Jews for Jesus

Will report back with more later.

Do they specifically intend to target Jews as possible converts? I do recall that, a few times, I was walking in New York City and a JfJ guy would come walking straight up to me and hand me their literature...as if he somehow just knew that I was Jewish and ripe for their propaganda.

In all seriousness, though, they seem pretty harmless as evangelicals go.

This is exactly the same logical stretching that Christians who follow a literal interpretation of the Bible have to adhere to, since they also believe that Christ was the Jewish Messiah. So from a theological angle, the JfJ beliefs are really no different than 99% of conservative Christians.

which is why I wonder who funds them. I wouldn't be surprised if a l'il Falwell or Robertson fundage was swung their way.

he goes to a jew for jesus temple with a jew for jesus rabbi, so yes.

reminds me of the church that marvin gaye's father belonged to.

my future! especially the blond spouse part.

blondredhead = ME! :)

my cousin made a video in high school showing how interfaith marriages are evil. he used an episode of 30something as principal evidence.

except for my mother. love ya!

ok, people. i wasn't trying to say that jews cannot be blond, but i had to phrase it like that because all of the goys married into my father's side of the family happen to be fair haired. calm down.

jesuits for judaism!

I had an Israeli roommate once, and she was brunette.

she'owl, sheh‑ole', Hebrew 7585; or she'ol, sheh‑ole'; from Hebrew 7592 (sha'al); hades or the world of the dead (as if a subterranean retreat), including its accessories and inmates :‑ grave, hell, pit.

HELL AND HADES. "Hope not ever to see heaven: I come to lead you to the other shore; into the eternal darkness; into fire and into ice." Dante's `Inferno', from which the quotation comes, is perhaps the most vivid depiction in literature of the place of eternal punishment for evildoers. Abodes for the dead have formed a part of the religious belief of most peoples. One reason for such belief has been the reluctance to accept the end of human life on Earth as permanent, as the extinction of individual existence.

The names hell and Hades have generally been understood as places of punishment, either eternal or temporary. Ancient cultures often envisioned an abode for the dead as a reward, or as neutral, rather than always as a punishment. In very ancient primitive religions, as well as among American Indians, the dead went to dwell with their ancestors or to a heavenly location with other souls. Ancient Israel conceived of a place called Sheol, a dark and gloomy place, to be sure, but no elements of punishment were attached to it.

The Greek Hades (originally the name of the god who presided over it) did not suggest punishment either. It was a dark subterranean realm or a distant island. The dead were conducted to Hades by the god Hermes. The way was barred, however, by the River Styx. The dead were ferried across the river by the boatman Charon. Eventually, the Greeks added a place called Tartarus, far below Hades, as a place of torment for the wicked. In time Tartarus lost its distinctness and became another name for Hades.

The word hell comes from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning "concealed," and it suggests a place hidden in the hot regions at the Earth's center. In Norse mythology Hel was the name of the world of the dead as well as of its goddess. It was especially for evildoers and was distinguished from Valhalla, the place to which those who had fallen in battle went. The ancient Greek myth of Elysium, or the Elysian fields, was similar to Valhalla. It was a dwelling place for heroes on whom the gods had conferred immortality. Eventually it came to mean the abode for all the blessed dead, as opposed to Hades.

The concept of hell as a place of punishment is rooted in the idea of justice. Hell was offered as an answer to the question: If evildoers prosper throughout their lives and are never punished, when will they get what is coming to them? The answer must be: after they die.

The modern Western understanding of hell derives from the latest period in ancient Israel's history, and it was more fully developed by early Christianity. The chief suggestion of such a place in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) is a brief reference in Daniel. The place reserved for the wicked dead was called Gehenna by Jews. Early references depict it as a place of temporary punishment, similar to the Roman Catholic purgatory. By the time Christianity was established, it had become a permanent abode. The torments inflicted there were largely imaginative projections of the worst tortures devised in this world. Eternal fire is the most common punishment, though perpetual cold also has been accepted.

There is no fully developed teaching about hell in the New Testament, though there are frequent mentions of it. Only in the course of later church history was it elaborated into official church doctrine. Today the New Testament statements and their later explanations are taken literally by some Christians, regarded as allegory or myth by some, and denied altogether by others.

Islam has no consistent teaching on hell. It is regarded as permanent in some passages of the Koran and temporary in others. In Hinduism, hell is accepted, but it has no permanent significance. It is but a stage in the long career of the soul. For most Buddhist schools, as well, hell is a transitory phase where sins are purged.

HELL - Hell traditionally denotes the place or state of being of unrepentant souls who are damned to eternal punishment after death. Derived from the Old Teutonic word hel, meaning "to conceal" or "to cover," the word hell is used in English translations of the Bible to represent both the Hebrew Sheol, an ethically neutral underworld for the departed, and the Greek Gehenna, the underworld for the punishment of the wicked from which the Christian concept of hell developed.

The characteristics of an underworld pervade descriptions of hell. In Greek mythology, Hades is the underworld ruled by the god of that name, who is also known as Pluto; in Norse mythology, Hel is a cold and

shadowy subterranean realm. The Christian imagery of hell as a fiery underworld comes from the New Testament, where hell is depicted as a "lake that burns with fire and brimstone" (Rev. 21:8). Two of the most famous and extensive descriptions of hell in Western culture come from John Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Divine Comedy. While the Western prophetic religions view hell as the Last Judgment of those souls that will be eternally separated from God, most Eastern religions conceive of hell as a stage that souls pass through on their way to a different existence (see transmigration of souls).

Bibliography:

Brandon, S. G. F., The Judgment of the Dead (1967); Mew, James, Traditional Aspects of Hell (1903; repr. 1971).

HEL

In Norse mythology, Hel, the daughter of Loki, was the goddess of death who ruled over the cold, dark underworld of Niflheim. She had a hideous body, half black and half blue. Her table was Hunger, her knife Starvation, her bed Care, and her attendants Delay and Slowness. Her domain was also sometimes called Hel in later mythology, probably through the influence of Christian belief.

Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright

xpost

http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter/groups/j/jews/

The fact that the first Christians were Jews is pointless, since the first Mormons were Christians, the first Buddhists were Hindus, and the first Protestants were Catholics. Yet, neither Martin Luther nor the millions of Protestants who follow him called themselves 'Catholics for no Pope'

Hey now, I thought Elysium was a Roman invention -- like Ovid or someone wanted to reward Achilles and friends by giving them a swanker place to stay than the commonfolk.

Yeah, that's exactly what it says in the Bible. Jesus fullfilled the prophesies as the messiah from the Old Testament, and he became the sacrifice for the whole worlds sins, saving it, giving it rebirth, whatever you call it. What Chistian does not believe that?

as for me, i think that they are anti-semitic and disrespectful of judaism, therefore undeserving of respect.

that would be when linkin park records a GOOD song.

Oy vey.

parading converts around does nothing to help interfaith relations that's for sure.
m.

Then again - Zadie Smith and James Wood to thread.

But no - they both live in the US!

If only that were true - I regularly pass by the London branch of Jews for Jesus on the bus. I think it's somewhere around Camden/Kentish Town, can't remember exactly.

http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist/en/SiteIndex/AssetViewer/view?asset=Job&asset-id=150112-201&keywords=writer&sid=35042097-192-UuWzH

-- DV (dirtyvica...), September 30th, 2005.

Some of them are, in a sense (though it's debatable that Jews are really an "ethnic group" since there are Ethiopian Jews that look Ethiopian and Morroccan Jews that look Morroccan, etc.)

But the organization was actually started by Baptists looking for a way to convert Jews.