God Squad: Jesus and non-Christian beliefs

I receive many versions of your question, and they all focus on the same issues:

1. Did Jesus perform miracles?

2. If he did, why haven't Jews become Christians?

3. If Jesus did not perform miracles, why are they in the Bible?

To begin, only the Christian New Testament, and not the Hebrew Bible, talks of Jesus performing miracles. Jews, Hindus and others don't accept the New Testament as God's word. Therefore, non-Christian religions do not accept Jesus' messianic claims.

Islam, you should know, accepts some of the Christian claims but not the essential Christian claim of Jesus' resurrection from the dead. It should be obvious that claims within one's religion are not convincing to those outside one's religion. You cannot quote your own scripture to refute the scripture of another faith.

There's one more point I see that makes the dialogue between Jews and Christians somewhat asymmetrical. Christians cannot understand themselves spiritually without understanding themselves as having come from Jews and Judaism. Jesus and all his early followers were Jews. However, conversely, Jews don't need to understand themselves in relation to Christianity, because Christianity came later.

When people ask me if I believe Jesus was the Son of God, I try to say in a friendly but firm way, "I don't believe he was, but after we die we will all know for sure." I will say that if Jesus was the Messiah, you may well hear the distant echo of my voice after my death calling out from another world, "Oy Vey!"

I'm not a fan of jewelry in general, but I am a big fan of religious jewelry. Wearing a necklace with a religious symbol on it is a clear sign of public pride in your faith, and that's a good thing in my view. However, combining symbols from two different faiths is both confusing and inauthentic to both traditions.

The teachings of Judaism and Christianity are different in important respects, so what would you intend to say by wearing both symbols? Would you be saying that Jesus both is and is not the Messiah? How can that be? If you'd be trying to say that all faiths have a common ethical core and teach us to have hope that death is not the end of us, that's fine. The use of contradictory symbols only muddies the waters, though, and blunts the message that you have a clear religious identity and that this identity fills you with pride.

Flip a coin. Make a choice and leave one of your necklaces in the jewelry box.

The death of a beloved grandmother brings great sadness. Sadder still is the death of our personal histories. There may be ways to fill in the gaps of your grandmother's life by speaking with any living members of her generation.

I hope you don't mind my using your question to make an appeal to all readers to do everything possible to discover and record their family histories. If elderly relatives resist, perhaps they'd agree to be interviewed by someone outside the family.

We need to know our roots for spiritual, historical and even medical reasons. Such stories must not be allowed to pass with the generations into dust.