Jews explain why Christ is a failed messiah; Christians, offer your rebuttal
Offline Back when I was Muslim, part of our apologetics was being able to prove how Islam came after and abrogated Christianity and Judaism. Now, the main (but not only) argument I had based myself on were in regards to the horrible textual history of both the Old Testament and the New Testament, as opposed to the Qur'an, of which even discovered "destroyed" copies had mainly dialectical differences, and both Sunni and Shi'a groups almost universally agreed on one copy of the text.
Anywho, from my studies, one thing that always did bother me was that if I had been a Christian, it seemed I had little to no way of proving Christianity to a Jew. Since Islam had the easy (if not intellectually dirty) way of stating that anything that disagreed with it scripturally was obviously a human distortion, I didn't have to deal with it. But Jesus, by all Jewish account, was a failed messiah, and his apostles (who were not trained in scholarship) misinterpreted the Torah in grossest of fashions. It seems the anti-intellectualism of modern evangelicals can take inspiration from the very first uneducated Jews who formed the highly eccentric and bizarre Christian world view.
Here are two links for you:
A historical Jewish criticism of Christianity: http://faithstrengthened.org/FS_TOC.html
A contemporary Jewish criticism of Christianity: http://www.jewsforjudaism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=72&Itemid=507
I had read a bit of the former work back when I was a Muslim, but the latter articles are a bit after my "giving a shit" stage. I'd love to see you counteract these, which I imagine will be hard considering few to no Christians are educated in Jewish tradition at all, let alone on the level of rabbinical scholarship. Well, to be fair, the first work was written by a Karaite, the Karaite movement being an anti-rabbinical movement in Judaism that was pretty popular in the medieval Middle East, and is making somewhat of a comeback today.
Anyway, give it your best shot.
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Thanks for the Links, this should be some good reading, VERRY- INTERESTING.
Signature ? How ?
I am going to steal you thunder here.
I can argue the fallacy of "history" when ANY of these three argue for their particular god of Abraham. I simply see it as a distraction.
Religions, superstitions, myths and even conspiracy woo, DO NOT poof into existence out of thin are. They are always inspired by prior motifs from prior, and or surrounding cultures, groups or even individual claims. They exist much like Coke was not the first soda. Soda water came before that and even soda water wasn't even sold as a soft drink, but an snake oil cure all.
All these beliefs in god/s are products of human imagination and succeed or fail through human marketing. Traditions do not make the god/s real. It just means if they become popular, then humans simply successfully marketed these myths falsely as fact.
Jews saying "Jesus was not our savior"
And even Jews saying "He existed but was not our savior"
Still misses the point that Jews themselves are a splinter sect of prior polytheism.
ALL these religions are man made. A history of making claims doesn't constitute a history of tested and proven evidence. It merely means a culture has had a history of believing the myths they sell.
I can argue history, but far more important to attack to me, are the fantastic claims. Most importantly ANY claim of ANY type of invisible non-material being with magical super powers, BY ANY NAME.
Being pulled into a particular religion allows them to distract you from the bigger picture.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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I am going to disagree here, and that's just mostly because I come from a different background here. In our Sunni-vs-Shi'a apologetics, it was all about attacking the institutions and their lineage of authority, and I think it can work here as well.
Showing the structural fault's of a faith (Christianity), by showing how it contradicts with an institution it cannot afford to discredit (in this case, early Judaism), is a great way to show why that religion isn't reasonable. More often than not, when we state, "Your god has no proof for existence and the faith that gave birth to yours is a sect of polytheism," you get closed ears, especially with Fry and the new Calvinists who say you must presuppose a Christian worldview, and never go down to the atheist's level by presupposing that it must be proven. But when we say, "Okay, let me go down to your level," and begin to show how their own system is deeply inconsistent, and that it is so unconvincing that it didn't even makes sense in Christ's times is a great way to kick them out of the comfort zone of Christianity and into skepticism. Christianity's existence is only justified by Judaism; not even contradicting logic and science is a problem. So, let's kick out from underneath it Judaism.
I don't know, once again, it's a difference in background. Old Shi'a missionary books used to stay that before advancing any positions, one should deconstruct and criticize the other person's position using their own preconceptions, until they are disillusioned. From that point on, you can build up your own case, and in every point, show how it is infinitely more consistent than what the other person used to believe.
Can I get back my thunder now?
I just farted, does that count?
Probly, yeah.