I am a writer, editor, adjunct professor of Religion and Philosophy, English as a Second Language, Genealogy, Educator in Ambulatory Care, and Spiritual Support Specialist, Singer, Musician, and Social Justice Advocate for Human Rights.
There’s new evidence that mind-body interventions can help reduce pain in people who ve been taking prescription opioids — and bring about reductions inside the drug’s dose.
In a study in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers reviewed evidence from 60 studies that included about 6,400 participants. They evaluated a few of strategies, including meditation, guided imagery, hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy. “Mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and clinical hypnosis are definitely possibly the most useful for reducing pain,” says study author Eric Garland, a professor along at the University of Utah. The reductions in dose were modest overall, he describes, yet the study is a symptom this approach is effective
Tests of lung samples derived from 29 patients with vaping-related injuries suggest all contained E vitamin acetate, a discovery US officials described on Friday being a “breakthrough” among the investigation of the nationwide outbreak having topped 2000 cases.
The discovery of E vitamin acetate in lung samples supplies the first direct evidence of affiliates when using the substance and vaping-related lung injuries. The substance has as well been identified in tests by US and state officials of product samples collected from patients when using the vaping injury.
Vitamin E acetate is believed in order to use for being cutting agent in illicit vaping products containing THC – the element in marijuana that will get people high.
U.S. infections from three sexually transmitted diseases have risen for your fifth consecutive year.
A little more than 1.7 million cases of chlamydia (kluh-MID’-ee-uh) were reported a year ago. The infection rate rose 3% from 2017. It’s the foremost ever reported each year, although the trend is basically by associated increased testing. About 580,000 gonorrhea (gah-nuh-REE’-uh) cases were reported. That’s the highest number since 1991. The pace rose 5%. Scientists worry antibiotic resistance could be considered a factor. And of course, the syphilis rate rose 15%. About 35,000 cases of by far the most contagious forms of the condition were reported — also one of the most since 1991. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the numbers on Tuesday. The increases coincided with health care funding cuts and clinic closures.
House investigators issued subpoenas Thursday up to 2 associates of President Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani following their arrest on campaign finance charges, seeking “key documents” which have not been produced along with impeachment inquiry.
The 2 guys are supposed to charge with scheming to funnel foreign money to U.S. politicians within a bid to affect U.S.-Ukraine relations. Both types have helped Giuliani investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his awesome son, although the indictment does not mention Giuliani or suggest that he cannot be charged with illegal trespass portion of alleged crimes. The developments played out as Trump ready to move to Minneapolis as a result of his first campaign rally since House Democrats launched the impeachment inquiry. Ahead of the trip, Trump lashed out at Fox News following its release of a new poll showing 51 percent of voters want to see him impeached and taken out of office. That is an uptick considering that the House launched an inquiry focused on Trump’s call wherein he pressed the president of Ukraine to look into the Bidens at a time when U.S. military aid to Ukraine was withheld.
It’s simple: Eat less. Sometimes combined with the directive move more, this mantra has a clear point. In case you can’t reduce weight, you might be either stupid or lazy—or, probably, both.
But if things were that simple, diets would work. Middle-aged people would not suddenly start increasing body weight despite eating and moving similarly every year. No one would need to endure the population of one friend with the “fast metabolism” who can eat anything he wants. And who, even though he knows you’re on any diet, says through his overstuffed mouth, “I couldn’t even add pounds in the event I tried.”
Instead, it is becoming clear that some people’s guts are simply more streamlined than others’ at extracting calories from food. When a couple eats the same 3,000-calorie pizza, for example, their bodies absorb different levels of energy. And those calorie-converting abilities can change over the person’s lifetime with age along with other variables.
The question is, why? And is it possible to make changes, in case a person needed to?
If so, the answer will involve the trillions of microbes in our intestines and how they operate in concert with another variable that’s just beginning to get attention. Your immunity determines stages of inflammation in the gut that are constantly shaping the way we digest food—how many calories get absorbed, and how many nutrients simply pass through.
The partnership between microbes and weight gain has long been overlooked in humans, but people have known about similar effects in animals for decades. After World War II, antibiotics became affordable and abundant for the first time. Farmers began giving the medication for their livestock—for example, as a treatment for a milk cow’s infected udder—and noticed that animals who got antibiotics grew larger and more quickly. This led to a flood of patent applications for antibiotic-laden foods for every variety of livestock. In 1950, the medication company Merck filed a patent for “a method of accelerating the growth of animals” with “a novel growth-promoting factor” that has been, simply, penicillin. Eli Lilly patented three new antibiotics to mix directly into the feed of sheep, goats, and cattle because the microbe-killing agents “increased feed efficiency.” Within the ensuing decades, it became standard practice to give livestock copious doses of antibiotics to make them grow faster and larger, although no person knew why this happened, or what other effects the practice might have.
Researchers have only recently shown that these antibiotics kill off many of the microbes that occur normally in the gut and help livestock, and people, digest food. By breaking up nutrients and helping them flow through the walls of the bowel, these microbes function a sort of gatekeeper between what exactly is eaten as well as what makes it directly into the body. Killing them is not without consequences. Similar to how antibiotics are associated with faster growth in cattle, a decrease in diversity in the human microbiome is associated with obesity. As the usage of animal antibiotics exploded in the twentieth, so too did usage in humans. Increase use of coincides having the obesity epidemic. This might be a spurious correlation, of course—lots of things have already been upon the rise since the ’50s. But dismissing it entirely would require ignoring a growing number of evidence that our metabolic health is inseparable beginning with the health in our gut microbes.
In 2006, Jeffrey Gordon, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, reported that the microbiomes of obese mice had something in accordance: In comparison to their lean counterparts, the heavier mice had fewer Bacteroides and more Firmicutes species within their guts. What’s more, biochemical analyses showed that this ratio made the microbes better at “energy harvest”—essentially, extracting calories from food and passing it into the human body. That is, even though mice ate precisely the same amount and kind of food, the bacterial populations meant that many developed metabolic problems, while some didn’t. Similar bacterial patterns have since been confirmed in obese humans.
What’s more, Gordon found, the microbiome associated with obesity is transferable. In 2013, his lab took gut bacteria from pairs of human twins in which only one twin was obese, then fed the samples to mice. The mice given bacteria beginning with the obese humans quickly gained weight. The others did not.
Intestinal microorganisms are likewise transferred between humans, using fecal transplants, as a possible experimental treatment for serious infections like Clostridium difficile. In one study, obese patients who received transplants from lean donors later had healthier responses to insulin.
Short of this kind of hard reset considering the microbiome, preliminary research has demonstrated that adding also a single bacterial species to the person’s gut can alter her metabolism. Within tests reported last month within the journal Nature Medicine, people who took a probiotic containing Akkermansia muciniphila—which is usually found in greater amounts in non-obese people—saw subtle metabolic improvements, including weight loss.
The research authors aren’t suggesting that anyone go out and obtain this bacterium. But is known as a “proof of concept” regarding the idea that it’s possible to change a person’s microbiome in ways which have metabolic benefits.
Because leanness and obesity seem to be transmissible throughout the microbiome, “metabolic disease turns out to be, in certain ways, like an infectious disease,” says Lora Hooper, the chair considering the immunology department at the University of Texas Southwestern Hospital. Hooper did her postdoctoral research in Gordon’s lab in St. Louis. While other researchers focused on the gut microbiome itself, she took an interest within the immunity. Specifically, she wanted to know how an inflammatory response could influence these microscopic populations, and thus be related to gaining weight.
During the last decade or so, multiple studies have proven that obese adults mount less effective immune responses to vaccinations, and also that both overweight and underweight people have elevated rates of infection. But these were long assumed to become effects of obesity, not causes.
“When I started my lab there wasn’t much found how immunity perceives the gut microbes,” Hooper says. “Many people thought the gut immunity might be the type of blind to them.” To her, it was obvious that this couldn’t be the case. A person’s gut is host to be about 100 trillion bacteria. They serve vital metabolic functions, but can quickly kill someone if they get into the bloodstream. “So clearly the immune system has got to become involved in maintaining them,” she says. It made sense to her that even subtle changes within the functioning of the immunity could influence microbial populations—and, hence, gaining weight and metabolism.
This theory was confirmed late last month in a paper in Science. Zac Stephens, a microbial ecologist with the University of Utah, and his colleagues had been collaborating with mice with altered immune T cells. They noticed that over time, these mice “ballooned,” as Stephens puts it. One of his colleagues started summoning them “pancakes.”
To determine how such an immune change may cause obesity, they tested the biomes considering the mice with and without having the immune alteration. They found that healthy mice have lots of bacteria coming from a genus called Clostridia, but few from Desulfovibrio, and also that their guts let most fat pass throughout. People who have a restructured immune system had fewer Clostridia and more Desulfovibrio, and this microbial balance helped the gut absorb more fats from food. These mice gained more weight and exhibited indications of diabetes type 2.
“Whether this applies in humans, we don’t know,” Hooper says, “but this can be a tantalizing clue.”
Mice aren’t humans, but their microbiomes are about as complex as our own. Reduced Clostridia and increased Desulfovibrio are seen in people with obesity and kind 2 diabetes. Bacteria can reasonably be expected to operate similarly within the guts of different species. But even if they can don’t, this experiment is a demonstration of principle: The immune system helps control the composition of the gut microbiome.
It does so by regularly mounting low-level immune responses to maintain populations of bacteria in order. “The gut is under a continuing state of inflammation, so to speak—constant immune stimulation from all the microbes,” says Stephens, pushing back upon the common misconception that inflammation is always bad. The role of considering the immune system within the gut would be to maintain balance. Changes to the body’s defenses, which could happen due to age or illness, can cause certain species to flourish in exchange for others.
This is the interesting part to Steven Lindemann, a researcher at Purdue University who was not involved in the Utah study. He studies the effects of foods upon the gut microbiome. “Although we all know that, on the balance, diet is the strongest contributor to gut microbiome composition,” he explained, this study means that when immune control over the colon stops working, growth could become unchecked and lead to further problems with metabolic regulation.
Lindemann says the fact that your immunity regulates the inhabitants of the small intestine is well established. He compares the bowel wall to the customs checkpoint: The goal is to weed out bad actors and illegal cargo, but allow legitimate trade to progress as regularly as possible. In the case of the immune-altered mice, he states, “we have a colonic border patrol that’s seemingly purpose is to lunch, allowing bad actor Desulfovibrio to bloom.” If similar microbial changes have comparable effects in humans, it very well could have far-reaching implications for our particular diets. The very ideas of “nutritional value” and “calorie content” of food seem to vary based on the microbial population of the individual eating it and, potentially, her immune status. A person’s microbes—and those contained in any given food—would need to be regarded as another component considering the already flimsy calories-in, calories-out equation. This would also compound the difficulties already facing nutrition labels. People trying to control their weight might conclude that tinkering with their microbiomes is the solution. This stands to support the already dubious and barely regulated industry of “probiotic” supplements, that have been projected to progress to $7 billion by 2025. But the answer probably won’t be so simple.
“A lot of the most recent research on probiotics suggests it’s really hard to keep and sustain new communities,” Stephens says. The immune system could explain that. “It might be that your immune response gets ‘stuck’ from a young age based upon what you’ve exposed it into. Probiotics might not be enough to change a person’s microbiome, because your immune system determined ahead of time that certain microbes are either appropriate or inappropriate in your gut.”
Stephens says the relationship between weight and the immune system will probably have got a lot more complicated before it gets simpler. Which makes it hard to give concrete advice. “Keeping diverse gut microbes with diverse dietary sources is perhaps the safest advice for now,” he states. “That will stimulate the ideal, strong immunity that can learn and regulate and do all the things it does, in ways we’re just beginning to comprehend.” If all this uncertainty makes nutrition guidelines and nutrition even more inscrutable, additionally it stands to carry out some great by undermining the moralizing and simplistic character judgments often associated with body mass. Seeing obesity being a manifestation of the interplay between many systems—genetic, microbial, environmental—invites the realization that human physiology has changed along with our relationship to the species in and around us. As these new scientific models unfold, they impugn the thought of weight as a possible individual character flaw, revealing it regarding the self-destructive myth it has always been.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said Wednesday that its officers had raided seven food processing plants in Mississippi and detained approximately 680 “removable aliens” in what a federal prosecutor described as “the largest single-state immigration enforcement operation in your nation’s history.”
Nearly 600 ICE agents swarmed the plants in Bay Springs, Carthage, Canton, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastapol, surrounding the perimeters to maintain workers from fleeing.
“The execution of federal search warrants today was simply about enforcing the rule of law in your state and throughout our great country,” U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst said within a statement. ” I commend these federal agents, our state and local law enforcement partners, and our federal prosecutors for their professionalism and dedication to guarantee that those who violate our laws are held accountable.”
FEDERAL JUDGE STRIKES DOWN TRUMP ASYLUM BAN ON MIGRANTS WHO ILLEGALLY CROSS BORDER In Morton, 40 miles east of Jackson, workers filled three buses — two for males and one for women — on a Koch Foods Inc. plant. Workers had their wrists tied with plastic bands and were informed to deposit personal belongings in transparent plastic bags. Agents collected the baggage before they boarded buses. About 70 family, friends and residents waved goodbye and shouted, “Let them go! Allow them to go!” Later, two additional buses arrived.
Workers who were confirmed to have legal status were permitted to let the plant following a their trunks searched. Some employees attempted to flee on foot but were captured in the parking lot.
“It was actually a sad situation inside,” said Domingo Candelaria, a legal resident and Koch worker who said authorities checked employees’ identification documents.
“All the unlawfully present foreign nationals arrested Wednesday are now being interviewed by ICE staff to record any potential mitigating humanitarian situations,” ICE said in a statement. “Based upon these interviews, and consideration of their criminality and prior immigration history, ICE is working out on a case-by-case basis based on the totality of the circumstances which individuals will certainly be detained and which persons may be released from custody at the moment.”
“HSI’s [Homeland Security Investigations] worksite enforcement efforts are equally focused on aliens who unlawfully seek work in the U.S. as well as the employers who knowingly hire them,” HSI New Orleans Special Agent in Charge, Jere Miles said within a statement.
A hangar with the Mississippi National Guard in Flowood, near Jackson, was set up with 2,000 meals to process employees for immigration violations on Wednesday. There have been seven lines, one for each location that has been hit.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” Chris Heck, resident agent in charge of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit in Jackson, told The Associated Press included in the hangar. “This can be a very large worksite operation.”
Such large raids were common under President George W. Bush, most notably at a kosher meatpacking plant in tiny Postville, Iowa, in 2008. Nearly 400 workers, mostly Guatemalans, were swept up and jailed due to that operation. President Barack Obama avoided them, limiting his workplace immigration efforts to low-profile audits that were done beyond public view.
Trump resumed workplace raids, but the months of preparation and hefty resources they require make her rare. Last year, the administration hit a landscaping company near Toledo, Ohio, and a meatpacking plant in eastern Tennessee. The former owner of the Tennessee plant was sentenced to 18 months in prison last month.
Koch Foods, situated in Park Ridge, Ill., is one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S. and employs about 13,000 people, with operations in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee. Forbes ranks it as the 135th largest privately held company in the U.S., using an estimated $3.2 billion in annual revenue. The Morton plant produces more than 700,000 tons of poultry feed a year, company officials said in February. Immigration agents also hit a Peco Foods Inc. plant in Canton, about 35 miles north of Jackson. The organization, based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, says it’s the eighth-largest poultry producer in the U.S. An organization representative didn’t immediately respond to a telephone call or email seeking comment.
It’s going to get worse. That’s the warning of a former violent extremist, Christian Picciolini, who joined a neo-Nazi movement 30 years ago and in fact now attempts to get people out of them. White-supremacist terrorists—the ones who have left dozens dead in attacks in Pittsburgh, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, the past few months—aren’t just trying to outdo another, he told us. They’re trying to outdo Timothy McVeigh, the anti-government terrorist who blew up an Oklahoma City federal building and killed greater than 100 people in 1995—the worst terrorist attack within the united states before September 11, 2001.
On Saturday morning in El Paso, a gunman shot and killed 22 people, including children, on a Walmart. The shop was crowded for back-to-school-shopping season. The victims included a high-school student, an elementary-school teacher, and a couple carrying their infant son, who survived. And the shooter, based on an online manifesto authorities attributed to the suspect, saw himself fighting a “Hispanic invasion” as he gunned them down. That shooting, in addition to yet another one hours later, wherein an attack killed nine individuals over half a minute in Dayton, Ohio, renewed the clamor for gun-control laws that has become a grim ritual after such events. But Picciolini said that even if the U.S. could get a handle on its gun problem, terrorists can always find other ways. McVeigh had his car bomb, the September 11th hijackers had their airplanes, Islamic State attackers have suicide bombings, trucks, and knives. “I have to ask myself, Can we have white-nationalist airline pilots?” Picciolini said. “There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to believe that that most of us don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.”
New Canadian research has found that having a D supplement could help slow down the progression of type 2 diabetes with those who’ve been recently diagnosed with the condition, or those who show signs of prediabetes.
Led by researchers at the Université Laval in Quebec, the brand new small-scale study looked at 96 participants who were either newly clinically recognized as having type 2 diabetes or at high risk of developing the condition, a disorder generally known as prediabetes, that can be identified by several risk factors such as obesity or perhaps a family history of the disease.
Less participants were arbitrarily assigned to receive a high dose of vitamin D3 (5000 iu, which happens to be approximately about 10 times the recommended dose) once daily for six months, while the better half were assigned to receive a daily placebo. The scientists measured markers of insulin function and glucose metabolism before and once the six months.
The findings, published in the European Journal of Endocrinology, revealed that vitamin D levels were substantially higher within the group who had taken a complement in comparison with those who had taken the placebo. In addition, taking vitamin D supplements appeared to significantly improve the action of insulin within the muscle tissue of participants after 6 months.
Preceding Research has suggested that low d levels really are a risk factor for developing diabetes type 2. However, research studiesinvestigating whether vitamin D supplementation can change metabolic function have produced inconsistent outcomes. The scientists say this could be due to a low number of study participants, or because participants with normal vitamin D levels at the start were metabolically healthy or had been existing with diabetes type 2 for a long period of time.
Study researcher Dr. Claudia Gagnon commented, “The reason we saw improvements in glucose metabolism following d supplementation with those at higher risk of diabetes, or with newly diagnosed diabetes, while other studies didn’t demonstrate an impact in people with long-standing diabetes type 2 is unclear. This could be mainly because that improvements in metabolic function are harder to detect in those with longer-term disease or that the longer treatment time is needed to see the benefits.”
She recommends further studies to enquire how different people reply to d supplementation and if the constructive effect on metabolism present in this study can be maintained in the longer term.
“Diabetes type 2 and prediabetes really are a growing public health concern and although our results are promising, further studies will be needed to confirm our findings, to identify whether some individuals may benefit more out of this intervention, and to evaluate the safety of high-dose vitamin D supplementation again and again. In the meantime I would recommend that current vitamin D supplementation recommendations be followed,” said Gagnon.
Research conducted recently found some common drugs could raise the likelihood of dementia or dementia-like symptoms by nearly fifty percent. According to the research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, discovered the increase odds of dementia in people 55 and older who take anticholinergic medications.
Anticholinergics are used to treat your wide range of conditions, including depression, indicators of Parkinson’s disease, bladder control and insomnia. An estimated one in four mature workers take anticholinergic drugs. Some antihistamines like Benadryl are also anticholinergics, but weren’t associated with dementia in this study.
“This can be a very broad class of medications,” CBS News’ Dr. Tara Narula told “CBS Early today.” “A large amount of Americans use these drugs whether prescription or over-the-counter beginning from things such as antihistamines or anti-allergy medicines, sleep aids, bladder control medication, Parkinson’s drugs, COPD meds, I mean the list goes on and on.” The research, which Narula cautioned is basically a correlational and not a cause-and-effect study, checked out more than 200,000 individuals in Britain who took a strong anticholinergic drug for 3 many years found a 49% increased likelihood of dementia.
“All of these researchers have said, look, some of these drugs that we’re giving – such as the anti-depressants and the sleep aids – we’re giving to people who may have had dementia all along because a few of these things such as depression and lack of sleep are early signs of dementia,” she said. It is important for pharmacists, doctors and patients all be informed regarding this and also to remember that the elderly are particularly susceptible for a range of reasons including a more permeable blood-brain barrier and because they are often on multiple medications, meaning there could be a cumulative effect. Because of those risks, Narula stated that patients with dementia should not be on these medications by any means. Past studies have proven that whenever patients turn off anticholinergics the symptoms subside, but researchers are calling for a randomized control trial – considered the gold standard in research – so they can fully understand whether there is a real cause and effect link.
“At every [doctor] visit you ought to be going over all of your medications and saying, must i be traveling on this? Could it be contributing on me, and what are the risks and benefits and are there alternative agents that may be good for me and you should not assume whether it’s over-the-counter that it’s safe.”
What do Jews believe about Jesus? For some Jews, the name alone is nearly synonymous with pogroms and Christian anti-Semitism.Other Jews, recently, have come to regard him as a Jewish teacher. This does not mean, however, that they believe, as Christians do, that he was raised from the dead or was the messiah.While many people now regard Jesus as the founder of Christianity, it is important to note that he did not intend to establish a new religion, at least according to the earliest sources, and he never used the term “Christian.” He was born and lived as a Jew, and his earliest followers were Jews as well. Christianity emerged as a separate religion only in the centuries after Jesus’ death.
Who Was Jesus?
Virtually all of what is known about the historical Jesus comes from the four New Testament Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — which scholars believe were written several decades after Jesus’ death. While there is no archaeological or other physical evidence for his existence, most scholars agree that Jesus did exist and that he was born sometime in the decade before the Common Era and crucified sometime between 26-36 CE (the years when the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, ruled Judea).
He lived at a time when the Roman Empire ruled what is now Israel and sectarianism was rife, with major tensions among Jews not only over how much to cooperate with the Romans but also how to interpret Torah . It was also, for some, a restive time when displeasure with Roman policies, as well as with the Temple high priests, bred hopes for a messianic redeemer who would throw off the foreign occupiers and restore Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
Illustration depicting Jesus fishing in the Sea of Galilee with some of his followers. (From “At Home’ by Grace Stebbing, published by John F Shaw & Co)
Was Jesus the Messiah?
The question “was Jesus the messiah?” requires a prior question: “What is the definition of messiah?” The Prophets (Nevi’im), who wrote hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth, envisioned a messianic age as as a period of universal peace, in which war and hunger are eradicated, and humanity accepts God’s sovereignty. By the first century, the view developed that the messianic age would witness a general resurrection of the dead, the in-gathering of all the Jews, including the 10 lost tribes, to the land of Israel, a final judgment and universal peace.
Some Jews expected the messiah to be a descendant ofKing David (based on an interpretation of God’s promise to David in of an eternal kingdom). The Dead Sea Scrolls speak of two messiahs: one a military leader and the other a priest. Still other Jews expected the prophet Elijah, or the angel Michael, or Enoch, or any number of other figures to usher in the messianic age. Stories in the Gospels about Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead, and proclaiming the imminence of the kingdom of heaven suggest that his followers regarded him as appointed by God to bring about the messianic age.
More than 1,000 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, the medieval sage Maimonides (also known as Rambam) laid out in his Mishneh Torah specific things Jews believe the messiah must accomplish in order to confirm his identity — among them restoring the kingdom of David to its former glory, achieving victory in battle against Israel’s enemies, rebuilding the temple (which the Romans destroyed in 70 CE) and ingathering the exiles to the land of Israel. “And if he’s not successful with this, or if he is killed, it’s known that he is not the one that was promised by the Torah,” Maimonides wrote.
What About Jews for Jesus? Jews for Jesus is one branch of a wider movement called Messianic Jews. Members of this movement are not accepted as Jewish by the broader Jewish community, even though some adherents may have been born Jewish and their ritual life includes Jewish practices. While an individual Jew could accept Jesus as the messiah and technically remain Jewish — rejection of any core Jewish belief or practice does not negate one’s Jewishness — the beliefs of messianic Jews are theologically incompatible with Judaism.
Did the Jews Kill Jesus?
No. Jesus was executed by the Romans. Crucifixion was a Roman form of execution, not a Jewish one.
For most of Christian history, Jews were held responsible for the death of Jesus. This is because the New Testament tends to place the blame specifically on the Temple leadership and more generally on Jewish people. According to the Gospels, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate was reluctant to execute Jesus but was egged on by bloodthirsty Jews — a scene famously captured in Mel Gibson’s controversial 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ” According to the Gospel of Matthew, after Pilate washes his hands and declares himself innocent of Jesus’ death, “all the people” (i.e., all the Jews in Jerusalem) respond, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25).
This “blood cry” and other verses were used to justify centuries of Christian prejudice against Jews. In 1965, the Vatican promulgated a document called “Nostra Aetate” (Latin for “In Our Time”) which stated that Jews in general should not be held responsible for the death of Jesus. This text paved the way for a historic rapprochement between Jews and Catholics. Several Protestant denominations across the globe subsequently adopted similar statements.
A mosaic in Jerusalem’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ascension depicting Jesus’ crucifixion. (iStock)
Why Was Jesus Killed?Some have suggested that Jesus was a political rebel who sought the restoration of Jewish sovereignty and was executed by the Romans for sedition — an argument put forth in two recent works: Reza Aslan’s Zealot and Shmuley Boteach’s Kosher Jesus. However, this thesis is not widely accepted by New Testament scholars. Had Rome regarded Jesus as the leader of a band of revolutionaries, it would have rounded up his followers as well. Nor is there any evidence in the New Testament to suggest that Jesus and his followers were zealots interested in an armed rebellion against Rome. More likely is the hypothesis that Romans viewed Jesus as a threat to the peace and killed him because he was gaining adherents who saw him as a messianic figure.
Did Jesus Reject Judaism?Some have interpreted certain verses in the Gospels as rejections of Jewish belief and practice. In the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus is said to have declared forbidden foods “clean” — a verse commonly understood as a rejection of kosher dietary laws — but this is Mark’s extrapolation and not necessarily Jesus’ intention. Jesus and his earliest Jewish followers continued to follow Jewish law.
The New Testament also include numerous verses testifying to Jesus as equal to God and as divine — a belief hard to reconcile with Judaism’s insistence on God’s oneness. However, some Jews at the time found the idea that the divine could take on human form compatible with their tradition. Others might have regarded Jesus as an angel, such as the “Angel of the Lord” who appears in Genesis 16,Genesis 22(in the burning bush) and elsewhere.
Are There Jewish Texts that Reference Jesus?Yes. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus, although the major reference in his Antiquities of the Jews appears to have been edited and augmented by Christian scribes. There are a few references in the Talmud to “Yeshu,” which many authorities understand as referring to Jesus.
The Talmud tractate Sanhedrin originally recorded that Yeshu the Nazarene was hung on the eve of Passover for the crime of leading Jews astray. This reference was excised from later versions of the Talmud, most likely because of its use by Christians as a pretext for persecution.
In the medieval period, a work called Toledot Yeshu presented an alternative history of Jesus that rejects cardinal Christian beliefs. The work, which is not part of the canon of rabbinic literature, is not widely known.
Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah, describes Jesus as the failed messiah foreseen by the prophet Daniel. Rather than redeeming Israel, Maimonides writes, Jesus caused Jews to be killed and exiled, changed the Torah and led the world to worship a false God.
The Dantzler Report! 