A long post, but i hope worth reading
Before I begin, let me state my background: I am a former Methodist minister, trained at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas--a rather "liberal" seminary, and by no means a fundamentalist one. At age 50, I converted to Judaism (the Conservative, or Masorti, branch), and as I went through the process, which is rather long, my rabbi assigned readings that were rather more heavily weighted toward theology and documentary study than those for the average candidate for conversion. I don't claim to be an expert, but I am pretty well versed in both systems and traditions.
First, then: the book recommended in an early post on this thread is David Klinghoffer's "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus", and it is very good indeed. More of a historical study than a theological one, it's very much oriented toward the "response", such as it was, of the Jews of Jesus's day.
A couple of corrections:
The Messiah was not expected to be a priest. Priests were Cohanim, a subgroup of the tribe of Levi (both groups are still recognized today, though the other tribes, by and large, are not). The Messiah was expected to be of the tribe of Judah, David's tribe, from which all rightful kings of Israel were to be descended. The Gospels make much of this, giving genealogies for Jesus that establish that he was of Judah on Mary's side--and, oddly, on Joseph's as well.
The term "mitzvot" does not refer to ritual law. Mitzvot--singular, "mitzvah"--translates as "commandment", but in modern usage simply means "good deed", or sometimes "religious act". Feeding the hungry is a mitzvah; so is studying Torah. A ritual act, like entering a mikveh (ritual bath), is often called "fulfilling a mitzvah", but the application of the term to ritual is not as common. In any case, Jesus's disdain for ritual, though a minor issue, was not the problem; one cannot read far in any of the prophets before finding the teaching that ritual without practical acts of charity, humility and devotion is meaningless. That idea has been basic to Judaism from Sinai onward.
To begin, then: The oldest books in the New Testament are the letters of Paul. They predate the Gospels by decades, and the Gospels, particularly Luke, were heavily influenced by Pauline thought and Pauline formulations. Paul was probably the originator of the ideas that Jesus was the son of God and
God incarnate, and of the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as the idea that Jesus was the "Lamb of God", the sacrifice by which the sins of all humans would be remitted.
NONE of these ideas are even remotely Jewish, and ALL of them conflict directly with Jewish law, tradition, and belief. For instance, the idea that God would come down to Earth and father a human child is specifically Greek (cf. Zeus and Hercules), and it's no accident that Paul was speaking to culturally Greek audiences when he came up with that idea.
Likewise, no Jew would ever acknowledge that any human being could ever share the nature or essence of God. The Messiah was always, without exception, everywhere in Jewish thought and tradition, expected to be an ordinary man; anointed of God, to be sure, but an ordinary man. The most fundamental formulation in Judaism is that God is One, and that concept permits no exceptions or modifications. None.
Again, it is basic to Jewish belief that a person's sins are, and can be, borne by that person alone and no other (though the *consequences* of sin may extend to the third and fourth generation, an observation that one need not be religious to share). The idea that sins can be "paid for" by another is foreign to Jewish thought.
The Jews that heard Jesus and did not accept him as prophet or Messiah (some obviously did--all of his Apostles were Jews) may have had other reasons, but Paul's ideas were so foreign and hostile to Judaism that they virtually guaranteed Jesus's rejection by all Jews subsequent to Paul's arrival on the scene.
So what, given the limitations on what we can actually know about the historical Jesus, did he, himself, say or do that might have resulted in his being rejected as Messiah? There are many issues here; I shall mention only a few.
(Incidentally, very few historians today, Christian, Jewish, or secular, take very seriously the notion that Jesus never existed at all. There is simply too much documentary evidence dating from too close to his time for it all to be fabricated. Even at the time when the Gospels were being circulated, there were certainly people still living who had met Jesus in person.)
For starters, Jesus claimed to have the authority to forgive all sins. That is truly shocking to a Jew. You see, we don't even believe that God Himself has that authority. In the Jewish understanding, no one can forgive a sin but the one sinned against; God can forgive sins against Himself (e.g. breaches of ritual or broken vows), but no others. If I punch you in the nose, who is God to forgive that? It is for you to grant that forgiveness, or no one. That's why murder is the worst of all sins, for which there can never be forgiveness. For a murderer, the only one who has the right to forgive him is dead.
(For myself, that also rather explains why I feel sickened by every lowlife murderer or rapist who claims from prison that "God has forgiven him", and asks why his victims and families cannot. It is not God's place to grant that forgiveness. It also explains why Jews cannot "forgive" the Holocaust. Ask the six million for forgiveness; no one else can give it. The Jews of today certainly can't. We do not have the right. Neither does God.)
For the Jews of Jesus's day, this was more than claiming to be God; it was claiming to be greater and more powerful than God.
Jesus taught that he, himself, had the authority to overrule the Torah. The Jewish community has always held that now that the Torah has been given to us, it is our collective right and solemn responsibility to interpret it to the best of our understanding--but always, too, that this task is a collective one that extends across all generations and can never take place independent of the traditions and judgments of the rabbis and sages who came before us (the Talmud is the record of these deliberations and judgments, and it is nothing is not equivocal and pluralistic). At NO time and in NO place has the authority of determining this interpretation been placed in the hands of only one man, not even Moses; and NEVER has the interpretation of Torah been allowed to simply discard the teachings and traditions of earlier generations. All this, Jesus claimed to do. He not only claimed to exceed the authority of God Himself, but of all the generations of scholars, teachers and prophets that came before him. To a Jew, that was, and still is, unthinkable.
Jesus (or perhaps Paul) also seemed to hold the view that this life is of rather less importance than the next, that "salvation" is everything and the most important question in one's life is whether or not one is going to Heaven.
Now this is very hard for many Christians to understand, but those questions are of very minor importance in Judaism, when they have any importance at all. The point of our religion is one's behavior in THIS life. The next--if any--we leave to God (it remains a debate within the Jewish community whether or not there is an afterlife promised at all. Most Jews believe so, but few will say it is guaranteed; it is not mentioned in the Torah). We don't speak of "salvation"; there's no point to it. God is the only Judge, and we have no warrant to speculate on how He may judge anyone, not even ourselves. We believe the next life is
God's business, and we're content to trust Him and leave it at that.
Another point worth considering is the teaching that one is "saved" by *believing* certain things, or even by believing them in a certain way. That is puzzling to Jews. Who cares what you believe? What you DO is what matters. We've been arguing over the fine points of belief and "doctrine" for 3,500 years or so, but it's never occurred to us that what or how we believe makes a difference in how God will judge us at the end of our lives. That will be decided on the basis of how we treated others and how well we lived our lives, not by the proper conformation of our ideas to some standard or other. Believe what you want, and fight it out with others who believe differently; you'll never come to a conclusion on such matters, and you're not meant to. But while you're arguing, see that you do not do to your neighbor that which is hateful to you. If there is an essential, that is it. All else is nitpicking detail.
"What you believe" is an interesting intellectual chess game; what you DO is a fist fight, with blood and bone and muscle on the line. There's a profound difference.
Now, after all this, is it therefore the Jewish position that Jesus was a false Messiah, a blasphemer, a man of evil or a deceiver? Strangely, perhaps, no. It does not.
Though I speak for no one but myself here, and I specifically do NOT speak for the Orthodox, I think the following formulation is consistent with Jewish thought on the matter: Jews do not, as a rule, claim to be competent to judge the truth or falsehood of any other religion (except insofar as it involves the literal worship of idols). We know, and claim to know, only how God has chosen to speak to US. If He has chosen to speak to a different people in a different way, that is no business of ours, and we do not have the right (or a reason) to pronounce that assertion true or false.
In my own personal understanding, I think that Jesus may very well have been sent by God as "Messiah"--or "Saviour", if you like--to the Gentiles. In Jesus's day, there were Jews, who worshipped the one, real God--and there were pagans who worshipped idols. That was all. Morality, for the Greeks, came from reason alone; they had no sense that their gods cared a whit about how people lived or treated one another. The idea that there might be an invisible God who cared about such things--who cared about them, in fact--never occurred to them.
Perhaps the world, and human history, would have done just fine with that as its foundation over the next two millenia. Perhaps not. But if there had not been a Jesus or a Paul or someone like them, my own people, the Celts, might still be painting themselves blue, worshipping trees, and burning each other alive in wicker cages. It's hard to see how Christianity, even with all its crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms, would not be an improvement upon that.
It seems unlikely that Judaism could, or will, ever become one of the world's leading religions in numerical terms. It is too difficult, Jews are too commonly hated, they do not seek (and traditionally discourage, at least initially) converts, and the conversion process itself is long and sometimes tedious. It is also not necessary, so to speak, because Jews have never claimed that one must be Jewish to go to Heaven. There will never be many Jews, compared to the other great religions. The Bible itself seems to agree with that statement; it says that the Jews will always be "a small people".
But if God is God, surely there ought to be a way for others, not Jews, to share in and approach the truth and insights offered by the Torah and by whatever goodness and morality and charity that Jews were charged with (the meaning of "chosen") bringing to the world. That way--perhaps--was Jesus.
He may have been all this; and in any case, he was, without doubt, among the greatest teachers, thinkers, and examples in human history, and has had more influence on the human race than any man who has ever lived. But he was, also without doubt, NOT the Jewish Messiah.
And it does not matter.
Judaism and Christianity were very different faiths from birth, so to speak; and yet, like all brothers, though we differ, we come from the same stock--we worship the same God--and we face the world side by side. We share a common God and a common ethic, and though the rest can be very different indeed, the battle has never been between Christians and Jews; the battle sees Christians and Jews on one side, and the pagans who remain among us on the other. The pagans of old worshipped idols of wood and stone, and those are gone; but today's pagans still worship *things*--money, power, fame, gratification, status, the accolades of the mob, and so on.
Anyone who places anything on a level of respect and reverence that permits or requires the disfigurement of a human soul is, by that standard, a pagan, and our enemy. It should be clear from that statement that responsible and moral atheists don't make the cut. Since Jews are more interested in what one DOES rather than what one BELIEVES, we do not call atheists, per se, our enemies. An atheist who lives as if he believes in God's laws about how to treat others is more of an ally than the many Christians and Jews who do not. We even believe that atheists, if they are "righteous" (and bear in mind that only God gets to decide what that means), get to go to Heaven, whether they believe in Heaven or not--if there is a Heaven, and if that's important anyway. We also believe that humans ought to be good because it is GOOD to be good, and not because we are children who require a Heavenly lollipop for a reward or a Hellish spanking for punishment. Goodness--or righteousness, if you like--is far too important for such silliness.
I hope this has cleared up some misunderstandings about Jewish beliefs and attitudes, about Jesus and many other matters. Jesus was a nice fella, but he had nothing to do with us, and we really don't think about him much. I have, since I used to work for the guy, but that's uncommon.
As I said at the beginning, I'm no expert, but if anyone has questions I'll try to help.
