Why aren't Christians called Jews and Jews something else?

If I remember correctly, Jesus was jewish. So if that’s correct, why wouldn’t this continue, since his arrival was predicted by the OT. Isn’t his arrival one of the basic tenets of the jewish religion?

I understand that many jews didn’t believe jesus wasn’t the son of God, so a break in the two sides was inevitable.

Why did the doubters continue to be permitted to use Jews to describe themselves, while believers in Christ went with Christians (yes, I get that’s a derivative of his name… I’m asking for the reason Jesus and his followers didn’t continue to call themselves jews after he appeared.)

Was it perhaps because of the number of people that DID believe Jesus was who he said he was was so much smaller than the jews that didn’t believe in Jesus?

That’s another question, I guess. What percentage of jews decided to follow Jesus? was it a small minority or a large majority?

If GQ isn’t the place for this question, mods please move it. I wasn’t sure where it would go other than GQ, so that’s where I started it for now… perhaps it would make sense in GD. but I’ll let the mods decide that.

Thanks.

The religion that came to be called Christianity didn’t catch on widely among Jewish people but instead took root among non-Jewish people elsewhere.

To further complicate matters, the Christianity that took root was not a direct legacy of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth but was instead essentially the theology of Paul, about Jesus of N.

It’s as if Ron Paul sought the Republican nomination, was assassinated, and then claimed as a martyr-hero by Lyndon LaRouche and adopted as the spiritual figurehead of the US Labor Party.

The Jesus-movement that originally attracted the name “Christian” was most likely seen - by its members, by mainstream Jews and by non-Jews - as a movement within Judaism. Thus a Christian was probably thought of as a type of Jew.

Pretty early on, though, the Jesus movement started to admit non-Jews as members. This wasn’t uncontroversial, and the controversy within the movement is to some extent documented in the NT. The main issue seems to have been whether participation in the Jesus movement involved conversion to Judaism, or whether one could be a Christian without adopting Judaism and, in particular, without observing the rigours of the Law.

For a short time, Christianity was a partly Jewish movement. There were Jewish Christians, mostly centred around Jerusalem, who were Jews by birth and who continued to observe the Law. They went to synagogue on the Sabbath (and may have had their own synagogues) and celebrated the eucharist on the following day. Their views were controversial within Judaism but I think mainstream Jews would have accepted that, yes, these Christians were indeed Jewish. I don’t think they were ever more than a minority within Judaism.

At the same time, you had non-Jewish Christians, who were not considered by themselves or anyone else to be Jewish, and who did not observe the law. And I think from pretty early on they dominated the Christian churches everywhere except Jerusalem.

OK. We get to AD 70 and the Jewish revolt and its brutal suppression by the Romans, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem. At this stage the Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem pretty well disappears from the record. It’s members presumably die in the fighting, or are enslaved or exiled afterwards. (They’re Jews, remember.) Maybe they are absorbed into non-Jewish Christian churches elsewhere. Maybe they fall away from Christianity. We don’t know.

From this time on, the Jesus movement outside Jerusalem has a strong incentive not to identify as Jewish, since Jews are seen as rebellious, troublesome, vanquished, etc. Plus, Judaism slowly regroups and struggles to reinvent itself and find an identity without either a Temple or a functioning, priesthood, and part of this process is a hardening of the view that Christians are not Jews. So Judaism and Christianity come to be seen as two quite distinct groups, and this suits both of them.

What proportion of Jews ultimately embraced Christianity? We don’t know. It’s thought, though, that about 10% of the population of the empire was Jewish before the Jewish revolt, and there were thriving Jewish communities in cities throughout the Mediterranean region. In the decades following the revolt the size and prominence of this population shrinks dramatically, while the size and prominence of the Christian movement grows It’s possible - but this is no more than speculation - that many of the Jews did embrace Christianity. But, if so, this was an attempt to distance themselves from Judaism, so they would have had no desire to emphasise any Jewish continuity or inheritance in Christianity.

The messiah predicted in the Torah is not Christ. The messiah is not a Divine Being, but a human that satisfies certain qualifications, which Jesus did not.

To say that the Torah predicted Jesus specifically is a Christian concept in which certain passages are reinterpreted with Christ in mind.

For Jews the messiah has not come. It is not that many Jews don’t believe in Jesus, but that people who believe in Jesus are not Jews. (sorry I see now you are referring to Jew during the time of Jesus)

UDS, actually a lot of the Judaean Christians got the heck out of Dodge early in the revolt and some later returned to the general area. But years before already, back when Paul was a newcomer and Peter was still in Jerusalem, the early sect had opened up to Gentile converts and the Apostles had decreed that such converts need NOT go through the steps of conversion into Judaism (most notably the surgical part) nor observe most ritual/purity law, but only needed to go through Baptism. This meant that the new gentile converts, soon to be the majority, did not become Jewish by any reasonable meaning of the term.

This gets into Great Debates territory: exactly what influence Paul had on Christianity, or what it would have become if Paul had never existed, is an open question. We had a GD thread on “Did Paul hijack Christianity?” that ran to 8 pages.

Yes, I’m aware of that. There were definitely non-Jewish Christians before the revolt, and I suspect that in most places outside Jerusalem they were the majority. But for an explanation as to why Jewish Christianity disappeared, I think we look to the revolt, one of the by-products of which was the destruction of whatever structures had sustained Jewish Christianity as a distinct community within both Christianity and Judaism. Jewish Christians who survived this period either returned to mainstream Judaism, or embraced non-observant Christianity.

It is at least safe to say that the bulk of the New Testament was written by Paul, more than by all other authors combined-- That alone would give him a great deal of influence. Even more so, when you consider that the Gospels are mostly saying the same things.

Safe? From what I’ve heard & read (though I’m having trouble finding an easily-linkable cite), Luke and Acts (written by the same person) take up more of the New Testament than the combined letters of Paul.

Of course Luke the Evangelist was a disciple of Paul…

That’s a Christian perspective. The Jewish perspective is that they’re still the same religion they’ve always been and it was those followers of Jesus who left the faith and started a new religion.

Keep in mind that Jesus was not the only person to be proclaimed the Jewish Messiah. There were people before and after Jesus who have said (or had said about them) that they were the Messiah foretold by prophecy. The Jews keep saying, “No, you’re not him either. We’re still waiting.”

If you do enough searching, you can find some pretty good GD threads that explain, in detail, why that is not true.

You have to remembers Jews are for the most part an ethnic group. Judaism is one of the few religions practiced by one ethnic group, the Jews.

That a bit over simplistic but basically how it is. You can be a Jew and not practice Judaism and conversely, you can practice Judaism and not be a Jew.

There’s an overlapping of ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Who qualifies is up to the particular sect of Judaism you are looking to

The gospels and the letters of Paul differ a great deal: there are no Jesus-sayings in Paul’s letters for example AFAIK. According to tradition, Luke was a physician: but actually the author of that chapter is unknown, or at least that’s the modern academic consensus.

The 4 Gospels were all written after the fall of Jerusalem. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Matthew is expressly anti-Semitic in parts and Luke takes pains to express how super-compatible Christianity is with Roman rule.

No, that it probably not true, and definitely not universally accepted.