“Jesus was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples; all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish text, from the Bible. He celebrated the Jewish festivals. He went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem…He lived, was born, died, taught as a Jew….the gospels ( the record of Jesus’s life and teachings in the first 4 books of the New Testament-Oxford language dictionary) make no pretense that he wasn’t…the gospels don’t even have a sense yet, that he came to found a new religion; an idea completely foreign to all the gospel text, and completely foreign to Paul. That is an idea which comes about only later….
What we’ve learned from the gospel stories is not that Jesus was not Jewish. Quite the opposite. He’s completely embedded in the Judaism of his time. What we learn from the gospels is that he’s not a member of one of the “groups.” He was always arguing with the different Jewish groups…the fact that he’s always arguing with these different groups, signifies that he’s a Jew, because that’s what Jews did with each other, all the time. -pbs.org./Frontline/ From Jesus to Christ.
“Jesus wore tzitzit, or fringes, that modern Orthodox Jews wear and donned the phylacteries that Jewish men still put on. He and his disciples kept kosher. He argued with other Jews but within the context of Judaism. In Matthew, he tells his disciples not to bother evangelizing among the samarians and the gentiles. His ministry begins with lost sheep within the house of Israel itself, before it broadens to contain all the world. “Think not that I have come to abolish the Torah ( the law of G-d as revealed to Moses and recorded in the first 5 books of the Hebrew Scriptures. -Oxford language definition.) and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them,” Jesus says in Matthew 5:17. -cardus.ca. 1/30/20.
“Virtually all of what is known about Jesus comes from the 4 New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; which scholars believe were written several decades after Jesus’s death.”…”He lived at a time when the Roman Empire ruled what is now Israel and sectarianism was rife, with major tensions among Jews, not only over how much to cooperate with the Romans, but also how to interpret the Torah. It was also, for some, a restive time when displeasure with Roman policies, as well as with the Temple (Jewish) high priests, bred hopes for a messianic redeemer who would throw off the foreign occupiers and restore Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”-myjewishlearning.com.
There are several passages in the New Testament that refer to Jesus as a rabbi; specifically in Luke and Matthew. “The term “rabbi” is derived from the Hebrew word “rav”, which in Biblical Hebrew means “great.” The word “rav” is not a title in Biblical Hebrew…it was used as a form of address when speaking to a learned teacher, or sage.”-biblescholars.org.
“It is correct to state that the focus of all the rabbis teaching was the Law. For the rabbis, the “Law” consisted not only of the Written Law, but the Oral Law as well. The Written Law was the Torah, or the 5 Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), that G-d gave to Israel at Sinai. In addition to this Written Law, Moses also received, according to the rabbis, additional Commandments that were communicated orally. These Commandments were designated by the rabbis as the Oral Law.-biblescholars.org.
Conclusion: Given the sum total of all this evidence, there is no question, nor any legitimate argument against the fact that Jesus was a Jew. / Done
