Was Jesus Jewish?

A Jewish life, from the eighth day

Every Gospel sets Jesus inside Jewish life, and Luke shows it from his first week.

When eight days were fulfilled for the circumcision of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Jesus is the Greek form of Yeshua, the same name as Joshua. Mark names his brothers James, Joses, Judah and Simon (Mark 6:3): in Hebrew, Jacob, Joseph, Judah and Simeon, the names of Israel’s patriarchs. The family goes up to Jerusalem every year for Passover (Luke 2:41). As a grown man he goes to the synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath, “as was his custom,” and stands up to read from Isaiah (Luke 4:16–17). A sick woman who reaches for him touches the fringe of his garment (Matthew 9:20), the tassel Numbers 15:38 asks every Israelite to wear.

Was Jesus a rabbi?

People called him one. The first disciples in John address him as “Rabbi,” and John translates it for Greek readers: teacher (John 1:38). Nicodemus opens the same way (John 3:2), and Mary Magdalene calls him Rabboni at the empty tomb (John 20:16). In his day it was a respectful address, roughly “my master.” The rabbi as an ordained office took shape after the Temple fell in AD 70.

He also taught as Jewish teachers did. He argued with Pharisees and scribes about the Sabbath and purity, and pushed the law of Moses deeper rather than setting it aside: “I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). Asked for the greatest commandment, he answered with the Shema, the prayer Jews still say morning and evening.

Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

His second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is Torah too (Leviticus 19:18).

Who are “the Jews” in John’s Gospel?

This is where many readers stumble. John’s Gospel uses the Greek word Ioudaioi, “the Jews,” about seventy times; the other three Gospels only a handful of times, mostly in the title “King of the Jews.” And John does not use it one way. Sometimes it means the Judean authorities who oppose Jesus; sometimes the people of Judea, a festival crowd, or the many who believed in him (John 11:45). Jesus himself tells a Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).

John 9 shows it most clearly. A blind man’s parents, Jews of Jerusalem themselves, are said to fear “the Jews” (John 9:22): plainly the authorities, who could put them out of the synagogue. Many scholars hear in such lines the bitter split between synagogues and Jesus’s followers around AD 90, when John was written. Some modern versions translate Ioudaioi as “Judeans.”

Why it matters

A Jewish Jesus was not always the Jesus people pictured. Painters gave him the face of their own country, and in 1939 a Nazi-backed church institute in Eisenach set out to rewrite him as an Aryan. The texts point the other way. Paul calls him “born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). Pilate’s placard over the cross reads “THE KING OF THE JEWS” (John 19:19). His first followers kept praying in the Temple (Acts 2:46), and their first great quarrel was whether non-Jewish believers had to be circumcised (Acts 15:1). How his death was later blamed on all Jews, and how the churches rejected that, is told in who was responsible for Jesus’s death.