The sufferings of the Jewish people have led many to disbelieve in God and to reject the idea of the Messiah altogether. But the articles of faith of Judaism express faith in ‘the coming of the Messiah, though he tarry’. The expectation of Messiah coming is a hope that times of pain and persecution will end and peace will come to the house of Israel. A Jewish prayer says, ‘Thou...
In our posting ‘Messiah – man or divine?’, I mentioned Rabbi Kaplan’s teaching that ‘the Jewish Messiah is truly human in origin. He is born of ordinary human parents, and is of flesh and blood like all mortals.’ The New Testament is at pains to make clear that there was something very unusual about Jesus’ birth, that he was not conceived in the normal way to ordinary human parents. This...
1. Birth in Bethlehem Bethlehem’s claim to fame in Bible history is that it was the location of the story of Ruth, the ancestress of King David and the city where David was born and lived as a youth. According to the prophecy of Micah 5.2 (5.1 in the Jewish Bible) something special was to happen at a future time in Bethlehem. ‘But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are little among the...
For many Jewish people the kind of arguments presented on this website are invalid because as far as they are concerned the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular are unreliable documents. There is a great deal of collusion between liberal Jewish and Christian scholars who undermine the message of the Bible and present an entirely different interpretation of the events recorded in...
Who is this prophet talking about? The other big issue coming out of Isaiah’s prophecy centres on this passage: ‘Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. Just as many were astonished at you, so his visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men; so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at him;...
During the 1970’s I made friends with some Jewish socialists who invited me along to a meeting of Young Mapam, a socialist Zionist group. The speaker was a man called Hyam Maccoby who gave a talk on Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary leader against the Romans. We pitched into the discussion afterwards and some members of the group then invited us along to another meeting where they were going to...
Her name was Millie and she was born into a Jewish home around the beginning of the 20th Century and brought up in a small town in Poland. She told us that her first memory of the name of Jesus was when her parents told her to hide in a cupboard in their home because it was ‘Good Friday’ and on that day the ‘Christians’ would come out of their church services into the Jewish quarter to throw...