Smiddy has made some good points. As a Jew I greatly appreciate them, and I think they need to be heard and considered with some more study by those who often try to convince Jews that they are lost and doomed to burn forever in hell for not accepting Jesus as Messiah.
However, as a Jew myself, I think it only fair to point out a few things about Jesus that we should all take into account:
- Jesus preached from one to three years (depending on the way you read the Scriptures). For a person to be raised to "God-hood" after such a short time is quite impressive. Moses was around much longer, millions more followed him during Moses' lifetime than followed Jesus during Jesus' lifetime, and Moses was never raised to "God-status" like Jesus has been. Moses, by this test, isn't as impressive as Jesus.
- Details about Jesus were not only preserved and spread by his followers. Because the ministry of Jesus had so much impact, contemporary Jews had to engage in quite of bit polemic efforts to counter the claims about him. Whether or not the stories about Jesus were just that, stories, the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth started something that even disbelievers had to deal with on a notable level.
- The idea that Jesus has been King since 1914 is limited to Jehovah's Witnesses, and then only the Jehovah's Witnesses who have been associated with the Watchtower since somewhere around the 1940s. The original date for this "invisible installment" is 1874. The rest of Christianity saw him as king from the time of his birth, which the feast of Epiphany (January 6 on the Christian calendar) annually marks (the visit of the Magi). The idea is that Jesus introduced the nations (Gentiles) to the teachings of God in a way nobody before him ever has, and in some ways this is true. By means of getting a large portion of the world to follow his teachings, one could say his "rule" has been an effective one on some level for the past 2000. More people follow his teachings than Moses (that is to say there are more Christians than Jews).
How did someone who preached only a few years to a few people get so famous and end up having so much control through his teachings in so little time? Moses has been preached in synagogues scattered via the Diaspora since Babylon fell, and few have been attracted to worship the God of Abraham over the generations that followed. Here comes one Jew who preaches for a short time and BLAM, suddenly every Gentile wants to worship the God of Abraham--and they want to do it the Jesus-way, not the Moses-way. How does that happen and why?
There is a movement within Judaism that has recently reclaimed Jesus as one of the great Jewish Sages. As the recent Orthodox Rabbinic Statement on Christianity and works by Jewish scholars such as Amy-Jill Levine demonstrate, the reason many Jews did not accept Jesus as Messiah have had less to do with Jesus as it has to do with Gentile Christians demanding the erasure of Jewish culture in the process. So over the years Jews have often equated the name "Jesus" with attempts to destroy all things Jewish. The various pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust did a lot to solidify this view unfortunately.
And while Jews are not running in hoards to claim they have found the Messiah in Jesus, it is also not true that Jesus remains on the wayside as much as he did in the past in Jewry. Excluding the Messianic Jews (which is an Fundamentalist Christian movement), there are many Jewish Christians. Groups like the Association of Hebrew Catholics exist that contain official members of Christian denominations that preserve their culture while claiming Jesus as Messiah. Countless interfaith families exist in which a Jewish-Christianity has formed (and celebrations such as "Chrismukkah" have arisen), and research has shown that most Jews, especially members of the post-denominational movement, believe one can believe in Jesus as Messiah and still remain fully Jewish. Thus hatred for Jesus is slowly on the wane in the Jewish world, the same as hatred for the Jews as people who won't accept Jesus as Messiah is diminishing in the Christian world.
@LoveUNiHateExams--One also needs to consider that the battles spoken of the Hebrew Scriptures may never have taken place. Even Jews understand these narratives to be legendary retellings of our history and not our literal history. For instance, when we celebrate Passover using the official Seder text, the Haggadah, Moses is not even mentioned once. However, it is well established that Jesus' followers have killed, and massacred men, women, and children (especially Jews) in the name of Christ. Jesus may not have killed for his religion, but the past 2000 years of Christianity shows that Jesus' followers have. Sometimes you can only judge the teacher by the way the pupils act.
@nonjwspouse--It is not taught, even in the New Testament, that the Mosaic Law was ever believed to be a rule to be followed as a means of salvation. That idea came after the Reformation, when arguments between Catholics and Luther became simplified into polemic attacks between the two Christian parties. Catholics were stereotyped as being "Pharisees" who promoted a religion of "works equal salvation." From this the epistles received a hermeneutic approach which implied that Paul was claiming that the Jews followed the Mosaic Law as a means for salvation.
And Jesus' teaching that "love" is to be followed is actually based on Mosaic Law, and Jewish religion or so Jesus himself said. (Matthew 22:36-40) By teaching "love" Jesus was teaching Torah, not something new.--Matthew 5:17-19.
