13 docs tagged with "jewish-objections"

Best for: Debates with Jewish objectors, anti-missionaries (Rabbi Tovia Singer style)

Type: Apologetics Reference Document — Response to Jewish Objections

Type Did Matthew Misquote Hosea?"

The Targum Jonathan is the authoritative Aramaic translation of the Prophets read in synagogues for centuries. At Isaiah 52 "my servant the Messiah." What it then does with the Servant's suffering is where the document becomes one of the most revealing texts in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation.

Tractate Avodah Zarah ("Foreign Worship") deals with laws governing interaction with idolatry and pagan practices. In its opening folio, it contains an eschatological calculation of world history — one that, using the rabbis' own arithmetic, places the messianic era squarely in the first century CE.

Tractate Berakhot ("Blessings") is the first tractate of the entire Talmud, dealing with prayer, blessings, and the Shema. It contains a statement by Rabbi Yochanan that validates — from within rabbinic tradition — the interpretive method the entire New Testament uses to read the Hebrew Bible.

Tractate Makkot deals with lashes as judicial punishment and laws of witnesses. Its final folio contains a remarkable passage in which the rabbis compress the entire 613 commandments of Torah down to a single principle — and the single verse they land on is the same verse Paul quotes as the foundation of justification by faith.

Tractate Sanhedrin governs capital cases, the authority of courts, and the criteria for judgment. It contains the Talmud's most extensive discussions of the Messiah — who he is, what he does, and what characterizes him — making it the single most apologetically productive tractate for engagement with Jewish objections.

Tractate Sotah deals with the ordeal of the sotah (the accused wife) and related matters. Its 48th folio records a tradition about the cessation of prophetic activity in Israel — a claim with enormous implications for any religion that produces prophets after Malachi.

Tractate Sukkah covers the Festival of Booths (Sukkot) — the harvest festival commemorating Israel's wilderness journey. The tractate's 52nd folio contains one of the most theologically significant passages in the entire Talmud for Christian apologetics10.

Tractate Yoma ("The Day") covers the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) ritual — the high priest's entry into the Holy of Holies, the two-goat ceremony, and the confession of Israel's sins. It is the tractate most directly concerned with how atonement works.

Before Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, the rabbis had already identified the rider of Zechariah 9:9 as the Messiah. And before Zechariah wrote it, Abraham's donkey had already traveled the same road — to the same hill — carrying a son destined to be offered up and received back from the dead.

The Talmud was compiled by rabbis who rejected Jesus as Messiah. Yet across multiple tractates it preserves traditions that, taken together, constitute a hostile-witness confirmation of the gospel: a dying Messiah, a God who does not distinguish Jew from Gentile, a second enthroned figure beside God, an atonement sign that permanently stopped working in 30 CE, a messianic era the rabbis placed in the first century by their own arithmetic, and a prophetic era they declared closed after Malachi.