What do Jewish people believe about Jesus?

What Jews expect of the Messiah

In Jewish tradition the Messiah is a human being, a descendant of King David, anointed to lead Israel in the age of redemption. The prophets describe that age. The exiles come home (Isaiah 11:12). God’s sanctuary stands among his people forever (Ezekiel 37:26–28). The earth is full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). And the nations put away their weapons.

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

Isaiah 2:4

Maimonides, the twelfth-century codifier of Jewish law, gathered this tradition in his Mishneh Torah (Laws of Kings, chapters 11 and 12). The Messiah, he wrote, will be a king from the house of David who leads Israel in the Torah, rebuilds the Temple and gathers the dispersed of Israel. Someone who fails to do these things, or who is killed, is not the Messiah the Torah promised.

By that measure Jesus does not qualify. The Temple was destroyed about forty years after his death, the Jewish people went into a long exile, and the world has known little peace since. For most Jews that settles the question. It is a reasoned conclusion drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures, and it deserves to be heard as one.

The oneness of God

The central confession of Judaism is the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jewish thought has always insisted that God is one, without parts, and has no body. Maimonides placed both convictions among his Thirteen Principles of faith, which many congregations sing in the hymn Yigdal.

So the Christian teaching that Jesus is God in human flesh, and the doctrine of the Trinity, strike most Jews as a departure from the strict monotheism of the Torah. To worship a human being is, in Jewish eyes, the very thing Israel was commanded never to do. This is the deepest point of disagreement, deeper even than the question of whether the Messiah has come.

A painful history

For most of the last two thousand years, Jews met Jesus through the people who claimed to follow him. Crusaders massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland in 1096 on their way to Jerusalem. Jews were accused of killing Christ, pressed into baptism, expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492, and tried by the Inquisition. Much of it was done in his name.

For many families, refusing Jesus became part of staying Jewish at all. To accept him would feel like joining the people who had persecuted their grandparents. Any honest conversation about Jesus with a Jewish friend has to begin with that history (see Did the Jews kill Jesus?).

A range of Jewish views

Jewish views of Jesus have never been one thing. The Talmud says very little about him. A few passages mention a man called Yeshu, and scholars still debate which of them refer to Jesus of Nazareth. Christian censors later removed or altered them in printed editions. In the Middle Ages a polemical folk story, Toledot Yeshu, circulated as a counter-story to the Gospels, told by communities living under Christian pressure.

Jewish scholars were sometimes compelled to debate Christians in public. At Barcelona in 1263, before King James I of Aragon, Nachmanides argued that the Messiah could not have come, since the world was still full of violence. Maimonides rejected Jesus as Messiah, yet he also suggested that Christianity and Islam, by carrying the Hebrew Scriptures and the hope of a Messiah across the world, were preparing the way for the true redemption. Censors cut that passage from many printed editions too.

In the modern era many Jewish thinkers began to reclaim Jesus as a Jew.

• Joseph Klausner, in his 1922 Hebrew study Jesus of Nazareth, presented him as a Jewish moral teacher, though one in whose teaching Klausner saw seeds of what later grew outside Judaism.
• Martin Buber wrote in Two Types of Faith (1950) that he had long regarded Jesus as his “great brother,” while rejecting the Christian claims made about him.
• David Flusser of the Hebrew University read the Gospels as sources for Jewish life in the Second Temple period.
• Pinchas Lapide, an Orthodox Jewish scholar, argued that the resurrection of Jesus was a real event, while holding that Jesus was not Israel’s Messiah.
• Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament scholar, teaches Christians to read Jesus within his Jewish world and co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament.

None of these scholars became followers of Jesus. Their work shows a Jewish community that can now speak of him with respect, as one of its own sons.

How Messianic Jews answer

Messianic Jews take these objections seriously, because many of them once held them. Their answers come from the same Hebrew Scriptures.

Two comings. Messianic Jews agree that the Messiah will rebuild, gather and bring peace. They believe Yeshua will do these things when he returns. The rabbis themselves wrestled with two pictures of the Messiah, one coming “with the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:13) and one “humble and mounted on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9), and the Talmud weighs them side by side (Sanhedrin 98a). When his disciples asked, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6), Yeshua kept the hope intact and told them the timing belonged to the Father.

The suffering servant. Isaiah 52:13–53:12 describes a servant of the LORD who was “despised and rejected by men” and “pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:3, 5), who suffers for others and is then exalted. Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator, and most Jewish interpreters after him read the servant as the people of Israel. Some older Jewish sources, including the Aramaic Targum on Isaiah 52:13, connect the servant with the Messiah. Messianic Jews see in the passage Yeshua’s death and his vindication.

The one God. Messianic Jews affirm the Shema without reservation. They believe the one God has made himself known in Yeshua, and they reject any idea of three gods as firmly as any rabbi would.

Remaining Jewish. Most of all, Messianic Jews hold that trusting in Yeshua does not mean leaving the Jewish people. His first followers were Jews who kept Shabbat, prayed at the Temple and called him Messiah in their own language (see Was Jesus Jewish? and Yeshua or Jesus?). A Jew who believes in Israel’s Messiah remains a Jew, and Messianic congregations exist to make that life possible.

Where Messianic Judaism stands

It would be dishonest to leave out the other side. Most Jewish communities, and every major Jewish denomination, do not regard Messianic Judaism as a form of Judaism. In their view, believing that Jesus is the Messiah and divine places a person outside Jewish religious life, and Israel’s Law of Return treats a Jew who believes in Jesus as having taken up another religion. Many Jews also experience Messianic outreach as an effort to draw Jews away from their people.

Messianic Jews disagree with the conclusion, and they also understand the hurt behind it. The movement’s better voices speak with humility, honor the wider Jewish community and its faithfulness through hard centuries, and do not pretend the disagreement away. To learn more about the movement itself, read What is Messianic Judaism? or find a congregation near you.

Common questions

Further reading

• The Jewish Annotated New Testament

  Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors. Oxford University Press, 2011; second edition 2017. Jewish scholars annotate the New Testament in its Jewish setting.

• Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching

  Joseph Klausner. Translated by Herbert Danby. Macmillan, 1925. The landmark modern Jewish study of Jesus.

• Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Volume 1: General and Historical Objections

  Michael L. Brown. Baker Books, 2000. A Messianic Jewish scholar responds to the common objections, the first of five volumes.