Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus : Volume 2 , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - L. Brown Michael

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

248 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Respectful, thoroughly documented answers to twenty-eight of the weightiest theological objections progressively reveal how belief in Jesus is deeply rooted in Jewish concepts and teaching.

Sujets

Jewish studies

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 novembre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781585589944
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0749€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2000 by Michael L. Brown
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2011
Ebook corrections 12.13.2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-5855-8994-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Scripture marked KJV is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture marked NJPSV is taken from the New Jewish Publication Society Version. © 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society.
Scripture marked REB is taken from The Revised English Bible. © 1989 by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
Scripture marked RSV is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedicated to my fellow Jewish believers in Jesus around the world
Joshua 1:9 2 Corinthians 13:8 Hebrews 13:11–14
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Part 3 Theological Objections
3.1. Jews don’t believe in the Trinity. We believe in one God, not three.
3.2. If you claim that Jesus is God then you are guilty of making God into a man. You are an idol worshiper!
3.3. God doesn’t have a son.
3.4. According to the Law (Deuteronomy 13), Jesus was a false prophet because he taught us to follow other gods (namely, the Trinity, including the god Jesus), gods our fathers have never known or worshiped. This makes all his miracles utterly meaningless.
3.5. The Holy Spirit is not the so-called Third Person of the Trinity.
3.6. According to Isaiah 43:11, God alone is our Savior. We don’t need or recognize any other saviors.
3.7. We are righteous by what we do, not by what we believe. Christianity is the religion of the creed, Judaism the religion of the deed.
3.8. Scripture clearly tells us that “to do what is right and just is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice” (Prov. 21:3).
3.9. The prophets indicated clearly that God did not care for blood sacrifices. In fact, they practically repudiated the entire sacrificial system, teaching that repentance and prayer were sufficient. The Talmudic rabbis simply affirmed this biblical truth.
3.10. Even if I accept your premise that blood sacrifices are of great importance in the Torah, the fact is that our Hebrew Bible including the Torah itself offers other means of atonement, not just the shedding of blood.
3.11. According to Proverbs 16:6, love and good deeds make atonement. So who needs sacrifices?
3.12. It’s clear that you misunderstand the entire sacrificial system. Sacrifices were for unintentional sins only. Repentance was the only remedy for intentional sins.
3.13. Even if I accept your arguments about the centrality of blood sacrifices, it only held true while the Temple was standing. The Book of Daniel teaches us that if the Temple has been destroyed and is not functional, prayer replaces sacrifice. In fact, the Book of Ezekiel is even more explicit, telling Jews living in exile and therefore without any access to the Temple, even if it were standing that repentance and good works are all God requires.
3.14. The Book of Jonah shoots down all your arguments about sacrifice and atonement, especially with reference to Gentiles. When Jonah preached, the people repented, and God forgave them no sacrifice, no blood offering.
3.15. Even if I admit that we need blood atonement, I still won’t believe in Jesus. God wanted the blood of a goat or a lamb, not a person. He doesn’t want human sacrifice!
3.16. I can’t believe the death of Jesus paid for my sins because the Torah teaches that for blood to be effectual, it had to be poured on the altar in a specific way. This obviously does not refer to Jesus.
3.17. If the death of Jesus was the fulfillment of the sacrificial system, why do the prophets anticipate sacrifices when the Third Temple is built?
3.18. The Christian concept of salvation is contrary to the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition. Jews don’t need saving.
3.19. Jewish people don’t need a middleman.
3.20. Jews don’t believe in original sin or a fall of man. We do not believe the human race is totally sinful.
3.21. Jews don’t need to repent.
3.22. Jews don’t believe in a divine Messiah.
3.23. Jews don’t believe in a suffering Messiah.
3.24. Jews don’t believe the Messiah will come twice.
3.25. Judaism is a healthy religion. Jews don’t see the world as intrinsically evil or denounce marriage or call for self-renunciation. Christians, on the other hand, see the world as evil, advocate celibacy, and say, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and suffer.”
3.26. Christianity calls on its followers to exhibit unnatural emotions and feelings such as love for their enemies. This is contrary to the Torah as well as human nature.
3.27. The only thing that keeps many people in the Christian faith including Jews is a fear of hell.
3.28. I find much beauty in the teachings of Jesus, and I think there are some good arguments in favor of Christianity. But I find it impossible to believe in a religion that condemns all people to hell including many moral, good, kind, and sensitive people, not to mention countless millions of religious Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists simply because they don’t believe in Jesus. I can’t follow a religion whose God tortures people in flames forever for not believing in someone they never even heard of.
Notes
Glossary
Subject Index
Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings
About the Author
Other Books by Author
Backcover
Preface
In November of 1971, as a rebellious, proud, heroin-shooting, rock-drumming, Jewish sixteen-year-old, I discovered something that I was not looking for and the course of my life was completely altered. I found out that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah! I learned that he was the one spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, that he was God’s way of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike, and that through faith in him my life could be transformed even though I didn’t want it to be transformed. I loved my sinful ways! But God’s goodness overcame my badness, and in a matter of weeks, I was a brand-new man.
My parents were thrilled and relieved to see the tremendous change in my life. I had fallen so far, so quickly, since my bar mitzvah at age thirteen, and my parents had been deeply concerned. But the positive transformation was more radical and dramatic than was the fall. The only problem for my parents especially for my father was that in their opinion I had joined a foreign religion. So my father, thrilled with the change in my life but very much wanting me to come back to our traditions, brought me to the local Conservative rabbi in early 1972 (I was still not yet seventeen). But rather than attacking my beliefs, this twenty-six-year-old rabbi befriended me. He told me that in his opinion he was not as spiritual a person as I was, although his beliefs were right and mine were wrong. In his view, Judaism, meaning traditional, Orthodox, observant Judaism, was the only true faith for our people, and he felt that the key for me would be to meet some very religious and zealous traditional Jews. And so the journey began!
In the summer of 1973, the rabbi brought me to Brooklyn to spend an afternoon with some ultra-Orthodox rabbis. It was a real eye-opener for me! I was impressed with the devotion and kindly demeanor of these men, and I was challenged by their scholarship. How could I, just eighteen years old and barely able to read the Hebrew alphabet, tell them what our sacred Hebrew texts meant? They had been studying the Scriptures all their lives; I had been a believer less than two years, although by then I had read the Bible cover to cover roughly five times and memorized more than four thousand verses. But they had memorized the original; I was dependent on English translations. What business did I have telling them that Jesus was actually the fulfillment of the prophecies of our Hebrew Bible?
This was my predicament: I was sure that my faith was sound and that Jesus really was our Messiah, but I could find almost no literature (and almost no people) to help me. When I did find solid academic works by Christians dealing with Messianic prophecy and related subjects, they tended to be insensitive to the traditional Jewish objections I was hearing. On the other hand, the few books (really, booklets) I found specifically addressing Jewish objections tended to be popular, short, and nonscholarly in their approach. I was in a quandary!
How could I effectively answer the questions of the rabbis and refute their objections? And what about my own conscience? Could I really be at peace with myself without being able to provide intellectually solid responses to my own people, especially when the rabbis told me that if I could read the original texts, I would never believe in Jesus? So it was that I began to study Hebrew in college, ultimately making it my major and continuing with graduate studies until I earned a doctorate in Semitic languages. And all through my college and graduate years, I was constantly dialoging with rabbis and religious Jews, sometimes in public debates, other times one on one. I wanted to understand exactly why my own people rejected Jesus Yeshua as Messiah, and