z_darius:
Before these are solved it's safe to say Jesus was a Jew.
Have you read any of the New Testament?...where does Jesus say 'I am a Jew'?...He does say 'Before Abraham was, I AM'...now, you must understand that the Pharisees who plotted against Jesus, and who Jesus called 'sons of your father, the devil', are considered by religious Jews to be their spiritual fathers...following your logic, if Jesus 'was a Jew', he must have been a 'self-hating' Jew...but, of course Jesus was not a Jew...apparently, from the Gospel of Luke, he was circumcized...does this make one a Jew?...Arabs also practiced circumcision...the religion of the Pharisees was the dominant 'religion' in Judea at the time...so, because Jesus WAS a minister and religious teacher, he had contact and conflict with this particular religious sect...but as I stated, since Jesus wasn't a Pharisee,
and the Pharisees were what are today called 'Jews', Jesus wasn't a 'Jew'...by the way, when the word 'Jew' appears in modern bibles, it is mostly a mistranslation...in Greek it would be 'Iudean' which means a resident of Judea...the Hebrew word most often mistranslated as 'Jew' is 'Yehudi' which actually means 'praise.