Jesus was not a Jew. Why do people think He was?

 

There was a recurring sketch on Mad TV of an American evangelical Christian saying stupid things; in one skit, the Christian lady said “Jesus wasn’t Jewish; his name was Christ, not Christowitz!”. I haven’t come across any argument against Christ’s Jewish identity that isn’t similarly moronic and bizarre. To quote from Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian”, Jesus was “A Red Sea Pedestrian, He was Kosher!”. When He quoted scripture, He referred exclusively to the Old Testament; not the Bhagavad Gita, the Gathas of Zoroaster, or Greco-Roman mythology.

Jesus was born of a Jewish mother, and even if he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, rather than Mary’s husband, Joseph, according to traditional Jewish law, he was as Jewish as a boring Saturday, or a meatless lasagna. Jews recognize that he was Jewish, if not the promised Messiah, and according to the Gospels, it was the Jewish clergy who wanted him dead, because they regarded him as a Jewish heretic, who threatened their legitimacy. To say that Jesus wasn’t Jewish is as absurd as claiming that Socrates was, in fact, an Aztec, or that Confucius was Polish.