How did the 1st century Jews view the Holy Spirit?
How did the 1st century Jews view the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit was understood as God's active, divine power, rather than a distinct, third person of a Trinity.
First century Jews believed the Holy Spirit was another name for God, similar to Yahweh, Elohim or El Shaddai - not a separate Person in the Trinity!
There is no record of Jesus ever trying to correct the Jews and prove the Holy Spirit was a third Person in the Trinity.
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What is Jews? Judaism encompasses the religion, philosophy, culture and way of life of the Jewish people. Judaism is a monotheistic religion, with the Torah as its foundational text (part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible), and supplemental oral tradition represented by later texts such as
the Midrash and the Talmud. Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the covenantal relationship that God established with the Children of Israel.
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Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Within Judaism there are a variety of movements, most of which emerged from Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of both the Written and Oral Torah.
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The Jews are an ethnoreligious group and include those born Jewish and converts to Judaism. In 2012, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14 million, or roughly 0.2% of the total world population. About 42% of all Jews reside in Israel and about 42% reside in the United States and Canada, with most of the remainder living in Europe.