Why are so many people rising to take the bait of a (so far) one-time poster who claims in the thread title that he/she is not starting a religious debate and then asks for the “difference” between Catholics and Christians. You people know better than this don’t you?
Having said that, I think the Messianic Jew angle is interesting and could merit it’s own thread in interest of battling ignorance. Messianic Jews may or may not be ethnically Jewish, but they are most decidedly NOT religious Jews. They are Christians by definition. I have argued this point on this and other message boards. I think part of the confusion is that many Christians do not realize that the Jewish Messiah is not divine.
As to the OP. Yes Catholics are Christians by any conceivable definition. That is your answer. Now either come back and say thank you or maybe people will suspect your motives.
Both Jews by birth and Jews by conversion are equally Jewish. And the Cohen, Levi, Israel difference was important 2000 years ago, but doesn’t really make any difference anymore, with the exception of a few relatively minor prayers and rituals.
Perhaps Messianic Jews should call themselves Kosher Christians, or something like that.
Because it just sounds like they’re Christians who still practice Jewish customs.
Well, as others have already told you, this is plain wrong. To be a Jew you need to either be born to a Jewish mother or convert to Judaism. I personally cannot trace my geneaology any further back than six generations. I don’t know who my ancestors were ten generations ago, let alone from the time of Moses and Abraham.
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Generally, yes, Jews are required to believe in God. But that doesn’t mean that an self-professed athiest isn’t a Jew. In short, an self-professed atheist who was born from a Jewish mother is still a Jew, and will always be a Jew.
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Judaism allows for conversion. If one converts to Judaism, then one is a Jew. There is no necessary “original Jewish blood.”
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Note: I moved your footnote to this part of the letter so that I can deal with it at once.
Jews don’t have “castes,” and converts are most definitely not “second-class” Jews. There are three groupings of Jews today. These are Kohanim, Levi’im and Yisraelim (Kohens, Levites and Israelites). The vast majority of Jews today are yisraelim. Some, if they claim descent from Levi (Jacob’s son) are levi’im. If they claim descent from Aaron (Moses’ brother) are kohanim. Converts fall into the same group of people that I do: yisraelim. For the most part the differences between the groups is acedemic. There are some minor rituals that center around kohanim (such as the priestly blessing said on holidays) and some restrictions that come with being a kohen (a kohen, for example, cannot go into a cemetery). But other than those examples and others like it, there is no “preferential” that a kohen receives in today’s society.
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False. Converts are welcome.
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False.
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As has been pointed out, since the premise is wrong, the conclusion is wrong. GIGO.
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False. Some of the most famous people in Jewish history were converts. Read the book of Ruth sometime. Ruth was a convert. From her David was descended and the messiah will come. One of the most famous Rabbis of the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, was the son of a convert. Hillel’s teachers, Shemiyah and Avtalyon were converts. In just about every Jewish Pentatuch printed today, you will find an Aramaic translation of the Pentatuch. That translation was written by Onkelos, a Roman convert. To state that you have to have “chosen blood” to be a member of the chosen people is outrageously false.
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No, some Gentiles harbor antipathy toward Jews because they are bigots. Some may choose to hang their bigotry on the notion of the Jews being the “chosen people” (without even knowing what that means or entails). Others hate the Jews because they are/were constantly fed misinformation about Jews. If I was told that there was a religious group that kidnapped Jewish children and used their blood for ritualistic purposes, (and I was in the middle ages and had no way to verify this one way or the other) then I’d probably hate those people as well.
Some Gentiles harbor hatred against Jews on racial grounds, claiming (incorrectly) that Jews are a race and are sub-human. This was the tactic of the Nazis. These people are no better than racists in any society.
In short, there are plenty of reasons why people don’t like the Jews.
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Jews were moneylenders in the middle ages simply because most other occupations were closed to them. However, you’re assertion that, to this day (you spoke in the present tense), Jews make all their money from money lending is patently false. I know many Jews in many different occupations. The people I know are accountants, opticians, plumbers, manual laborers, waiters, doctors, lawyers, engineers, emergency medical techinicians, teachers, salesmen, advertising executives, a manager of a radio station, and many other positions. I myself am a computer programmer. But you know something… I don’t know of a single money lender.
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In any event, Susma, it seems that every time you post something about Judaism, someone has to come along and correct you. Why don’t you simply admit that you don’t know very much about Judaism and refrain from posting on the subject until you’ve done some more research.
BTw, Susma, the Romans killed Jesus. 'Jewish leadership" had nothing to do with it. The gospels were shaded to try to take the blame off the Romans but crucifixion is a purely Roman method of execution, and Jesus had done nothing under Jewish law to merit a death penalty. He was executed by the Romans as a public nuisance, probably for creating a disturbance at the Temple during Passover. The Romans may have used some Temple priests (who were hand-picked Roman collaborators and NOT Jewish leadership in any meaningful sense) to facillitate the arrest, but even that is fairly doubtful. The trial before the Sanhedrin depicted in Matthew is so rife with factual errors, procedural inaccuracies and ludicrous details that it can only be a fiction written by someone who knew nothing of Jewish law or legal procedures. Even the crime of “blasphemy” that Jesus is convicted of is suspect because Jesus said nothing which was blasphemous under Jewish law.
Regardless of who one assigns the responsibility of “killing” Jesus it seems nonsensical for a Christian to carry a grudge against them. W/o the “death” of Jesus there could be no eternal salvation, no?
If not party A then God would’ve had party B or C or D - Z kill Jesus.
And never mind the silly little fact that no Jew who has been alive for the last 1850+ years was around then. Even if you believe you can assign guilt to your descendants (Matthew 27:25), most of the Jews of the day didn’t even live in Jerusalem anyway. Most of them lived in Babylonia, hundreds of miles away and probably never even heard about the crucifixion until years after it happened. But silly little things like facts have never stopped bigots from hating.
I find dogface’s insistence on this point very intriguing – but a little off-topic for this thread. I’m going to go over to GQ and start a new thread: “What was the real origin of the Papacy?” All are invited to weigh in. (This being a purely historical question, I think GQ is a better place for it than GD. The moderators might think otherwise, depending on the content of the posts.)
Some Protestants and Catholics are still fighting the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. And now it appears that some Orthodox still have not gotten over the Great Schism of 1054!
But what if they believe Jesus was the messiah, but not the son of god, nor part of any trinity? In this case, would it still be a “conversion to another religion”?
I will disagree with you about proper placement, BrainGlutton, and start the discussion here in consequence. The issue is one that is really hotly debated, and while “facts” are present, their implications are subject to strong disagreement. I might add that the subject matter is not merely one of academic interest, but is at the core of how Orthodox (and to a lesser extent Anglicans) see their churches as valid and licit.
To begin with, the filioque question is not the real issue, but, like Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, it’s the proximate cause of an event with much deeper real causes. And, as you suspected, the origins of the Papacy are significant to the discussion. As objectively as I can report it, here is the background:
After Jesus’s death, Resurrection, and Ascension and the events of Pentecost, the Apostles formed an informal college for making decisions about the leadership of the newly formed church. The first eight chapters of Acts allude several times to their actions, from the calling of Matthias to fill the vacant place of Judas to the naming of the first seven deacons.
Peter was by common consent the leader of this group. However, a few years later, after apostles have gone out on missions, there is a meeting – effectively the first Ecumenical Council – held at Jerusalem to iron out differences between their views, and the man who presides is not Peter, but James the Brother of Jesus, who was Bishop of Jerusalem. and hence more or less the host for the conclave. (See Acts 15.)
Briefly, as the apostles and, later, other leaders founded new churches, they appointed deacons to attend to the charitable needs of the people and elders (presbyteroi) to preside over the services (and any meetings needed), giving one of the latter oversight (episcopé) over the church. This was the origin of the three orders of clergy: deacons, priests/elders/presbyters, and bishops. By common consent it was the elder-with-oversight (i.e., episcopos or bishop) who spoke for the local church at regional meetings and participated in ironing out the theology that soon came to play an important part in church life.
The bishops of five major metropolises, all but one founded by an apostle (the exception, Alexandria, was founded by the John Mark who wrote the Gospel), came to play leading roles in the governance of the church, and were in consequence named Patriarchs, a title more of respect and acknowledgement of leadrship than a granting of special authority: Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, and Alexandria. By the third century, Ephesus was declining as a city, and when Constantine founded Constantinople, the patriarchate was moved to that city. After the two Jewish Revolts, Jerusalem became a relatively unimportant city, but kept its patriarchate as the mother church of all Christendom.
Rome was of course the Imperial City, to which all roads proverbially led, and was also the sole patriarchate of the West. And it preserved the orthodox faith through a number of controversies in which each of the three major Eastern patriarchates lapsed into and was redeemed from heresy. These factors combined to give it a first-among-equals status, a primacy of leadership, in the eyes of the united church. As the status of Constantinople grew, being the second Imperial City, its patriarch took on a second-place role, after Rome.
After the fall of the Empire, the Bishops of Rome acquired significant land of which they were temporal monarchs (a status they held until 1870, and to a miniscule extent to the present), and grew apart from the Greek-speaking East. Basing its claims on Peter’s primacy and his legendary founding of the Church in Rome, the Popes arrogated to themselves an authority not of leadership among co-equal Bishops but of authority over them. This the East rejected, preferring a collegiality of bishops in one united church that came to be organized along national lines, following the example set by Antioch in Syria, Alexandria in Egypt, and Cyprus, the first autocephalous church.
The issue came to a head in the 800s, and the first of many mutual excommunications took place. The one in 1054 “took” and an attempt at reunification in the 1430s failed.
But the Orthodox claim is that they were and are holding firm to the faith and order established by the apostles in the first place, adding doctrine only to clarify and not to supersede the existing belief system, and eschewing both the accretions of Roman Catholicism and the throw-the-Baby-Jesus-out-with-the-bathwater tendencies of much of the Reformation. Orthodox doctrine lays stress on the goodness of the world redeemed by the Atonement and the interior renewal of the believer in Christ (I’ll let Dogface speak to theosis, a doctrine I deeply believe but find difficult to put into words; Monty and AbbySthrnAccent may be fascinated by it.) It declines to get into the convolutions of the Roman Magisterium or the cataloguing of sins, nor does it accept the sola scriptura/sola fidei and sharp delineation of Saved and unsaved of evangelical Protestantism.
Catholics, of course, see the evolution of Papal authority as the growing recognition of the place of Peter’s successor as head of the church as Peter had been. They see the evolution of Catholic doctrine as material brought by the Magisterium of the Church out of the treasury of faith. And they consider the Orthodox as schismatic and faintly heretical.
Needless to say, Protestantism rejects both sides of this argument. And I need not get into the doctrinal standards of Protestants; they’ve been set forth in thread after thread.
For Anglicans, desiring to preserve the best of the old while cleansing it of error, a modified national variation on Catholicism with a touch of Bucerian doctrine mixed in was what made sense. But over the years, Anglicans have come to see their status as very much akin to that of the Orthodox churches – Collegial bishops oirganized in national churches preserving the essentials of the faith in faithful witness to the apostles’ original plan. And as Anglican doctrine has evolved, it’s grown much closer to that taught by the Orthodox in many ways, though we reserve the right to make our own judgment in many areas of church polity (married bishops and women priests, for example).
I pride myself in being a very open person, open to all kinds of corrections to reflect the facts. In these forums I have come across quite a number of dopers who are exactly the opposite. There are some will not even open their eyes and ears to perceive anything other that what they claim to know already as “true.” Just now I am in contact with some who will not even try something in order to experience it, so as to talk about it from a personally experienced standpoint, instead on some hand-me-own ‘knowledge’; when the experience is totally harmless and troublefree.
Originally stated by Zev:
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If I refrain from posting anything unless I ‘know’ from research, then what’s the essential purpose of these forums? Now, tell me that. Ha Ha Ha. Even Cecil Adams would be jobless.
But Zev, you are a good chap. And I bow to your superior knowledge on a lot of matters of Judaism and in other learning. On my part, I always admit and profess myself as a curious learner.
See my next post for more corrections from fellow posters here.
(I am open to all kinds of corrections in the post below.)
Who are Christians?
I speak as one from a Catholic background and from an academic Catholic background, but now a postgraduate Catholic. OK, I have said that many times - but just to give you my peculiar biases, that of postgraduate Catholicism. What’s that? If you have become a postgraduate anything, then you will know what I mean. For example, if you are a postgraduate government worker or soldier or corporate worker, or teacher, or even a postgraduate Jesus or Moses or Mohammed, you might certainly know what I mean. The God of the Bible is also a postgraduate God as He describes His sentiments many times in the Bible.
Now, who are Christians? One group calling themselves Christians, for example Fundamentalists, are fond of reserving that label to themselves, and maintain that some others are not. Catholics for them are not Christians, for example. I do still have an attachment for my original religious identity. So, in this connection I will just say that Fundamentalists usually don’t know history of the Christian Church from A.D. 33 to the present. The only thing they might know even their preachers on some intimate degree is Martin Luther and the Bible, the King James Version.
To know who are the Christians, we have to ask non-Christians who they recognize as Christians. Now, listen to this: non-Christians identify Christians as people who believe in Santa Claus, Easter bunnies, and also Satan, of course likewise Jesus Christ, and whose number 1 icon are two lines crossing each other perpendicularly, and I almost forgot, St. Valentine.
Think about that, and you will realize it is very true, namely, the identifying marks of Christians to non-Christians.
So, Christians who want to know seriously what and who are Christians, ask non-Christians and take them seriously; then Christians might know themselves better and more realistically.
I was raised Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian, and there’s a definite difference in that worldview between being a cultural Christian (and I like Susma Rio Sep’s description of that) & a real Christian, which is taken as synonymous with “saved.”
One big reason I’m not a Christian now is that I don’t buy Yeshua as the actual prophesied Messiah. He didn’t fulfill the requirements.
But to be fair to Christians, the idea was that Yeshua would do all that when he got back, and he should be back any time now, right? Right? Hello? Must be some serious traffic in Heaven!
Anyway, if I were a Jew, I’d be blasting anyone who expects one prophet from God to come & change the basic nature of reality to some “Peaceable Kingdom” jive. It will never happen, it is simply impossible. So if I were to believe that such a thing as a Messiah existed, I’d have to define it in more attainable terms.
And if you look at the philosophy of the Christian church, you see a lot of preaching of diminished expectations: Don’t think that it’s all milk & honey just because the Messiah has come. That was a flight of fancy the rabbis told. We are in the kingdom, yet we still have to work for it. The perfect kingdom is not in this world, but the next. There’s a beauty to this, and maybe wisdom.
Then again, there are the Left Behind nuts.
Whatever, I think all exclusivist monotheism is a fraud, anyway.
It seems to me that all branches of Christianity have the same tree trunk and are equally as old even though beliefs have evolved and there have been schisms.
The same is true for the Jews, including Messianic Jews.
But if Jewish Scotsmen were born in Turkey, can they be knighted and still eat kosher haggis?