In my last video I said that the next video was going to be about the Jewish Jesus and
I got a comment saying - Is there a Jesus that is non-Jewish?
Jesus was Jewish, his disciples were Jewish and at no point does it say in the New Testament
that he started a new religion.
In this video I will talk about Jesus’s Jewish roots, and actually it goes far beyond
roots.
Before we start I will just say that my name is Oren and I am an Israeli tour guide.
I will also add that I am not trying to convert you.
I know that some Jews will find it suspicious that I’m talking about Jesus and some Christians
will find it strange that a Jew is talking about Jesus so I just want to say that there
is no secret agenda here.
My only secret agenda is no secret: I want you to visit Israel and enjoy it.
Many visitors and pilgrims come to Israel to see the places mentioned in the New Testament:
Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem.
Right now I’m at Emmaus Nicopolis, which is one of the towns associated with the Emmaus
of the New Testament and where Jesus met two of his disciples after the resurrection.
What you can see here today is mostly the ruins of a Byzantine church from 1500 years
ago and of a Crusader church which is 900 years old.
It makes quite an impression to see these places you’ve been hearing about your whole
life.
And for some that’s already enough.
But there are many more layers of understanding that can be added.
One of them, which I won't talk about today, is the range of different denominations and
how each one connects to Jesus.
I want to talk about the Jewish Jesus.
And before we take a deep dive, I’ll start with an event that happened 60 years ago - the
Nostra aetate.
In 1965 the Catholic church declared that Jews were not to be blamed for the death of
Jesus and established the common ground between the two religions.
This was a step in the right direction.
You can't understand the life of Jesus without understanding the time and surroundings in
whichJesus was active - the Jewish society of 2000 years ago.
There are two important things to know here.
The first is that Judaism today is very different to how it was 2000 years ago and the second
is that there were many different kinds of Judaism.
But let's start at the beginning.
The first century was a troubled time.
It was an apocalyptic era.
Everyone was waiting for something big to happen: the end of days, the Messiah, war...
The Jews were slowly losing their independence.
As the Roman occupation became more and more cruel, Jewish society found itself being divided
into many groups.
Some of these groups are mentioned in the New Testament.
I will say the Hebrew names as well so that my Hebrew-speaking audience will understand
what I’m talking about: the Pharisees פרושים are mentioned almost 100 times; the Sadducees
צדוקים are mentioned too, and then the zealots כת היחד או איסיים are
mentioned as well.
Christians need to understand the Jewish Bible because the New Testament ‘sits’ on the
Hebrew Bible like this.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, King David was born in Bethlehem.
Jesus was baptised by John at the location where the Israelites crossed the Jordan River
when entering the promised land.
Jesus was crucified on Pesach (Passover), when Jews were celebrating freedom with a
sacrifice in the temple.
The day the Jews got the Torah is the same day that the disciples started speaking in
different tongues.
This is Shavuot, or Pentecost.
And there are loads more examples.
Jews also need to learn the New Testament in order to understand this time when Judaism
changed the most.
Here is a small example I can give you: let’s go over the Hebrew names of Jesus’s family.
Unlike the Jewish kings in Jerusalem, whose names were influenced by Roman names like
Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, Jesus’s family members have very Jewish names: Jesus is Yehoshua,
Mary is Miriam, Joseph is Yossef, and Jesus’s brothers’ names are Yaakov, Yosi, Yehuda
and Shimon.
Sounds very Jewish to me...
So in order to understand the New Testament and the context of Jesus teaching you need
to understand the Jewish Bible and the different Jewish groups that were active at the time.
I will start with the Sadducees.
They were the ones with the power: they were rich, they were the families of the high priests
that served in the Temple in Jerusalem, they believed only in the written Bible and not
in the oral Bible, and they didn’t believe in the afterlife.
Another group was the Pharisees.
They represented the common people, they saw the Sadducees as corrupt and as collaborators
with the Romans.
They believed in the oral Bible, the afterlife, and that you get what you deserve in the afterlife.
In many ways the Pharisees took the work of the priests in the Temple and brought it down
to the public, making the work of God accessible to all the Jews, not only those in Jerusalem
and the Temple.
Another group was the Essenes.
Now I am not getting into the discussion about the identification of this group or their
name.
We know that there was this group, a group of men who didn’t allow women to join and
who lived in communities and had no private property, like a kibbutz of monks.They were
probably priests who rejected the corrupt priests in Jerusalem.
They were an elitist group who saw themselves as the sons of light, waiting for the war
against the sons of darkness.
They had their own books and their own calendar.
John the Baptist was probably influenced by them and maybe even was one of them for a
while.
And to all of that you need to add the idea of Tumah and Taharah, which means impure and
pure.
A topic that became a huge part of Judaism at that time.
Dead people or animals are impure, after you go to the bathroom you are impure, when women
have their period they are impure, some impurity can contain other things, and to become pure
again there are many different things that need to be done.
The Essenes didn’t go to the bathroom on Saturdays so that they would stay pure.
When the Pharisees criticized Jesus’s disciples for eating without purifying their hands beforehand,
Jesus replies... (and I’m reading from Mark chapter 7 - 15): There is nothing from outside
a man that, entering into him, can defile him; but the things which come out of him,
those are they that defile the man.. evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,
thefts… all these evil things come from within and defile the man.”
In the same chapter, a non-Jewish woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter.
But Jesus says to her, “Let the children be filled first, for it is not good to take
the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”
“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s
crumbs.”
Then Jesus told her, “Because of this answer, you may go.
The demon has left your daughter.”
The children are the Jews.
When Jesus criticizes the Pharisees, it is important to understand that this is not a
criticism of Judaism from someone on the outside, but it is a criticism from within.
Jesus said: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have
not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Jesus offers another interpretation of the Jewish Bible.
This is also the time that the Jewish Bible was sealed.
The Bible is a library of books.
Around the time of Jesus, the end of the Second Temple, it was decided which books would be
part of the Jewish Bible and which wouldn’t.
There were many more books written by different Jewish groups or denominations that were left
out.
And the reason that the Jewish Bible was canonized at that time was to prevent books written
by Jewish sects from becoming part of the holy books.
I am talking about all of this together: the Bible, Jesus, and the different groups within
Judaism, because I want to make a point that I learned only recently and found very interesting.
The Jewish point of view is this: this is Judaism and this is Christianity.
Christianity came from the Jewish world but has no connection to Judaism.
The Christian way of thinking is this: there is Judaism and then Christianity continued
and replaced Judaism.
I want to suggest a new way of thinking that I learned recently from Isca Harany, the leading
scholar of Christianity in Israel.
She says that we need to look at this differently.
There was no single Judaism 2000 years ago - instead there were many different kinds.
If this is the Jewish Bible, many groups interpret it differently: the Pharisees, the Essenes,
the Zadokites, the Sadducees, the followers of Jesus, the zealots and other groups...
that were all Jews.
Of all these groups, only two survived the destruction of the temple, two rebellions
and 2000 years of history: rabbinical Judaism, which in many ways is a continuation of the
Pharisees (הפרושים), and Christianity.
Both are changing and evolving but deeply connected to the first century CE in the Land
of Israel.
So it’s Isca Harany’s idea, but the hand gestures are mine, so give me some credit
too.
In this short video I’ve really only scratched the surface.
If you want to know more about this topic and understand this time period, come to Israel.
Without knowing who your tour guide will be, I can promise you that he or she will talk
about this topic everywhere, in Nazareth, in Masada, in Jaffa, in Caesarea, in Komran,
in Yardenit or Kaser El - Yahud, and of course in Jerusalem.
I hope you found this video interesting.
If you did, please give me a like.
I have a feeling there will be some comments on this video.
I’ve noticed some of you don’t follow me on Instagram.
Why not?
I’ll leave a link to my account below.
See you in the next video!
Yalla bye.