than the persecution He faced, for following Him. But in the same breath, He promised them life everlasting and the right to sit on the throne of Heaven. In the meantime, his initiates should expect to be evicted out of the synagogues, like He was and the fact that He established synagogue worship as a norm among His new recruits opposes the assumption that He was setting up new religion. He was, instead, going deeper into the practice, except that He wanted His followers to be keenly familiar with suffering to a point of overcoming it out of love for His Father.

The Christian religion or Christianity grew out largely from the teachings of Saul, renamed into Paul the Apostle, after his conversion. He wrote the Epistles in the New Testament. Many critics, however, found his writing style complicated, his instructions hard to observe and his saying anti-Semitic and antinomian or anti-law. Almost two centuries have passed and Paul's teachings have remained unacceptable to the Jews. The major difference between Judaism and Christianity lies in the superiority or inferiority of faith over action, no longer Jesus is the Messiah or not. Judaism teaches that God looks and judges His people's action more than their faith and obliges them to follow biblical and rabbinic law to the letter. Christianity, on the other had, emphasized faith over works or acts, whereby faith in Jesus Christ releases one from the burdens of following the law to the letter.

Christian history, however, testifies that this reverse position of faith over works was not the emphasis of either Jesus or His early followers. Jesus Himself said that He had come not to abolish but to fulfill the Law and assured all that not a single dot or stroke would disappear from the Law, the Torah, is completely fulfilled, at the expense of the earth and heaven. He also warned against violating even the least of its commandments (Matt 5:17-19). Evidence also showed that the disciples of Jesus continued to observe Jewish Law or Halakha: their regular praying in the Temple (Acts 2:46, 3:1), Peter's scrupulous observance of Jewish dietary laws or Kashrut (Acts 15:1), and their preaching about circumcision in relation to salvation, according to the Law of Moses (Gal 2:12). James told Paul straightway denied the report against him and that Paul still regularly observed the Law (Acts 21:24).

In the year 70, the Romans destroyed the Jewish community in Jerusalem and a new ideology was formed concerning God's law. Its designer was Paul of Tarsus who set forth that: all the laws of the Torah must be observed and that anyone who did not persevere in their observance would be cursed (Gal 3:10); man is imperfect and will sin under the law, but the Law could not justify or give life (Gal 3:21-22); man is cursed by the Laws and cannot rely on them but must be redeemed from them through belief in Jesus Christ, Who redeemed man from that curse (Gal 3:10). He concluded that the only way to be set right with God is only through faith in Him and not by performing what the Law commanded (Romans 3:28).

The differences between Judaism and Christianity are many and profound. The Jews contend that Paul's idea that a person who breaks a law is cursed by God (Gal 3:10) can be found nowhere in the Bible and must have been due to his misreading Deuteronomy 27:15-25. These verses list 11 basic ethical obligations and declare that a transgressor was perpetually cursed by the Jews or Moses for the transgression. The Jews say that the Bible recognizes man's sinfulness (Ecclesiastes 7:20) and mentions chosen Jews, such as Moses and David, who sinned, but repented and were restored to God's grace.

The Jews do not excuse those who violate the Law, but when a person breaks a law, he o she can repent and be made right with God again. Repentance, or teshuvah in Hebrew, which means return, consists of three steps: the transgressor must acknowledge his sin, feel sincere contrition or sorrow at having sinned and then resolve or decide to return to fulfilling the law again. A fourth step was offering a sacrifice at the Temple, but was rendered unnecessary when the Temple was later destroyed and because God considers righteousness and righteousness more acceptable than sacrifice. This was illustrated by the repentant people of Nineveh whom God forgave although they did not make a sin-offering. And God cursing imperfect men for being such makes Him cruel and sadistic and these are not traits of their God.

In contrast with Christianity, Judaism puts greater importance to acts than on faith. The Jew base this position on the Talmud, which states that God prefers the Jew to abandon Him but continue observing His laws, because they will return to Him through the observance of these laws (Jer 16:11) (Jerusalem Talmud, Hagiggah 1:7). Judaism also differs from Christianity particularly in denying three major Christian dogmas, namely, original sin, the Second Coming and the sin atonement of Jesus' death on the Cross. Christians perceive these beliefs are necessary in solving insoluble problems. Paul or Christianity views baptism as the solution to the problem of original sin, which condemns all men, and the solution was approved at the Council of Trent (1545-63). Christianity sees original sin as replicating by generation, rather than by imitation, and therefore every man is born with a sin nature until blotted out by baptism. The Jews, however, maintain that every man is born innocent or without sin and it is his personal choice to sin or not to sin.

Christians also believe that the Messianic prophecies were not completely fulfilled with Jesus' first coming and so He must come a second time to do so. The Jews believe neither in Jesus as the Messiah nor in a Second Coming, which, they argue, is nowhere to be found in the Bible.

And Christianity believes that human beings cannot attain salvation by their own effort or merit and someone chosen precisely for the purpose had to take their place and they put their faith in his atoning sacrifice. This is the Messiah, Jesus Christ, born as a Jew and dying and conquering death in lieu of those who will accept Him as their Savior and follow His teachings. The Jews have no problem with this dogma in the belief that their own actions can save them.

There have been arguments against the position of the Jews or Judaism. One argument asks what sins Jesus died to atone for or the purpose of His atoning sacrifice. The Jews claim that the Bible obliged only them to obey the Law, non-Jews could not have committed sin, therefore, non-Jews sinned only against other people, not against God and Jesus' death atoned for the sin of non-Jews too. Judaism claims that God Himself cannot forgive sins against another person: only that violated person can forgive.