Jewish Jesus

Jewish Jesus

This article was found again on the CNN website, see some consistency here.  The topic today is about Jews reclaiming Jesus as an important element in their Judaism.  For centuries Jews were sceptical of Jesus because other religions believe Jesus to have a divinity, whereas the Jews do not.  That is why in some ways they did not want anything to do with Jesus, and they dismissed him quite a bit from their teaching.  This generation of Jews however want to be better equated with Jesus because they see him as a good example to look at, as Jesus himself was a Jew.  They will not however still accept Jesus deity like Christians do.  A simple way to explain what Christians believe Jesus to be is this: teacher, healer, and savior (son of God).  What the Jews believe is that Jesus was a teacher and a healer but not savior.

            What really stood out to me when I was reading this article was when  this woman,  Levine mentioned that it is important to know what you believe about the religion you claim to be yours.  She said you owe it to people out of respect when you put that kind of religious label on yourself.   It is true for Christians as well, when we call ourselves Christians we need to know about what we claim, we need to know Christ!  Not just know a little about him but know his words, his actions, his commandments for us.  So if anyone asks about what we believe we won’t be stumbling for words but we will know what to say.  I think this is especially true if we are going to wear something like a Jesus shirt.  Actually the other day I saw a group of people in a museum wearing shirts that said, “You Need Jesus”.  Well I think that we don’t need to wear a shirt to say that because it’s almost like we are telling people this but we don’t care enough to just talk to them about it (I hope that was at least part of the intent).  But yes we can’t just wear a t-shirt and hope we did our job on telling people about Jesus.  No I think that shirt doesn’t tell us much about Jesus at all.  
Link:  http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/05/jews-reclaim-jesus-as-one-of-their-own/?iref=allsearch