A History of Christian Theology (Repack) (eBook)

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Christianity and Judaism

The Parting of the Ways

Why are Christianity and Judaism different religions? Today we are used to this and seldom give it much thought, but for the historian it is a question that demands an answer. Consider the evidence. Jesus was a Jew and so were his disciples. Neither he nor they expressed any desire to break away from Israel. Jesus made it clear that his message was intended primarily for Jews, and his disciples followed him in this.1 He regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative Scripture, quoted it often, and even stated that not one word of it would be overruled by his teaching.2 His message was that he had come to fulfill the promises made in the law and by the prophets, and there were many Jews in Jesus’ time who were actively waiting for that to happen. They expected a charismatic Messiah figure who would come and deliver Israel from its bondage to the Romans, and to some of them at least, Jesus looked like a plausible candidate for the role. They may have been wrong to interpret his mission in political terms, but that was a mistake that could be corrected by a more spiritual interpretation of the promises made to Israel—it was not a new idea that was alien to the hopes and aspirations of the nation.

Furthermore, although the Jewish world of Jesus’ day stood apart from its non-Jewish (or “Gentile”) surroundings as a distinct religious and national entity, it was not a monolith. Alongside the temple establishment in Jerusalem, which all Jews recognized as their central religious authority, there were many subgroups competing for influence among them. In the New Testament we meet the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who are well known from other sources. There was also the Qumran community, which was not mentioned by anyone in ancient times but which we know a lot about thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls in 1947. Among several other groups there were many “Hellenized” Jews, people who had adopted Gentile ways and the Greek language but without abandoning their ancestral faith.3 We might even include the Samaritans, who were Jews of a kind even though they were rejected by the mainstream. Why could Jesus not have launched a messianic sect similar to one of these and remained within the fold of historic Judaism?

In fact, some modern scholars think that this is more or less what Jesus wanted to do. They portray him as a great rabbi whose intentions were traduced by others after his death.4 What propelled his disciples (or perhaps their disciples) to develop a belief in Jesus as the Son of God that was incompatible with the Jewish understanding of monotheism remains something of a mystery to them. They generally conclude that this development occurred under non-Jewish influence, but why that was able to supersede traditional Jewish beliefs is unclear and remains controversial.5

There were always many Jews who rejected Jesus and his message, but only when his followers started admitting Gentile believers to their fellowship without obliging them to become Jews first did it become clear that Christianity was not just another form of Judaism. Within a couple of generations, Jewish converts to the new faith tailed off and the church became a largely Gentile body to whom the political heritage and religious culture of Israel were alien. Once that happened, it was inevitable that Jews and Christians would emphasize their differences and downplay what they held in common. In many ways Jews found this easier to do than Christians did. Jews could always dismiss Christianity as an aberration based on a false interpretation of their sacred Scriptures, but Christians could not reject their Jewish inheritance so easily. They insisted that Christ had come to fulfill those Scriptures, and they knew that he had ministered almost exclusively to his fellow Jews. They also realized that his teaching and work could not be understood if the Jewish background to them was not recognized. The few Christians who tried to reject the Hebrew Bible were condemned as heretics, and the church continued to emphasize not only that Jesus had fulfilled the promises contained in it but also how he had done so.

The stages by which Christians separated from Judaism are obscure, though we may assume that the process was not the same everywhere. What is universally agreed is that by about AD 100 a Christian church had emerged that claimed a Jewish origin and heritage by appropriating the Hebrew Bible as its own, but that no longer thought of itself as Jewish.6 The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, so whatever connections the church continued to have with it after the resurrection of Jesus were automatically severed. The Old Testament food laws and other aspects of traditional Jewish practice that survived the initial conversion of Jews to Christ were gradually ignored or abandoned, and any knowledge of Hebrew was quickly lost. Christians read the Greek translation of the Bible as their sacred text and used it to argue that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Somewhat oddly, although Christians advocated loyalty to the Roman authorities, it was they who were persecuted for their beliefs and not the Jews, despite the Jewish tendency to rebel against Rome. The reason for this was that Judaism was a legally recognized religion, while Christianity was not. Even as early as AD 64, when most of the apostles were still alive, the emperor Nero could distinguish Christians from Jews to the extent of blaming the former, but not the latter, for having started the great fire of Rome in that year. This unfair discrimination inevitably caused bad feelings, and some Christians believed that Jewish agitators were the main cause of their suffering. How true that was is hard to say, but that there was an abiding tension between two otherwise similar communities is certain.

How did this happen? A comparison between Christianity and Samaritanism may help us understand the process more clearly. The Samaritan schism seems to have been political in origin, as much as anything else, and with a scriptural text that contained only six books (Genesis to Joshua), Samaritanism was less developed than full-blown Judaism. Christianity, on the other hand, was everything that Judaism was and more. Not only did it take over the whole of the Hebrew Bible, it added to it quite considerably. The Old Testament that the church preferred to use was a Greek version that contained a number of books (and parts of books) that were missing from the Hebrew text,7 and what we now call the New Testament was gradually added to it—in Greek, not in Hebrew. The New Testament is less than a third as long as the Old, but its significance for Christians is at least as great as that of the Old Testament, if not greater. The reason for this is that the church regards it not only as equally authoritative (and therefore just as divinely inspired) as the Hebrew Bible but also as a kind of commentary on it, giving principles of interpretation that the church can use to read and interpret its Israelite legacy.

It is the New Testament that tells us what the essential difference between Christianity and Judaism was, and we must look to it for clues to explain how the two became separated. Let us start with the teaching of Jesus. Was he a rabbi with new and challenging ideas, or was he something quite different? What was his take on the law of Moses, and why was his view rejected by the Jewish leaders of his day?

What is certain is that Jesus was not a rabbi in the usual sense of the term. He was not trained in a rabbinical school in the way that the apostle Paul was, and as far as we know, his only contact with the rabbinic world before he began his public ministry occurred when he went to Jerusalem at the age of twelve and spent several days with the teachers in the temple.8 However there is no indication that he learned anything from them; on the contrary, it appears that even as a boy he was teaching them as their equal. It is true that during his adult ministry he was frequently addressed as “rabbi,” but this was a courtesy title bestowed on him by people who did not know what else to call him.9 Neither his training (if he had any) nor his message could be described as “rabbinical” in the usual sense of the word.

Admittedly, rabbinical Judaism was still developing in Jesus’ day, so there may have been more freedom for Jews to recognize the kind of freelance teacher that Jesus was than would have been the case later on. But even if that is true, what Jesus said was often quite different from standard rabbinical teaching. The main differences between them can be sketched as follows:

1. The rabbis were concerned to interpret the law and apply it to situations that were not envisaged in the original text, or not fully expounded there. Jesus said that he had come to fulfill the law and make it redundant. In this sense, he was not really messianic, as Jews understood it, because he did not see his mission as the establishment of a Jewish state in which the law of Moses would be perfectly observed. On the contrary, he said that his kingdom was not of this world, something that was beyond the comprehension of most Jews of his time.10 Messianic movements remained active among Jews until AD 135, when the defeat of Bar-Kochba’s rebellion finally...