You know, I actually knew that.
I was engaging in a bit of sacasm. Sorry.
Yup. Jews have been fooled before by far too many false messiahs promising great things if Jews support them. Now, most Jews expect the great things first, then they get the support.
Makes life tough on would-be Jewish messiahs, no doubt.
1) Even with the arrival of Jesus, isn’t the Jewish God and the Christian God the same God? (I know Jesus is part of the holy trinity, so jews will probably say no, but let’s assume for a moment that we can separate Jesus from that. The pre-Jesus God would have to be the same as the post-Jesus God regardless of whether or not you believe that Jesus was the son of God, correct?
Yes.
2) Do Jews believe in a Christ-like arrival, and are waiting for their messiah to be born?
Yes. There were prophecies of his coming since the time of Moses. (Technically, since the Garden of Eden, but Judaism hadn’t been founded at that point.)
3) If the answer to 2 is yes, then what does this individual have to do to prove he is the messiah? Are there certain, defined attributes of the messiah? Some jews obviously thought Jesus was this person and followed him, others did not. I’m assuming there is some criteria established.
There are hundreds of prophecies concerning the Messiah throughout the Old Testament.
4) if indeed this person is believed to be the messiah by the Jews, do they stay Jews or automatically lose their jewish standing as they believe the Jews who believed that Christ was the Messiah lost their jewishness (sorry, cant think of a better way to put this) to those that don’t believe this person to be the real Messiah (you have to figure that some still wouldn’t believe, those doubting thomases!)
Here are some Bible verses that address this.
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”~Galatians 3:28
“Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.”~ Galatians 6:15
“But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the [Jewish] law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”~ Romans 7:6
“A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code.”~Romans 2:28 - 29
“What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew? Much in every way! First of all, the Jews have been entrusted with the very word of God … What shall we conclude, then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are under the power of sin.”~ Romans 3:1 - 2, 9
Basically, it means that Jews who become Christians don’t lose any of their ‘Jewishness’ - if anything, Christians become a little bit Jewish. (Though those who don’t believe Jesus was the Messiah probably don’t see it that way.) The purpose of the Jewish religion is for its adherents to become right with God. Jesus taught that he can achieve this, both for Jews and everyone else, without the need for the Jewish law. A Jewish Christian can and should be proud of their heritage, as long as they don’t take this to mean that they’re somehow superior to other Christians.
5) Did Christ consider himself a Jew during his lifetime? Did his followers?
Yes, Jesus considered himself Jewish. He said that “I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.” (Matthew 5:17) The original disciples and a lot of the earliest Christians were Jews too. But not all of them.
6) Is the holy trinity part of christianity itself, or is something like this described in the OT?
It’s not mentioned in the Old Testament.
7) Is the Messiah supposed to be named Jesus Christ, or does that just happen to be the name chosen to describe Jesus when he was born?
The angel who appeared to Mary told her to name him Jesus (Greek for Joshua, which means ‘The Lord saves’) because he would save his people from sin. It wasn’t prophesied that this would be the Messiah’s name. Christ isn’t a name, it’s a title given to Jesus by his followers that means annointed.
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Same God- different conceptions. Same as with Allah in Islam.
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Those Jews who do believe in a Messiah are still awaiting him.
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The Jewish expectations has already been listen. These were certainly among the expectations at Jesus’ time, but they were not the only expectations. Those expectations became solidified by the Rabbinic councils after Jesus in a way to de-legitimize his claim & to justify their rejection of Jesus and his followers. Interestingly, the prophecies about the Temple being rebuilt, Israel being restored, world peace breaking out, etc. do not say “the Messiah” would do all this, but that “The LORD (YHWH)”, “The Lord (Adonai)”, “David” (Ezekiel 37), “The Prince” or “The King” would do all this. The two passages that use “Messiah” are Psalm 2 and Daniel 9. Daniel is very clear the Messiah would be “cut off” (rejected and/or killed) and that destruction would come to the City and the Temple. And Jesus did fulfill that.
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The Rabbinical-Synagogal expulsion of Jesus/Yeshua-believers was a massive historical tragedy. The Greco-Roman Ecclesiastical repression of Judaic-Christian
believers & their practices was its mirror image. But because the Gentile world was much bigger, it became even more intensely homicidal & longer-lasting. In the past century, the vast majority of The Church has sought to reconcile with the Jews and religious Jews have come more to peace with Jesus as one of them. Hopefully, in this new century, they will be more accepting of their fellow Jews who also trust in Jesus. It may ironically be the Schneerson Messianic cause that contributes to this acceptance. -
Yes, Jesus and the Apostles & the early Church considered themselves not only as Jews, but as the faithful remnant of Israel.
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I do believe the Elohim references, the Angel of YHWH Who appears & speaks as YHWH, and various Theophanies in the Jewish Scriptures do indicate a Plural Unity in the OT God.
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In Zechariah 3-4, the Angel of YHWH (Who I think MAY be The Son and aka Michael*) speaks to the High Priest Joshua and the Davidic Governor Prince Zerubbabel, leaders in the Restoration after the Babylonian Captivity, and
notes that Joshua and his fellow priests signify “My Servant the Branch” who is to come. The is not a prophecy that the Messiah would be named “Jesus” but it does present a “Joshua” as a prefigure of Messiah. (There is in some Jewish thought an array of Messiahs- the Priestly Levitical Messiah, the Kingly Davidic Messiah, and the battle-wounded/slain Messiah of Joseph.)
And this is why it’s not always a good idea to listen to a Christian when they attempt to define Jewish theology. 
Numerous mistakes, some we’ve gone over to death. Judaism, for instance, holds as a central concept that God is one, not triune and certainly that God can’t have a child. Also, rather than being some angel that speaks for God, elohim is a name of God. Friar, coming to Jewish theology from the perspective of a non-Jew (much like many Christians whose goal isn’t so much to understand Judaism as it it to eliminate it and make Jews Christians) doesn’t understand how Judaism conceives of the moshiach and the messianic age.
Pointing to the things that God will do when the moshiach comes as a refutation of the messianic age is simply jabberwockian. The whole concept is that the moshiach’s arrival will signal the beginning of the messianic age and during that time, various things will happen by the will/might/what-have-you of God. If those things don’t happen, it aint the messianic age. And so if a claimant to the title comes and those things don’t happen, saying that God was supposed to do them anyways… totally misses the point.
But it does make a sort of sense if you’re a Christian who doesn’t grok Judaism. It’s worth reading the facts that rebut Christian missionary claims, as well.
And again, as we’ve done to death, there will be no ‘acceptance’ of Christians who claim to be Jews, because they’re not Jews. Jews accept Christians just fine. We just don’t accept Christians who pretend to be Jews.
And while we’re at it, readers should probably check up on Friar’s citations and see if they’re accurate.
Just taking one, let’s look at Daniel 9.
Now keep in mind that “messiah” is a Christian mis-translation and, in any case the time line is totally wrong for this prophecy to apply to Jesus.There was half a millennium between the Restoration of Jerusalem and the birth of Jesus. And rather than 62 weeks between his anointing and the destruction of Jerusalem, it was roughly 40 years past his death until the destruction of Jersualem. It was roughly 600 *years * between the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Cyrus and its destruction at the hands of the Romans in 70 CE. And Titus, the Roman general who led the siege and would later become Emperor didn’t die of a flood.
But aside from all that, sure, it’s totally a prophecy of Jesus.
Any Temple on the Temple Mount will do. It’s the location that matters, not the physical material of the building. There is, of course, no expectation that a previously destroyed Temple will be miraculously reconstituted.
The Jewish expectation of the Messiah is that a direct descendent of David and Solomon will one day restore the Kindom of Israel, rebuild the Temple, return all Jews to Israel, bring world peace and cause the world to worship one God. He is not the Messiah until after he does these things. Jewish Messiahship is defined by having completed these things, not by birthright. It’s kind of like if there’s a prophecy that a guy will cure cancer, then you aren’t the guy who cured cancer until you cure cancer.
He is not God or a son of God. He is not supposed to die and be resurrected, and he’s not going to pay for anybody’s sins. Those are all Christian redefinitions of the Messiah, not found in the Hebrew Bible or in Jewish expectation.
What makes a Jew become religiously non-Jewish is not just believing that someone is (or more accurately will be the Messiah), but believing that any Messiah (or any other human being) is, or can be God.
Jews don’t don’t worship the Messiah. That’s maybe the most succint way to characterize the theological difference between Judasim and Christianity. Even if Jesus had been the Messiah, it would still be Jewish heresy to worship him.
As to what Jesus’ original followers thought of him, that information has been lost. We have no eyewitness writings or testimony of Jesus. It is unlikely they thought he was God (or that he even claimed to be), but if they did believe it, then that belief would have put them outside of Jewish theology and made them essentially a religiously non-Jewish personality cult.
Here’s an account from around 200 CE, which gives some truth to what you say perhaps. It doesn’t list off several of the prophecies that have been listed in this thread. But, the two prophecies I can find that it seems to stand by are that he should be descended from David, and that he would be “a mighty potentate, Lord of all nations and armies.” Whereas the real life Jesus had a following of a dozen people of ill-repute who denounced him at his trial once a death sentence showed up.
The one point that matters most is that there has never been any Jewish expectation or belief that the Messiah will be God.
There has also never been any belief that he will die for anyone’s sins.
All answers below are from the perspective of orthodox Trinitarian Christianity. There are a wide range of views held by people considering themselves Christians or Jews; let me delimit this to ‘classic’ theology to make things a little easier – remembering that almost any answer can easily have a rebuttal posted in good faith by somoene.
***1) Even with the arrival of Jesus, isn’t the Jewish God and the Christian God the same God? (I know Jesus is part of the holy trinity, so jews will probably say no, but let’s assume for a moment that we can separate Jesus from that. The pre-Jesus God would have to be the same as the post-Jesus God regardless of whether or not you believe that Jesus was the son of God, correct?
Key point is that the Trinity is God – one Godhead, three Persons, existent from all eternity. When YHWH parties with Abraham, destroys Sodom, tells Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt and then goes before them, intervenes in David’s life, takes Elijah to heaven, etc., it is one God in three Persons doing this. God the Son was equally present with the Father and the Holy Spirit in doing all the O.T. stuff; it’s just that He became human – without losing His deity – in the person of Jesus Christ. The only distinctin between B.C. and A.D. is from a human perspective – when we became aware of this – God was on top of it all along.
***2) Do Jews believe in a Christ-like arrival, and are waiting for their messiah to be born?
Yes – insofar as they care about the issue. Most Jews apparently think about the Messiah about as much as the average Christian (not the eschatological nutballs who see the fulfillment of prophecy in who won the Slovenian elections) thinks about the Rapture, Second Coming, and related phenomena – i.e., very little.
3) If the answer to 2 is yes, then what does this individual have to do to prove he is the messiah? Are there certain, defined attributes of the messiah? Some jews obviously thought Jesus was this person and followed him, others did not. I’m assuming there is some criteria established.
cmkeller and others have answered this in past threads. There’s a list of things the Messiah is supposed to do, derived from various O.T. passages; Jesus did not do most of them. Q.E.D., from a Jewish perspective.
***4) if indeed this person is believed to be the messiah by the Jews, do they stay Jews or automatically lose their jewish standing as they believe the Jews who believed that Christ was the Messiah lost their jewishness (sorry, cant think of a better way to put this) to those that don’t believe this person to be the real Messiah (you have to figure that some still wouldn’t believe, those doubting thomases!)
AFAIK, you don’t stop being a Jew because you stop believing in God according to rabbinic understanding of Him. (Much like, in Catholic eyes, a Catholic who gets excommunicated is an excommunicated Catholic, not someone who used to be Catholic but got kicked out.)
***5) Did Christ consider himself a Jew during his lifetime? Did his followers?
Yes, on both counts. Paul’s perspective is that Jesus freed everyone from the Law – but like the rest of them, he still considered himself a Jew.
***6) Is the holy trinity part of christianity itself, or is something like this described in the OT?
From the traditionalist perspective, it’s core to Christian understanding – in Jesus, God (one of three Persons making up the Godhead, coequal) became man so that we might be reconciled to God.
***7) Is the Messiah supposed to be named Jesus Christ, or does that just happen to be the name chosen to describe Jesus when he was born?
Well, Christians certainly believe so! 
Yehoshua (meaning “YHWH is salvation”, and rendered “Iesous” in the Greek) was the name chosen (by Joseph following angelic advice) for the child his bethrothed wife had borne. “Christos”, meaning “Anointed One,” is the literal Greek translation of “Mashiakh”, i.e. Messiah. It’s not a surname but an epithet: “Joshua the Anointed”, like “Peter the Great” or “Charles the Fat.”
No worries. If I understood the subject better, I probably would have picked up on that.
And for the rest of the responders, thank you very much for your viewpoints and answers. I really was hoping for the kind of straightforward answers that were given, and even if there is some disagreement here or there, it has helped me understand a bit more about a subject I know very little about.
much appreciated.
Thank you, Finn.
Maybe the fundies who swallow all the fundy propaganda should try the following thought experiment:
Imagine reading the BOM, Doctrines and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price, and then accepting everything they say, and becoming Mormon. That would mean that everything before that you believed would only be “Party I of II” to what you now believe. You now believe:
That the Mormon version of Christianity is the real, full truth, and that mainstream Christians, as you once were, are benighted fools in need of proper doctrine and conversion.
And that Joseph Smith has done more for the world than Jesus.
Of course, the usual reaction to this challenge would be WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THAT?! Even the very idea of the thought experiment would be anathema and ridiculous to most.
And that’s how believing Jews feel. For some strange reason 
they don’t see themselves as some sort of pre-Christians, waiting to be converted by convoluted “reasoning” and perverted deliberate mistranslations.
I have done the thought experiment. I actually looked into Mormonism vs traditional Christianity when I was a teen, JUST IN CASE. I still find some aspects of it attractive (a more multi-layered Afterlife, the inclusion of the Western Hemisphere in ‘Biblical’ events, eternal families) but others not as much (the persons of Smith & Young, polygamy as an ordinance, God as Exalted Man & us as potential Gods, etc.) I have been hostile to some LDS members in the past for deliberately hiding their radical re-definition of God from potential converts. I don’t equate LDS Missionary work with spiritual genocide, however. And I regard them as mostly, at worst, misguidedly doing what they think is best in trying to convert me. And it was not that long ago historically that violence often broke out between LDS & traditional C’tians (with both sides taking turns as the aggressors).
No problem. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that. Friar is still acting as if trying to eliminate Judaism as a religion (especially through bullshit “prophecies”) isn’t aiming at the eliminating of the entire spiritual tradition.
(emphasis added to my quote of myself)
Well, okay, FriarTed, you would be one of the exceptions to those attached to mainstream Christianity and unwilling to even consider something like Mormonism. So I’m glad that I hedged and said most. I’m still a bit :o , though, since what I said came in the wake of Finn and others responding to your post. So, sorry about that.
It’s pretty much funny all around, tbh.
There’s the rather humorous distress that Friar is in over how horrible it is that Jews won’t accept Christianity as just another Jewish sect. Ya know, Reform, Reconstructionist, Roman Catholic. Because, and certainly this is a belief fed by the pure milk of human kindness, it’s a darn shame that those wicked, tricksy, false (dare I say, perfidious?) Jews committed the tragic sin of saying that a totally different religion, one which explicitly said it was there to render all of Judaism null and void, wasn’t considered part of Judaism. Why, if the Jews of the time period had just accepted that Christianity was better than Judaism and all become Christians, there would’t be any of the problems we see today with Christians trying so hard to convert Jews.
Truly, it is sad.
Even funnier is the method that Friar uses to rectify this, ahem, historic tragedy.
Talking about ‘prophecy’ to most Jews is, for similar reasons, about as effective as talking to Christians about their responsibility not to suffer a witch to live. Very few Jews actually take the Tanakh as the literal Word of God and those that do not only know it well enough to spot little mistakes like the 600 year gap in Friar’s “totally accurate Jesus prophecy!”, but their knowledge of religion is actually grounded in Jewish theology and they can’t be misled all that easily.
The whole thing is kinda funny. “Hey… I know that everybody in your religion says otherwise, but I know more about your religion that they do. Yeah, they were totally going to make me a rabbi but I was all like, too cool for that. So, um, your religion really says that my religion is correct. No, for serious. It’s only due to how evil and power hungry your religion was that they avoided acknowledging that my religion was correct all those centuries ago. But really, your religion’s teachings would show the truth if they weren’t changed by those perfidious, tragedy inducing nudniks. See, the whole problem is that the Jews didn’t realize that their religion was really about preparing for its own end via conversion to another religion. If you read it closely, though, that’s really what it says. Well, in the King James translation, sorta, kinda, at least. I know, what’re the odds? So can I put you on my mailing list?”
It’s sometimes a bit depressing when I think about all the charitable contributions that could be made with all that energy that goes into trying to trick Jews out of their religion. The operating budget of cults like “Jews” for Jesus, I’m sure, could provide hot breakfasts for quite a few poor American children who have to go to school with empty stomachs. But what’s the suffering of children when weighed against eliminating a religion that has the temerity to deny that your religion is simply better?
Kinda makes me want to drop a hit of LDS…
So help me, when I find a Messianic Jewish childrens’ breakfast ministry, I’m donating $20 in honor of this thread.
(And I actually do think I may know of some.)
So, BTW, how’s that coming along, Ted? 
I’m wondering meanwhile what your answer is to the various rebuttals of missionary claims.
Let’s take one, the claim that Daniel is talking about the Moshiach (Messiah), rather than about Cyrus. This is connected with the supposedly jaw-dropping matching-up of the spans of time in the Book of Daniel with Jesus’ timeline.
The particular rebuttal in the midst of the site Finn brought up is here:
http://www.becomingjewish.org/cm.html#daniel
BTW, it just doesn’t seem to me that the Jews at any point thought that their religion was any sort of pre-messiah “Part 1 of 2.” I don’t suppose that it will be any good to point this out, but Judaism came first, so the burden of proof would be on you, not them.
But that’s just me.
I’ve found an MJ ministry connected with my denomination that does have a humanitarian aid aspect so I donated to that & I know of another that I’ll be donating to & I also donated to JfJ just to be onery. I haven’t found any that specifically has a “children’s breakfast ministry” so my Salvation Army donations will have to cover that.
My response to the rebuttal on Daniel’s 70 weeks-
I think the 70 weeks began with the issuing of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in Nehemiah 1. (There are several possible decrees- one by Cyrus & a couple by Artaxerxes). I used to believe it was a decree around 445 BCE & that 69 weeks of 360-day “times” were concluded on Palm Sunday in April 32 CE. I now lean to a 454 BCE decree concluding around 36/37 CE with the opening of the Gospel to the Gentiles (Christ’s crucifixion negating the need for sacrifice & offerings mid-week.) The Messianic line could have begun 7 weeks in with the restoration of Anointed priestly worship & David rulership but it was completed when Prince Messiah was killed. The forty years from Christ’s baptism in 30 CE to the City’s destruction recalls the forty years in the wilderness after the Exodus. The people & the City were given a forty year span during which the Apostolic Church evangelized and ministered. The murder of Jacob/James on the Temple grounds by the High Priest Ananus was the sign to the Church to leave the City to God’s Judgment.
Truthfully, if I were Jewish, I’d be worried about secularization, intermarriage & assimilation as major threats to my people. At least many MJs want to preserve their ethnic/religious heritage & not lose their Jewishness in Christendom as previous generations of Jews have done (alas, and been forced to do) in becoming Christian.