These atrocities are not in keeping with the teachings of Jesus or the New Testament writers, and are, in fact, in direct opposition to them. In fact, there has been more bloodshed in the name of Jesus rather than in the name of peace.
How then can anyone argue that Jesus is the promised Messiah according to the Jewish Scriptures? Because the current Jewish community is so focused on inclusion, it has compelled them to consider Jesus and those who follow him in a different light. Many recent studies show that this once-firm perspective is now shifting, both on paper, and in everyday Jewish life. While Jewish followers of Jesus acknowledge the cultural obstacles and painful historical facts surrounding his identity, there are still many reasons that drive them to believe that he is the Messiah.
First and foremost, most people who come to follow Jesus, Jewish or not, have a personal encounter with God that changes their lives. They recognize that Jesus was born to Jewish parents, was raised in a Jewish home in Israel , observed the Torah , and taught the nation of Israel as a rabbi. Following his teachings is a continuation of the Jewish faith, not an abandonment of it. It is important to understand all the prophecies describing the Messiah in the Jewish Scriptures and not just selected passages.
The Hebrew Scriptures relate a complex picture of who this figure will be. It was necessary for the Messiah to first come, suffer, and die as an atonement for sin.
By doing so, he brought peace between humanity and God. However, the Tanakh goes on to explain that he will return and at that time establish peace on earth. Jesus came to bring reconciliation with God, not violence and bloodshed, especially against his own people. Christians believe this because we believe God established a new covenant through Jesus. Christians believe Jesus fulfilled the prophecies and types of the Messiah in the Old Testament.
Judaism rejects all of this and is still watching for the Messiah. There are numerous other stumbling blocks hindering non-believing Jews from believing Jesus is the Messiah.
Here are a few examples. They believe the Messiah will re-establish the Jewish nation and bring peace and prosperity back to God's chosen people. Followers of Judaism do not believe the promised Messiah will come and die to save the world from the burden of sin. Even more shocking to the Jews, Christians believe that peace is offered to the Gentiles just as freely as to the Jews. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey just one week before His crucifixion, the Jews hailed Him as a military hero who would save them from Roman occupation Matthew — When they learned that Jesus was not going to do this, they turned against Him, calling Him a blasphemer claiming to be one with God, and demanded His crucifixion.
Today, many Jews acknowledge that Jesus was a great teacher and maybe even a prophet. But they hold to the belief that Jesus was only a man and not God.
Jesus taught that He could forgive sins. No one can be God's equal. Jesus lived his life not as a Christian but as a Jew, obedient with very few exceptions to Torah. Yet within a few years after his death, the Jewish followers of Jesus espoused a rather different kind of religion from that followed by most Jews. Judaism, like Islam after it, is strongly rooted in religious law; Christianity ceased to be so. Judaism, also like Islam, has a strong belief in the unity of God; Christianity came to place such great store in Jesus and subsequently in the doctrine of the Trinity that it has seemed to many other monotheists to be, in essence, a refined form of polytheism.
Gradually, Christian religion came to look less like an authentic, even if eccentric, form of Judaism, and more like a completely different religion. During the Second Temple period, there were many internal arguments about what it meant to be Jewish. Did religious law permit one to acquiesce in Roman occupation, or to fight it? How did the law reconcile justice and mercy?
These must have been common debates, which one can see mirrored in the gospels' accounts of Jesus' disputes with contemporary religious leaders. We cannot be certain of Jesus' views, for the gospels are a highly interpretative genre of literature, coloured by their contributors' and editors' reflections on events that had happened 40 and more years before, in the light of the momentous events that had occurred in the intervening years.
Even so, his attitude towards dietary laws recorded in Mark's gospel shows little interest in the minutiae of what they require that Jews eat and drink. This unusual interpretation eventually became common for Christians: certainly the food laws gradually became a thing of the past, as accounts in Acts and the Pauline letters illustrate.
Moreover, although Jesus' message of the kingdom of God was clearly within mainstream Jewish tradition, the Christological references about him and his meaning are less so. The belief that Jesus was God is an impossibility for Jewish thought.
But not so the belief that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. Several Jews have in the course of years, claimed to be the Messiah - sent by God to inaugurate God's kingdom on earth. But the association of Messiah with terms like Son of Man and Son of God, which developed a profusion of meanings, soon led to exalted claims for Jesus that few Jews felt able to follow.
Even within the New Testament this is so; by the time of the full-blown Trinitarianism of the 4th century creeds this gap was unbridgeably wide. Jesus was put to death by the Romans on the charge that he claimed to be the Messiah.
Jesus made it clear to Peter that he regarded himself as the Messiah Mark as he did to the High Priest Mark Some Jews accepted Jesus as Messiah, believing that he would redeem them from the bitter yoke of Rome and bring the messianic age. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem he was acclaimed, "blessed is the Kingdom that comes, the kingdom of our father David" Mark Other Jews rejected the claim. The charge against Jesus on the cross and his mockery as 'King of the Jews', his execution between two villains, the appearance of the royal messianic motifs - these all suggest that Pilate faced a man charged with sedition.
Jesus was not crucified because he denied his Jewishness, abandoned the Scriptures, or disowned his people. He remained a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, the Jew from Galilee and was executed for political rather than religious reasons. To claim to be the Messiah, if it was an offence against Judaism at all, was certainly not as the Gospels contend an offence against Jewish law for which Jesus could have been put to death.
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