Who Was Jesus?
According to the New Testament and the Christian church, Jesus is divine, the son of God, the Messiah. In sharp contrast, Jews believe Jesus was a man – period. Jesus – The Man Jews believe that Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem, raised in Galilee, and killed in Jerusalem. Like other Jews in his day, Jesus spoke and wrote the Aramaic language. His own Aramaic name was Yeshua. Like other educated Jews in his day, he was faithful to the law of Moses, learned in Jewish scriptures and oral law, steeped in the spirit of the Pharisees (the leading religious teachers of his day), and expectant of the coming of the Messianic Era (which he called the “Kingdom of God”). In his day, many people called Jesus “rabbi.” Like other religious, nationalistic Jews before and after him, Jesus angered the Roman government. The Romans considered the ideas preached by Jesus to be dangerous. As a result, the Romans arrested Jesus during his Passover trip to Jerusalem.
The feature article that followed had the subtitle “New Theories offer starkly different visions of a great religion’s central figure.” The article reviews several widely accepted and recently published books that give rather untraditional pictures ofJesus of Nazareth. Each claims to give new insight or a vision of Jesus that is closer to the real story than the gospel records. Several claim to be based on “new discoveries.” In this article I will review some of those “new” visions of Jesus and point to problems with these and other similar views of Jesus. History, reason, and faith call us to challenge the theories of this revisionist scholarship. First I’ll summarize these views briefly from the Maclean’s article itself. 1.Barbara Thiering is the author of the book, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, published in June, 1992. She is a lecturer in theology at Sidney University. According to Thiering, Jesus was born, according to the modern calendar, in the year 7 BC, in a re
The Bible gave a warning about a dangerous, false prophet who would arise to test our faith in G-d. In Deuteronomy 13, G-d describes this false prophet as a member of the Jewish people (v. 2, 7) who would tell true prophecies and would have the power of miracles. G-d Himself would give this false prophet the power to perform miracles and reveal prophecy, but the false prophet would try to seduce the people away from G-d’s Law and towards strange gods unknown to Judaism. The purpose would be to test whether we are truly committed to living under the Law, or whether we will be dazzled and fall for the temptation to join a false path to salvation (v. 3-6, 7-8, 11). In this Biblical passage, G-d repeatedly commands the Jews to kill this false prophet, lest the evil spread and destroy many souls. To be accepted by the people, the false prophet would sometimes pretend to be a righteous Jew who fulfills the Law, but at key moments he would turn against certain details of the Law in order to m
Jesus, or Jesus Christ, is the central figure of Christianity, a Jew, born (ca. 4-8 BC) in Bethlehem in Judea, Palestine. Traditionally, the Christians have seen him as the Messiah, the incarnate Son of God, and as having been divinely conceived by Mary, the wife of Joseph, a carpenter of Nazareth; and that by faith in Jesus one may attain salvation and eternal life. He was crucified (ca. 29 AD) after a brief public ministry during Pontius Pilate’s term as prefect of Judea.
