I think blasater1960 is Jewish. He is not going to believe that Jesus is the Jewish messiah. His presenting a case for a different understanding of OT verses that we take as prophesying the birth of Jesus and presenting a different understanding does not tell us what he personally believes about Jesus. It simply is a defense of the Jewish understanding of those verses and why they (to them) do not show Jesus is the messiah.
He may think Jesus was a liar, he may think he was a lunatic. But that is for him to say and not for us to presume.
Today is not my first or even fifth reading of balaster’s railings. We’ve had a Christian Rabbi of FR refute him and he refuses to acknowledge his own errors.
When you look at Jesus's criticisms of the phariseess and the sribes, he points to hypocrisy as a big issue. This is very much like the prophets, very much like Amos, Obadiah etc. His teachings are much like the minor prophets.
The problem is that Jesus did not write one book by his own hand. So all we have is other men writing about what he said. The problem is that a lot of the NT contradicts, mistranslates and invents messianic passages from the OT. Whos fault is that...Jesus's? Or the men who wrote the NT? Since Jesus didnt write a word of it...I blame the authors of the NT. What did Jesus really believe of himself? We will never know. He wrote nothing.
All I know is that the NT is riddled with error both in eisegesis and theology.
The original Jewish christians neither believed in virgin birth nor in the divinity of Jesus.