Free Republic

The term Jew is used in at least two senses in Scripture: to refer to those who are ethnically Jews and to those who are religiously Jews. Jesus was a Jew in both senses. In fact, he completed the Jewish religion by serving as the Messiah (Christ) whom the prophets had long foretold. The completed form of the Jewish religion is known as Christianity, and its adherents are Christians or “followers of the Christ.” Unfortunately, many people who were ethnically Jewish did not recognize Jesus’ role as Messiah and so did not accept Christianity, the completed form of Judaism. Instead,...

Jesus’s Ancestors By beginning his Gospel with a genealogy, Matthew declared that the Jesus who was born in Bethlehem, raised by Joseph, and who worked as a craftsman in Nazareth was the descendant of Abraham through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Matthew sought to convince his readers that Jesus, who had no home, no fortune, and only an unimpressive group of followers, was the royal King in the line of David whose kingdom would never end. But honestly, if that was all that Matthew was trying to accomplish, he could have gone about recording Jesus’s...