Ok, so, I don’t have the time or the energy to really dive super deep into this, but here’s the thing.
It is amazing what you can back-fill prophecy-wise if you willfully mistranslate everything you read.
One of the most classic things that Christians cite to regarding the messiah is this particular verse in Isaiah:
Assuredly, my Lord will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel [lit. “Let her name him With-us-is-God”]. By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.
Seems like a pretty clear proclamation about the very immediate political circumstances of the time that it was written in, right? There is a woman (we don’t know who), and she’s already pregnant, and her son will be a symbol of the fact that God is with us, and by the time that son is old enough to understand morality, (ie. within a few years from the prophecy, which was given in ~800 BCE) the Ephraimite-Syrian coalition will be destroyed, and the Nation of Israel will be restored to its former agricultural glory (ie. “feeding on curd and honey”).
Except for some reason, the King James Bible translates this line:
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.
Well, yeah, sure – it sounds a lot like Jesus once you remove all of the clear references to the historical events it was actually about, and once you add in a reference to a virgin birth and the boy “refusing to know evil”.
Like, imagine if some activist today stood on the US-Mexican border and told a notable political figure, “By the time the pandemic is cured, we will have a new administration, and we will all be ready to dismantle the walls that have been put up between us.”
Now imagine that three-thousand years from now, that quote gets translated into whatever language we’re all speaking by then, and its translated to read:
The sick will be cured miraculously. A new king shall arise in this land, and behold! He shall demolish the siege-tower between us.
And imagine that those same translators are arguing that this line was actually a prophecy about how in the year 2800, a messianic figure would lay hands on a woman and cure her cancer, and then go on to demolish a siege-tower with prayer alone (which they say we know that he did, because in the year 2900, many decades after his death, some of his followers wrote that he did that, and we just all think that they’re really trustworthy, I guess).
And now imagine that there are people who still speak English, and have been speaking it since 2020, and have the newspaper clippings about the actual historical event. And what’s more, these English-speakers really respect that activist because of the other things he wrote about, such as criminal justice reform and ending homelessness. Except, whenever they try to talk to other English-speakers about how this activist was really pretty awesome, but not because he prophesied a messiah (which he very clearly didn’t), but because he stood against injustice and advocated for governmental reforms, a bunch of non-English-speaking cultists barge into the room and demand that they convert to a non-English-speaking religion.
“Don’t you see how this speech proves that we have the only correct religion?” the cultists demand.
“No, it doesn’t?” the English speakers say. “We literally have the receipts. He was talking about Trump and the Border Wall.”
“Well then why would he have foretold the Miraculous Cure?!?” the cultists yell back. “Have you even read your own texts? They are clearly prophesies of the coming of the Lord Nargarth the Merciful!”
“But we don’t care about Nargarth the Merciful!” the English speakers say. “We barely even know who he is, and the historical evidence for the things you claim he did is vanishingly slim. There was an actual historical figure named Trump, and he wanted to build a xenophobic border wall, and this line was clearly referring to the global pandemic which was happening at the same time as he was in office. There are English-language historians and literary critics who have been writing about this political speech for centuries. It has nothing to do with your cancer-curing story, or with this Nargarth guy!”
“HOW DARE YOU DENY THE EVIDENCE OF THE MIRACULOUS CURE! WHICH IS IN YOUR OWN TEXTS, NO LESS!” the cultists scream. “BURN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKERS, FOR THEY WORSHIP A GOD THAT IS NOT NARGARTH!”
*cue several hundred years of genocide*
To be blunt about it: As far as we Jews are concerned, Jesus didn’t fulfill any prophesies, and most of the prophesies that Christians cite? We literally don’t even think that they were prophesies in the Christian sense at all. Most of them were just poetry, or political calls to action, or literary descriptions of current events that were meant to encourage people to act better and resist oppression – and they may very well have been inspired by the divine, but even if so, they were in no way cliffhangers than Hashem planned to fill in or “complete” centuries later.
Oh, and also? We’d really appreciate it if you guys stopped literally sending people to kill or convert us at every opportunity. Please, as stated above, just leave us alone.
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