This was written by a Jewish Messianic believer. I'm not pushing Jewish Messianic believers per say. It could have just as well been written by a Gentile believer but it has enough meat in it that I thought I would offer it for what it's worth. Comments welcome if you are inclined.
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To give a short answer which I will then elaborate on, both the Greeks and rabbinic Jews, for all of the intellectual brilliance usually attributed to them, simply got it wrong. They put artificial limitations on what cannot be limited, because the implications of dealing with a God that could not be placed neatly into a little theological box was not appealing to either group.
First of all, to the Greeks. It has been said that the God of the Bible could not adequately be understood before the Hebrew ethos had been exposed to Greek philosophy. Put in theological terms, this idea is horse manure. If you look at the theological concepts that the Greeks managed to develop, there is something lacking in all of them. Understand that there are two basic ways that God’s relation to the cosmos are explained. Immanence maintains that God is manifested exclusively in the material world, while transcendence sees the Divine as being outside the material world. The Greeks appear to have originally adopted immanence to explain the relation of their Gods to man, but then they did nothing useful with it.
The core view of Greek thought concerning mankind was extremely pessimistic, because its view of the physical world was not congenial. Man was not created by the gods as a partner and friend, but as an afterthought. The Gods did not come to man offering guidance and friendship, but used man as a plaything. In the Greek ethos, serving one of the gods usually caused you nothing but trouble, because one of the other gods would take offense at your devotion to their rival and make your life miserable. The gods did not manifest themselves in the world to be man’s teacher. Prometheus tried, and look what happened to him. When the Greek gods appeared in the world, they acted like college kids on spring break. There was nothing noble about them, and other than their power there was little to respect about them.
The limitations in the Greek mythos became apparent when Greek philosophers began to examine the world around them. The Neo-Platonists of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE stated that if the gods behaved immorally, they were not gods at all. In its attempt to define a rational explanation of God’s relation to man, Neoplatonism adopted the transcendental view of God, and then proceeded to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Having decided that the immanent concept was unsatisfactory, the Neoplatonists swung in the other direction and adopted the transcendent view, maintaining that God was wholly independent of the material universe and beyond all physical laws. The Neoplatonists saw matter as having proceeded from the Monad, the One, a creative principle existing beyond the cosmos created by it. The One embodies the dunamis, the power to exist. From the One a series of emanations caused other levels of being to exist. The first emanation was an eternal, perfect essence, the nous, the Divine intellect, an image of God often called the Demiurge. This divine intellect was the first principle, the foundation of existence. From the divine intellect emanated what has often been called the World-Soul, the psuche, capable of acting upon its own thought and creating the cosmos, the physical world. The physical world was thus the product of a series of emanations constantly moving away from the ultimate reality of the One.
The problem was that this created an extremely negative view toward physical reality. If the ultimate reality was the One, and the One was unreachable by the physical world, then physicality was an obstacle that had to be overcome to reach ultimate reality, instead of something to be embraced as the gift of a loving Creator. So, the Neoplatonists created a system in which the physical world was essentially evil, but what does that have to do with us today?
Unfortunately for us who adhere to the Judeo-Christian ethos, Christianity and to some extent Judaism were bodily taken over by Neoplatonism between the time of Yeshua and Emperor Constantine. Within the Christian movement there developed alongside of orthodox teaching the Gnostic heresy. The Gnostics, while claiming to be believers, also adhered to Neoplatonic teachings. Therefore, they saw the God of Scripture as the Demiurge, not ultimate reality. In order to reach beyond the God of Israel to that ultimate reality, a special knowledge or gnosis was necessary. This knowledge was unavailable to normative Christians, and was provided only to those "worthy” of receiving it. Even though Gnosticism was condemned as a heresy by the Church, the Church adopted it by the back door by making Neoplatonism and Aristotle the basis of Christian theology. Plato and Aristotle were referred to much more frequently than Scripture. While the Church taught the reality of the Incarnation and thus admitted to the truth of immanence, that God could and did become man, it much more frequently taught God’s transcendence, that He was essentially unknowable except through the teachings of the Church, which had a special knowledge of God. Adherence to Church teachings, and not a personal relationship with God, became the basis of knowing God and obtaining salvation.
So the Gentiles ended up with a thoroughly confusing idea of God’s relation to man. God was present in His creation, yet he could really be approached only through the authority of the Church and was thus essentially unknowable by the average believer. But what about Judaism? How did rabbinical Judaism make such a horrible mistake in the matter of the Incarnation?
Judaism stands in a unique position in the discussion of God’s relation to the physical world. Is the God of Genesis immanent? Yes. Is the God of Genesis transcendant? Yes. This apparent inconsistency is answered by an intermediary theological system called panentheism, which states that God is both within and beyond the universe, in it, but not of it, at the same time filling it and surpassing it. A classic view of Judaism is that God can be compared to the oceans, while creation is a sea-cave between sea and land. The sea-cave is completely filled by the ocean, but the substance of the ocean is not diminished by doing so. The universe does not so much contain God as that God contains the universe.
Genesis chapters 1 through 3 shows God walking with man in a form that man could perceive and speak with face to face. Even after man broke fellowship with God to go his own way, God continued to reveal Himself to man. In the famous theophany of Genesis 18, God in human form ate with Avraham and spoke with him face to face. When Yaakov wrestled with the man at the brook Yabbok, he called the place Peniel, "the face of God”. It states in Torah that Moshe spoke face to face with God. So Israel’s history shows God as being physically present with them.
From the history of God revealing Himself in Torah, we find in the prophets speaking of God’s revelation of Himself in even more intimate ways. Isaiah 7: 14 reveals a special child being born named Immanuel, "with us God”. While it can be maintained, although in my opinion not without some degree of intellectual dishonesty, that the presence of God spoken of is symbolic or metaphorical, the next reference in Isaiah removes all doubt. Isaiah 9: 6 states that a child will be born for us, and that one of his titles will be mighty God. There is no metaphorical meaning in this. Pagan societies had no problem allowing for the mingling of gods with men, but the absolute monotheism of Israel cancelled out such a conclusion. This was speaking of a theophany, but a theophany with a difference. Instead of God taking the appearance of a man, God Himself would become a man. The consequences of such an act are mind-boggling. God becoming a man meant that God was becoming His own mediator between Himself and man.
Given the fact that the Tanach makes it abundantly clear that there will be a Messiah that will intercede for mankind (see Isaiah 53), you would think that the Hebrews would have had no problem with dealing with the concept of Immanuel. But history intervened, and the persecutions of the Greek Seleucid kings, especially that of Antiochus Epiphanes, occurred. The Jewish people have a peculiar habit of falling away from God in prosperity and returning to Him in calamity. The Assyrian and Babylonian deportations seemed to cure them of overt idolatry. The persecution of the Greeks, which is still commemorated today in the festival of Hanukkah, taught the Jewish people an unfortunate lesson. God raised up the Maccabees to fight on behalf of the Covenant, and against all odds the ragtag army of Yehudah Maccabee defeated the Greeks. But as Roman conquerors succeeded Greek conquerors, the longing for another conquering hero that would defeat the pagans and restore the glory of Israel took root in the hearts and minds of the great majority of Jews. This longing gradually became entwined with the Messianic longing and the Messiah envisioned at the time of Yeshua bore more resemblance to Caesar than to the suffering Servant.
When Yeshua entered the world, the Jewish people were thus, because of the mindset that they had developed over the preceding two centuries, psychologically unable as a whole to accept Him. He just did not answer what they felt was their need, that of national deliverance. The deliverance that Yeshua brought, that of the kingdom of God within the heart of anyone who accepted Him, was never really understood at the time. If more Jewish people had looked to the Tanach they would have better understood, but outside of meticulous study of the Torah the remainder of Tanach seems to have been much neglected, especially the prophetic writings where most Messianic prophecies were found. The average Jew saw himself as someone justified before God by the simple fact of having been born an Israelite, and the entrance ticket to that exalted status was a minute observance of Torah as taught and elaborated upon by the rabbis. To most Jews of the time, this was all that was necessary. The words of the Prophets crying out for individual repentance before God were ignored in favor of a prideful observance of Torah and a corresponding contempt of the goyim.
In the disasters that fell hard and fast upon the Jewish people following the crucifixion of Yeshua, false messiahs came and went and the influence of the Zealots grew dramatically. In opposition to the Herods and the Roman procurators that ruled the land the Romans called Palestina, the Zealots held that no human should rule over Israel. The only king of Israel should be the God of Avraham, of Yitschak and of Yaakov. When the Romans, who took exception to this idea, destroyed the Temple of God along with the rest of Yerushalem, the Jews were cut off from their spiritual moorings and should probably have ceased to exist as a people.
The fact that the Jews did not go away was due primarily to a rabbi named been Zakkai, who basically created present day rabbinic Judaism out of the ruins of the Temple. He created a Judaism that could exist without a Temple, that could be practiced anywhere a Jew found himself. The Judaism of ben Zakkai and his successors, the Tannaim, was a rational Judaism that consisted of practices performed in obedience to Torah. In order to explain how to apply the timeless concepts of Torah to the present day, over the next few centuries the work known as the Talmud was assembled. The mystical and prophetic element that had existed in Judaism vanished, not to reappear in the Kabala until many centuries had passed. Illustrative of this departure is the famous maxim of ben Zakkai that if one was planting a tree and heard that the Messiah had come, that the planting of the tree should be completed before the Messiah was sought.
Because of the intense persecutions of the past two millennia and the turning away of the majority of Jews from the prophetic elements of their religion, it became practically impossible for the Jewish people to conceive of Yeshua as either Immanuel, God among men in the flesh, and as the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. The Gentile Church turned away to the elements of Gnosticism hidden within the Christian religion, to the seeking of "private revelation” that often bore little resemblance to the truths revealed in Scripture. Much confusion has attended the understanding of the essential nature of God as a resultb of these events. But a diligent search of Scripture shows clearly that God is in the business of shattering the labels we attach to Him in any case, and that perhaps in the end the safest thing is to say what the Tannaim have always said, His name shows clearly what He is, Yehovah, "God is”.
Shalom.