Why did the Jews lie about Jesus?

[Vicki Q]

You might find the link below interesting: The page title is "Judaism 101"

http://www.jewfaq.org/mashiach.htm

That's very helpful, and it's refreshing to find that some of the rethinking I've had to do in recent years to see the essential Jewishness of Xianity seems to have a fairly accurate basis in Judaism as seen from a Jewish perspective.

As to the meat of the issue. As I see it, when the astonishing, life-changing Easter events were over, the disciples went back to the OT to fit it all together; they were later joined by the fanatical Jewish/Pharisee Paul. They would have approached things from an orthodox C1 Jewish perspective, and didn't find a problem in saying the prophets had got it spot on. In fact, the NT is stuffed with OT quotes, and Paul devotes a lot of his writing to this question.

They realised that the prophecies were not just about the military conquest of a bit of semi-fertile land, but that “all nations on earth will be blessed” was the victory, and that the promised Messianic Age was split into parts (e.g. the resurrection was Jesus as part 1, along with the inauguration of the Kingdom, other resurrections etc to be part 2). And many other new understandings.

Having looked at the link, where a lot of the references don't say what the author says they do, and others just need to have ranges of meaning carefully examined, I can't see any problem with saying Jesus was the Jewish mashiach.


Back in a couple of days to pick this up.

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Yeah, let's hear what 1 Cor. 15 has to say: "5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve."

I mean from the start you can see that Paul is lying because there were only eleven, Judas having died.

The Twelve was a technical name, widely used in the Early Church, for the inner circle of Jesus' followers. There is more than a nod to the 12 tribes of Israel. Judas was fairly quickly replaced. 

Hence the capital letter, and the appropriate continued use even when there were temporarily 11 of them.