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Religious responses to the problem of evil are concerned with reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God. [1] [2] The problem of evil is acute for monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism whose religion is based on such a God.
Judaism teaches that the soul continues to exist after death, and that it is subject to both reward and punishment after death. [11] However, this punishment is held to be temporary, normally only lasting up to 12 months after death. [12] After this period, the soul is able to enjoy the light of God in the afterlife.
Tacitus is not the only non-Christian writer of the time who mentioned Jesus and early Christianity. The earliest known references to Christianity are found in Antiquities of the Jews, a 20-volume work written by the Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus around 93–94 AD, during the reign of emperor Domitian.
Evil, according to Clement, does not exist as a positive, but exists as a negative or as a "lack of good". [61] Clement's idea was criticised for its inability to explain suffering in the world, if evil did not exist. He was also pressed by Gnostics scholars with the question as to why God did not create creatures that "did not lack the good".
Adherents of Judaism do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah or Prophet nor do they believe he was the Son of God.In the Jewish perspective, it is believed that the way Christians see Jesus goes against monotheism, a belief in the absolute unity and singularity of God, which is central to Judaism; [1] Judaism sees the worship of a person as a form of idolatry, which is forbidden. [2]
Christian scholars have offered three main theodicies of why a good God might need to allow evil in the world. These are based on the free will of humankind, [ 103 ] a self-limiting God, [ 104 ] and the observation that suffering has "soul-making" value. [ 105 ]
Christianity began as a movement within Second Temple Judaism, but the two religions gradually diverged over the first few centuries of the Christian era.Today, differences of opinion vary between denominations in both religions, but the most important distinction is Christian acceptance and Jewish non-acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah prophesied in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition.
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their 1999 publication The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? propose that Jesus did not exist as a historically identifiable individual, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan "godman" by the Gnostics, who were the original sect of Christianity. The book has ...