by James Pate

Created on: October 11, 2010

The Jewish religion (except for Messianic Judaism) rejects Jesus as the Messiah for at least four reasons:

1.  The Jewish religion has problems with the Christian idea that Jesus is God.  Judaism sees the divine and the human as fundamentally incompatible: the divine is eternal, unchanging, and boundless, whereas the human is temporal, mutable, and finite.  Consequently, Judaism rejects the notion that the divine could become human, with a nature that is fully human and fully divine (the doctrine of the incarnation).  Some Jews may even deem the incarnation to be beneath the dignity of God, in that it brings God down to the level of a human being.  "Are you saying that God needed to have his diaper changed?", some have asked. 

There's also the issue of visual representation of the divine.  One of the Ten Commandments prohibits Jews from making a graven image of God (Exodus 20:4).  In Deuteronomy 4:12-19, Moses tells the Israelites that God did not appear to them in a form, and so they are not to make an image or likeness of the divine for their worship.  That is why there is a strong strand in Judaism that holds that God is unseen.  According to many Jews and Muslims, the doctrine of the incarnation runs counter to this idea, for it holds that God was visual when he became a human being, Jesus Christ.    

Moreover, the Jewish religion takes seriously the shema, which affirms that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4).  Orthodox Christianity, however, holds that God is one being in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  That makes little sense to many Jews, who wonder how someone can be one and three at the same time.  For many Jews, God is only one person, and to worship Jesus as God violates God's command to have no other god before the LORD (Exodus 20:3).  Some Jews have even interpreted Jesus to be the sort of false prophet that Deuteronomy 13:1-5 condemns: one who performs signs and wonders, while encouraging the Jews to serve other gods.  According to Deuteronomy 13:1-5, God is sending this false prophet to test Israel's fidelity to God, and she is to put that prophet to death.  That is why some Jews are not impressed with the claim that Jesus performed miracles: for them, a false prophet can do miracles, but that doesn't mean anyone should follow him!

2.  The Jewish religion believes

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