Re: Nostra Aetate

Mark Goodge wrote:
> I disagree with this. God didn't change anything, whatever humans did.
> The covenant still stands.
>
> However, that doesn't mean that all Jews are automatically saved. The
> covenant with the Jews wasn't a one-way thing, it required actions on
> the part of the Jews in order to benefit from it. Jews, like Gentiles,
> are saved by faith through Christ. The difference between the Jews and
> the Gentiles is that the Jews were given a preview, so to speak, of
> salvation. Prior to the incarnation, Jews were saved by faith in a
> Messiah yet to come. Now, they are saved by faith in a Messiah who has
> come. A 21st century Jew who does not accept that Jesus is the Messiah
> is in breach of God's covenant with the Jews, and therefore unsaved.

The covenant with the Jews still stands. On that I agree, but not the
rest of the above.

There is nothing in the terms of the Jewish covenant, whether with
Abraham or Moses, or even that in Jeremiah 31, that requires belief in
a Messiah, to come or already having come. So unless God was holding
back on the Jews and not telling them all, those Jews who knew God in
the centuries before Christ found their salvation without any need of
messianic belief.

"The Messiah", as a single figure, nowhere appears in the Tanakh. What
does appear are a number of prophecies about various leaders under
various titles; some of these appear to relate to people currently or
shortly to come into being at the time of the prophet; others may well
relate to a more distant time.

Orthodox Jews, who are a kind of fundamentaist minority among Jews,
believe that teaching about a Messiah was given secretly to Moses and
was handed down orally as esoteric knowledge until the writing of the
Mishnah around the 2nd century CE.

Most other Jews recognise, along with most modern Christian scholars,
that there was no such belief until it began to develop very late on in
the pre-Christian era, so that such a figure starts to appear in some
non-canonical literature (such as at Qumran); that such figure or
figures (for there are two in the Scrolls)were various in form and were
not part of mainstream Judaism until after the fall of the Temple in
70CE.

Thus the impression given by the Gospels of a widely expected Messiah
is probably misleading. It is either:
- a reading back from the post 70, and post Jesus viewpoint;
- if such expectations were around, they were probably those of a
minority, for example of the Zealots and maybe others who were
attracted to Jesus' cause, mistaking him for a miltant leader.

Paul, who was of course certainly writing before the Gospels took their
present form, makes much use of the term "Christ" = "Messiah." But he
doesn't seem to give it the kind of content that Jews were supposed to
have invested in it, and since the word simply means "anointed" it may
simply be Paul's statement that Jesus was specially appointed by God.
It could even be that Paul's usage sparked off the whole Messiah idea,
and led to a scouring of the Tanakh by Christians looking for
predictions of Jesus; thus in fact themselves creating the idea that
Jesus was the long awaited Messiah.

In response to this Christian purloining of the term and the Tanakh,
the Jewish development of a Messiah idea may itself have been a
defensive reaction. Thus it was not so much that Jesus was their long
expected Messiah but that the Christian approach to Jesus caused the
Jews themselves to develop such an idea, and then to compile lists of
Tanakh passages which they now use to define the messianic role.

In the Talmud there is, at one point, a rabbinic discussion about the
Messiah and one or two rabbis experiment with the isea of a suffering
figure and a separate triumphal one. But such ideas never became part
of official Judaism; the Talmud records minority views too!

Some Jews today will tell you that what they look for is not so much a
Messiah as a Messianic age, in which the individual called the Messiah
will simply be God's agent. He is not, and has never by Jews been
considered as, a divine or quasi-divine figure; he is a human figure,
called and appointed by God to bring about the re-establishment of Zion
as Earth's spiritual centre and the beginning of an age of universal
peace.
.

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