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Why don't Jewish people accept Jesus as the Messiah?
The short answer
Jewish people who do not accept Jesus usually give serious reasons from the shared Scriptures, and they should be heard at full strength. The Messiah was expected to bring peace, gather the exiles and rebuild the Temple, and the world is visibly unredeemed. God is one, and worshipping a man looks like idolatry; the suffering servant is read as Israel. Christians answer that the same Scriptures also promised a suffering, cut off Messiah who would come before the Temple's destruction, and that Jesus himself read Moses, the prophets and the psalms as written about him.
The fuller answer
The strongest objection is the simplest: look at the world. The prophets promised that in the Messiah's days swords become ploughshares, the exiles return, and the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord. None of that has plainly happened, so the Messiah, on this reading, has plainly not come. A second objection is theological. God is one, without body or parts, and directing worship to a crucified man seems to break the Shema. A third is textual: the suffering servant of Isaiah is Israel, named as such in nearby chapters, and no one needed a second candidate.
We all like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.
Isaiah 53:6 (BSB)
Christians answer the textual objection inside the same chapter. All we like sheep have gone astray, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. The servant bears the iniquity of the very people who confess their straying, which makes him distinct from them. He is also described as without deceit and as making himself an offering for guilt, language that fits a sinless person more readily than a nation that, by its own prophets' account, often strayed. The Christian claim is not that the passage is obvious. It is that Jesus fits its hardest lines.
Know and understand this: From the issuance of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Messiah, the Prince, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of distress.
Daniel 9:25 (BSB)
Daniel's prophecy gives the timing objection an answer to weigh. Gabriel speaks of an anointed one who will be cut off, and places the sequence before the destruction of the city and sanctuary, which happened in AD 70. Christians argue that a Messiah who is cut off, rather than immediately enthroned, had to arrive before that date, and that the two stage pattern, suffering first and glory at his return, explains an unredeemed looking world without abandoning the promises. Jewish readings of Daniel differ, and the honest move is to read the chapter together rather than quote it past each other.
Jesus said to them, “These are the words I spoke to you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.”
Luke 24:44 (BSB)
Luke records the risen Jesus telling his followers that everything written about him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. That is the Christian claim in one sentence: not a new religion bolted onto Judaism, but Judaism's own Scriptures read as a single story with a suffering and rising centre. History also belongs in the conversation, gently. Centuries of persecution done in Christ's name give many Jewish families reasons to distrust the messenger that have nothing to do with the texts, and Christians should name that shame rather than argue around it.
Sources
- Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
- Maimonides' Thirteen Principles
- Rashi on Isaiah
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