What do you thinki about jesus?
I think he was a nice Jewish man, but irrelevant to my life and spirituality.
what do you believe he was like?
Remembering that we only have the writings of what others SAY about Jesus...
I do think he was an Idealist (some sort of NF). I think he was a student of the school of Hillel ( and in fact may have met Hillel personally during his bar mitzvah at age 12). In his thirties, the Sanhedron became dominated by the school of Shammai, and this was perhaps his biggest irritant. He lost his temper with these particular rabbis on a number of occasions, resorting to immature name calling, but it shows his passion for his interpretations of the Torah. He clearly believed he was the messiah, but went off on poeticizing the notion of messiah, so that it was figurative rather than literal ("My kingdom is not of this world.") At some point, he became convinced in the inevitability of his death, and i'm not sure if it was a rational knowledge that the romans simply didn't put up with rabble rousers, or if he had become emotionally off keel. I suspect that it is the idealist understanding of patterns: that charismatic leaders who go against the status quo in history have a habit of ending up dead. He was a master of figurative speech, to the point where those of a more concrete thinking tended to misunderstand him ("My flesh is real food.") However, I dislike his chronic use of hyperbole ("if you lust after a woman in your heart you have committed adultery"), if for no other reason than that most people don't recognize it as such, and so take it literally when a literal reading is actually quite absurd. You see his xenophobia at times, very typical for those of the Galil ("Shall I cast my bread to the dogs"). One of his best virtues is that he treated women as different but equal, not just socializing with them, but teaching them.
do you understand his concepts?
Oh yes. I alwasy thought Jesus was very easy to understand, but now I know that my brain simply works analogically, so figurative language is my best foot forward.
I've noticed that christians tend to home in on the concepts they like, and sort of blot out in their minds the concepts counter to their beliefs, such as his teaching that to gain eternal life you keep the commandments. (Matthew 19:16-19)
do you believe his character was such a way as to be regarded Divine?
do you think he was really god in human form?
Absolutely not. Okay, I'm not here to shove my beliefs down anyone's throat's, so I know that this is my two cents worth. The G-d we Jews believe in is non-corporeal. This is a core concept. It is one of Maimonides 13 principals of Judaism. It is stated directly in Torah, "G-d is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should repent." (Numbers 23:19) For me, the very definition of G-d is that he is creator, NOT CREATION. As splendid as the heavens and earth can be, it is all created. Jesus, too, was G-d's creation.
Now, I disagree with most christians that Jesus ever claimed to be G-d. Jesus was a typical mystic who tried to articulate his closeness to G-d with poetic language, which inevitably gets misunderstood by many.
And I'll end as I began: the documents we have regarding Jesus are influenced by the beliefs of those who wrote them, and they are not entirely reliable. Who really knows if Jesus said X or not. The patterns formed by the different sources do create a kind of chasracter which we can then say, "This verse is in synch with what we know about Jesus." Or not.
