It always does. The successful Prophet always includes some easy ones, like picking Joey Feek in the SDMB Death Pool.
Dislcaimer- I haven’t read the whole thread. It’s been a rough week.
The Talmud is very clear that all righteous people are rewarded- regardless of their religion.
From a personal perspective, while I realize that my own religion is full of problem areas and weirdness, I don’t understand how Christians hold that Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecies. Defeat our enemies? nope. Gather all Jews to the Promised Land? Nope. Rebuild the Temple? Nope. Descendant of King David? Nope. (Under Jewish law, royal heritage would have to be on his father’s side. If Jesus had no human father, he had no claim to the line of David). So he doesn’t fulfill the prophecies, but you still hold he’s the messiah? Additionally, I hold that the laws on Temple sacrifice will be binding again. I know I’m not alone in this as several prayers say ‘And may Your Temple be rebuilt speedily in our days. there we will serve You in awe as in the days of old’. Yeah, the Temple was destroyed. It wasn’t the first time and was no reason to declare the law null and void. To sum up, I’m confused by Christianity (and this is not due to lack of study) but believe that righteous Christians wind up in heaven. I think it goes like this
“The pearly gates! Thank Christ! I made it!”
UMM, ABOUT THAT
“Oh no! I’m going to hell!”
NO, THAT’S NOT IT
“I’m confused then.”
OH- WAIT. I HAVE ALAN RICKMAN UP HERE NOW! HE CAN EXPLAIN IT! EVERYTHING SOUNDS BETTER COMING OUT OF ALAN RICKMAN
I am Jewish and this really depend on the person as long as a Christian doesn’t try to made me one too I am fine. I had a Christian friend and she tried to made me one too. It destroyed our friendship ! She wanted me to go to heaven so she could see me again ! WTF! I don’t believe in that crap !
I believe the deal is that Jesus said at some point, and I do not remember the exact quote, “I come to bring a new covenant”. I was taught that the Old Testament had a vengeful, mean G-d, and the New Testament was all about nice and happy things.
The problem goes beyond the word “almah” which, in fact, does not mean virgin. The KJV renders the verse: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” There is no “shall conceive” in the Masoretic Text, and Jewish translations are not the only ones that recognize this. So, for example:
From The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version; Fourth Edition:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Emanuel.
From **NABRE - New American Bible Revised Edition:
**
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign; the young woman, pregnant and about to bear a son, shall name him Emmanuel.
In English, “Maid” may mean a virgin or a young woman. Interesting, linguistically.
What do you mean, “Catholicism split from Christianity” – Catholics ARE Christians. The Great Schism split the Eastern Church from the Western, yes. But they’re both Christian. And neither of them are Protestant, either. :dubious:
Right, that’s why he said:
[QUOTE=Matthew 5:18]
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
[/QUOTE]
Were you taught about Hell by any chance? Because that is a nice happy thing Judaism doesn’t have.
Rabbi Telushkin (sp) says that Jews don’t believe in afterlife “because no on has cme back to tell us about it”. 
Many Jews do, however.
Neil Gillman’s The Death of Death (Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought) is quite good in my opinion. I would suggest that the afterlife is a post-Torah concept (perhaps borrowed from Zoroastrianism) intended to address the Problem of Evil.
There most certainly is. But it’s the nature of the punishment that is under controversy-whether it’s simply being removed from G-Ds love or more like fire and brimstone.Isaiah 14:15
over 30 references to Hell,and several to it as a place of punishment. Daniel 12:2, Psalm xvii 4-6, Ezekiel 18:20, Isaiah 66:24.
Gehenna
*The picture of Gehenna as the place of punishment or destruction of the wicked occurs frequently in the Mishnah in Kiddushin 4.14, Avot 1.5; 5.19, 20, Tosefta t. Bereshith 6.15, and Babylonian Talmud b.Rosh Hashanah 16b:7a; b. Bereshith 28b. Gehenna is considered a Purgatory-like place where the wicked go to suffer until they have atoned for their sins. *
Without actually studying it, I would have assumed that the concept of an afterlife is, as you say, mostly post-Torah - giving rise to both Jewish and Christian notions: but that after the development of Christianity, there was a certain amount of Christian influence.
Nonetheless, it never loomed as large in Jewish concepts as in Christian ones, and today many varieties of Judaism are basically indifferent to it (Conservative Judaism, for example, is totally equivocal about the existence of an afterlife - in Conservative Judaism, you can believe it or not, as you like. Orthodox Judaism, OTOH, requires belief in an afterlife, following Maimonides).
I’m an atheist and even* I* get sick of hearing people say that veneration of saints is the same thing as polytheism. It’s not. At all.
In case the Jews here don’t know this, most Christian laymen have no clue what the NT says about the afterlife. They have a hazy idea of going to heaven and being reunited with their dear departed spouses as soon as they die, but Jesus said that there are no marriages in heaven, and several passages imply that the dead stay dead until the Second Coming, which will DEFINITELY occur Real Soon.
Wovoka believed in the Ghost Shirt and Jesus? :dubious:
Jayhawker Soule:
Torah-contemporary belief in the soul’s continued existence after death is attested to by the story of the witch of Endor in I Samuel chapter 28. That may not mention such matters as reward and punishment (allusions to those are less direct in scripture), but the existence of an afterlife at all is clearly part of the canon.
[ol][]I Samuel is not part of the Torah.[]I spoke poorly. What I really meant to say is that the afterlife as a means of effecting reward and punishment is a post-Torah concept. By the way, a rather good article touching on this is Brichto’s Kin, Cult, Land and Afterlife - a Biblical Complex.[/ol]
I thought it was.
Link.
And I should like to ask Rabbi Telushkin about the Witch of Endor, a story related to me by my Christian Grandmother.
I can’t find anything in your cite that says Samuel is part of the Torah. Which is good, because it isn’t.