This question has been bugging my friend since he was very little, and I told him I would get him an answer here. Anybody know? I ask since most of the early Christians were originally Jews.
Because God made the Jews his chosen people until he sent Jesus, who nullified that chosenness and opened it up to everyone who believed in Him.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question, but why *would * they? Doesn’t being a Xtian entail not practicing Judaism?
Well, Christ and his apostles were all Jews, and the Jewish Bible is part of the Christian Bible, so it would not be odd if Christianity incorporated Jewish holidays as well.
Some do. I had a good friend whose family were devout Christians so they celebrated certain Jewish holidays (Hanukah and Passover, if I recall correctly). Some celebrate these holidays through the lens of Christianity (such as Messianic seders versus the Jewish Passover Seder) while others celebrate them as Jews do.
My understanding, as a Jew, is that Christians feel that the coming of Jesus rewrote the book as it were and changed what it meant to be observant. The old covanent was out and new practices were put in place.
As I understand it, the early Christians of the Jerusalem Church, which was controlled by Jesus’s brothers, still considered themselves to be Jews and observed all the Jewish laws. When Paul started converting Gentiles, he told them that Jewish Law did not apply to them (something they were glad to hear, since it meant they didn’t have to be circumsized). Eventually Jewish Christanity faded, and the Pauline tradition became “orthodox” Christianity.
Hanukkah would be an odd choice for a Jewish holiday celebrated by a devout Christian. I could see them celebrating Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Passover, or Shavuot, because those are biblical holidays. Unless you use the Catholic Bible or another version of the Bible that includes the Apocrypha as canonical, the events that are commemorated at Hanukkah aren’t even in the Bible.
I’d be a lot less surprised if they were a family with some Jewish background (such as a family where one parent grew up Jewish and one grew up Christian) that had decided on Christianity as their religion. Celebrating Hanukkah and Passover but no other Jewish holidays is not uncommon in such families.
Christians sort of do celebrate Passover and Shavuot, actually, but they’ve put their own interpretations on them as Easter and Pentecost. Given 2000 years of separate development, it’s not surprising that the rituals and meanings of those holidays don’t have too much in common now.
Yeah, I found it odd too that they chose Hanukah. I don’t think they put a lot of thought into it, just decided that they should include some aspects of Judaism and picked two holidays they knew something about!
This was not a case of an interfaith family trying to “do both”.
Acts 15 is where this occurs (at least in the Bible; I don’t want to get into whether or not it’s credible history). Paul gets into an argument with Peter over Jewish requirements and Peter and the apostles hold a meeting about it. The result of which is that almost all of the dietary restrictions and Judaic traditions are tossed out. Peter says that it’s “good” to keep up with them anyway but it’s not a requirement for Christianity. Peter then jots off letters to some of the other churches letting them know the new ‘rules’.
Since this occured within the first year or two after the death of Jesus (again, according to the Bible) and people being what they are, I’d guess that Jewish Christianity numbers took a quick dive thereafter.
That nullification theory is an increasingly unpopular view. Some would argue that a majority of evangelical Christians now believe in a dual covenant.
I started writing this when there was only one other reply, but work came up and I just got back to it. I hope it is still informative.
I’m sure others will go into more detail, but one thing to consider is that not all Jewish holidays are biblical. Hanukkah postdates the Hebrew Bible and was only a couple of hundred years old at the the birth of Jesus. How or whether it was celebrated at that time I don’t know, but the fact that it celebrates a rebellion of militant Jews against the Roman Empire makes it of dubious appeal to a gentile Roman convert to Christianity.
Which leads to another consideration. The first couple of centuries were a turbulent time for Christianity, with alternating periods of acceptance and persecution both for Christians and Jews. There were political as well as social and theological reasons for separating the new sect from Judaism. Judaism also redefined itself in that period and took a different direction than Christianity took, furthering the gap between the two religions.
Some holidays were superseded or redefined within Christianity. Easter was originally the Christian celebration of Passover (The two still share a name, I think, in many languages.) although it was eventually separated on the calender. The traditional Seder celebration isn’t celebrated by Christians partly, I would assume, because the Torah ties it to circumcision, which the early church explicitly rejected, but it is also worth noting that the Seder appears to have been a model for the Eucharist, which makes a Jewish-style Seder redundant for Christians. Pentecost is also a Jewish Holiday, although it is usually called Shavuot; according to Wikipedia, there aren’t any special commandments associated with it, only traditional customs, so it is natural that in Christianity it has no particular connection with Jewish practices.
Hanukkah is a celebration of a successful revolt against the Seleucids, which was a Hellenistic successor to Alexander the Great, not the Roman Empire (which didn’t conquer the area until 63 BC.) There was never a successful Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire.
To follow on with earlier comments: the early Christians were never a comfortable part of Judaism and as the movement spread out to the gentiles, there was less rason for either group to associate. Following the destruction of the Temple, Judaism (as could be expected) went through a period of deep conservatism that was particularly adamant about the impossibility of Jesus being divine. As persecution of Jews broke out around the empire, (particularly during the rebellions of 67 - 70 and 132 - 135), newly recruited Christians joined their neighbors in disdaining Judaism and that, unfortunately carried over into religious practices. There were very explicit efforts among church leaders to ensure that Easter was NOT celebrated in connection with the Passover and that Sunday, (a natural time for celebration in regards to the day of the week on which the Resurrection was supposed to have occurred), was deliberately substituted for the Jewish Sabbath.
This to me states a pretty good reason:
The Jewish holidays and laws were legalistic, well at least for the ones defined in the OT, Jesus took that away, along with the curse of the law.
:smack: Right. Thanks.
Two questions: 1) What was (is) legalistic about Shavuot, a harvest festival with no commandments associated with it? 2) Do you have any evidence that this is actually the historical reason why Christians stopped celebrating Jewish holidays?
I hope that you did not mean this the way it sounded. Describing them as “legalistic” makes it sound as though they were simply formal rituals carried out as “rules,” when they were actually the sacred Jewish response to the Covenant of Sinai.
“Some” would argue that. John Hagee’s splinter group CUFI, though, is estimated at less than 50,000. This is according to two Bill Moyers Journal (PBS) shows that touched on the phenomenon. I think Israelis would be less comfortable with CUFI if they understood its intention to preserve Israel in order to bring about Armageddon.
Some other Christians cherry-pick their way through Leviticus, in order to find excuses to condemn abortion, homosexuality, and women’s rights. They ignore the dietary stuff, the hats-and-hair stuff, and all those sensible rules for slavery. Pick your abominations, so to speak.
Why are English holidays not observed in the US?
'Cause Guy Fawkes is too close to Hallowe’en, Boxing Day always conjures up images of pugilism, and everyone is afraid to try to pronounce Mafeking without offending Aunt Lily.