Sparky says:
Tell Them The Truth — They've got Bupkis.
Sir Moses Montefiore According to an apocryphal account, Sir Moses Montefiore is
supposed to have been confronted by an anti-Semitic member
of the House of Lords at a state function, who informed him
that he had recently returned from Japan, "where they have
neither pigs nor Jews." Montefiore is alleged to have responded
"in that case, you and I should both go there, and then they shall
have one of each."
I'm counting on all the
PP Guru readers being hip to my earlier rant on "
Baby J" —
Xtians are sometimes puzzled and hurt by the allergic reaction of us
Jews to “Jesus” -- even to the mention of his name. But the energy is not really to “Jesus” the person, about whom Jews (like everyone else), know very little, but to his appropriation by the church and the oppression of Jews in his name.
Albert Schweitzer The
quest for the historical “Jesus” has gone on for about three centuries with no success. Now, the classical study was done by
Albert Schweitzer in his book,
"The Quest of the Historical Jesus" — What he showed was that from the 18th century on, the attempt to find out who “Jesus” really was had been conditioned all the way through by the needs and wants and desires of the people who were writing the Gospels.
Funny thing is no one wants to admit they have bupkis here. Nada. Nothing. And certainly “human framework” to hang the
myth on. there's really very little that we can know in a firm historical sense about the real “Jesus” as he is nonexistent. We really are only seeing the wake of the myth fashioned by Paul.
Franz Rosenzweig when asked what Jews thought about “Jesus,” he answered simply, "They don't. " But in regard to the historical “Jesus,” the same thing could be said about Xtians.
The historical information about “Jesus,” therefore, is precious to me as a way of understanding not just the historical puzzle about this “whisper campaign gone awry,” but also to understand the nature of the source religion and of its varieties. Modern scholars have routinely reinvented “Jesus” or have routinely rediscovered in “Jesus” that which they want to find, be it rationalist, liberal Christianity of the 19th century, be it apocalyptic miracle workers in the 20th, be it revolutionaries, or be it whatever it is that they're looking for, scholars have been able to find in “Jesus” almost anything that they want to find.
Yet Jews have also been fascinated by the “Jesus” myth. When Jews began to think about their own history, they had to consider him as part of its' baggage. Nineteenth-century scholars who investigated “Jesus” included the Jewish historians
Heinrich Graetz and
Abraham Geiger.
Claude Montefiore wrote a two-volume commentary on the
Synoptic gospels in the early part of this century, and
What A Jew Thinks about Jesus, published in 1935.
Joseph Klausner wrote Jesus of Nazareth in Hebrew in 1922. Translated into several languages, it is still the best-know book on “Jesus” by a Jew. The present generation draws a bold line between “Jesus” as Jew and Christianity's picture of him. Just as earlier generations of scholars often separated “Jesus” from his Judaism, present-day scholars, Jewish and Christian, both distance him from the Christianity that claimed him. Jewish writers — when coerced under the gun to tell fundamentalists their myth was real — often characterized him as simply another unexceptional Jewish holy man, beyond his later public-relations image first created by Paul, or so unlike Jewish expectations of a Messiah as to make his lack of acceptance by most early Jews utterly unsurprising.
Honestly, even if all the hoopla was about a real person, he'd simply be yet another "failed messiah" versus the harsher "
phony messiah" skeptical historians label him. If you want a person considered to be a messiah (or annointed leader) that would be
Simon Bar Kokhba.
The Jewish sage
Rabbi Akiva convinced the Sanhedrin to support the impending revolt and regarded the chosen commander Simon Bar Kokhba the
Jewish Messiah, according to the verse from Numbers 24:17: "There shall come a star out of Jacob" ("Bar Kokhba" means "son of a star" in Aramaic language).
Due to the failure of the earlier
Great Jewish Revolt in the eastern Roman provinces, Bar Kokhba's support was mostly limited to the Roman province of Judea. Despite some initial successes, his revolt was brutally crushed by Emperor Hadrian: Bar Kokhba and his followers were killed in a dramatic last stand at the fortress of Betar, southwest of Jerusalem. Many of his supporters were executed, among them Rabbi Akiva. Nevertheless, it was a costly victory for Rome, and the generals, when reporting to the Senate, did not begin with the customary greeting: "I and my troops are well." After Bar Kokhba's defeat, Jerusalem was razed, Jews were forbidden to live there, and a new Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, was built in its place.
Over the past few decades, much new information about the revolt has come to light, thanks mainly to the discovery of several collections of letters, some possibly by Bar Kokhba himself, in the caves overlooking the Dead Sea. These letters can now be seen at the Israel Museum.
At the time, Christianity was still a minor sect of Judaism and most historians believe that it was this messianic claim that alienated many Christians (who believed that the true messiah was Jesus) and sharply deepened the schism.
The Jewish leaders carefully planned the second revolt to avoid numerous mistakes that plagued the first one sixty years earlier. In 132 CE, it quickly spread from Modi'in across the country, cutting off the Roman garrison in Jerusalem.
Remember the real messiah will fulfill all of the below in his first visit:
- The Sanhedrin will be re-established. (Isaiah 1:26)
- Once he is King, leaders of other nations will look to him for guidance. (Isaiah 2:4)
- The whole world will worship the One God of Israel. (Isaiah 2:17)
- He will be descended from David HaMelech (Isaiah 11:1) via Solomon (1 Chron. 22:8-10)
- The Moshiach will be a man of this world, an observant Jew with “fear of God” (Isaiah 11:2)
- Evil and tyranny will not be able to stand before his leadership. (Isaiah 11:4)
- Knowledge of God will fill the world (Isaiah 11:9)
- He will include and attract all cultures and nations (Isaiah 11:10)
- Jews will have returned to their homeland (Isaiah 11:12)
- He will swallow up death forever (Isaiah 25:8)
- There will be no more hunger or illness, and death will cease (Isaiah 25:8)
- All of the dead will rise again (Isaiah 26:19)
- The Jewish people will experience eternal joy and gladness (Isaiah 51:11)
- He will be a messenger of peace. (Isaiah 52:7)
- Nations will end up recognizing the wrongs they did Israel (Isaiah 52:13-5)
- For My House shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations (Isaiah 56:3-7)
- The peoples of the world will turn to the Jews for spiritual guidance (Zechariah 8:23)
- The ruined cities of Israel will be restored (Ezekiel 16:55)
- Weapons of war will be destroyed (Ezekiel 39:9)
- The Temple will be rebuilt (Ezekiel 40) resuming many of the suspended mitzvos
- He will then perfect the entire world to serve God together, as it is written (Zephaniah 3:9)
- Jews will know the Torah without Study (Jeremiah 31:33)
- He will give you all the desires of your heart (Psalms 37:4)
- He will take the barren land and make it abundant & fruitful (Isaiah 51:3, Amos 9:13-15, Ezekiel 36:29-30, Isaiah 11:6-9)
To paraphrase
Maimonides who wrote why Jews believe that
Paul of Tarsus was wrong to create Christianity (and why they believe that Mohammad was wrong to create Islam) he laments the pains that Jews felt as a result of these new faiths that attempted to supplant Judaism. However, Maimonides then goes on to say that both faiths help God redeem the world.
As for Paul of Tarsus, who claimed “Yeshua of Nazareth” to be the anointed one who was killed by the Roman court, Daniel had already prophecied about him, thus: "And the children of your people's rebels shall raise themselves to set up prophecy and will stumble" (Ibid. 14). Can there be a bigger stumbling block than this? All the Prophets said that the Anointed One saves Israel and rescues them, gathers their strayed ones and strengthens their mitzvot whereas this one caused the loss of Israel by sword, and to scatter their remnant and humiliate them, and to change the Torah and to cause most of the world to erroneously worship a god besides the Lord. But the human mind has no power to reach the thoughts of the Creator, for His thoughts and ways are unlike ours. All these matters of “Jeshua of Nazareth” and of Mohammed who stood up after him are only intended to pave the way for the Anointed King, and to mend the entire world to worship God together, thus: "For then I shall turn a clear tongue to the nations to call all in the Name of the Lord and to worship him with one shoulder.
How is this? The entire world had become filled with the issues of the Anointed One and of the Torah and the Laws, and these issues had spread out unto faraway islands and among many nations uncircumcised in the heart, and they discuss these issues and the Torah's laws. These say: These Laws were true but are already defunct in these days, and do not rule for the following generations; whereas the other ones say: There are secret layers in them and they are not to be treated literally, and the Messiah had come and revealed their secret meanings. But when the Anointed King will truly rise and succeed and will be raised and uplifted, they all immediately turn about and know that their fathers inherited falsehood, and their prophets and ancestors led them astray.
Mostly I'm rambling again but I am tempted to show the attempted Mongol Invasion of Japan was actually "Jew on Jew" violence - Sparky
PS Wishing I had a good scan of Sean Kelly and Neal Adam's Son O' God Comics.
PPS Never forget that the KJV version of Daniel and Isaiah are sort of tainted and bad. They have errors and edits to make Xtians look better.