This is a fascinating thread. Thanks, all.
It’s probably more accurate to say he legalized it. It wasn’t until Theodosius that Christianity got official status and paganism was outlawed.
Indeed, in many people’s eyes he was a very naughty boy.
No idea, not my problem. I just commented because it seemed to me that the OP was putting the question the wrong way around.
We must also remember the messianic movements of the time. According to A History of the Jewish People (Ben-Sasson, 1976) :
“They [messianic Jews] regarded the duty to fight Rome as a positive commandment, which should compel even the hesitant to take up arms”.
Jesus’ pacifistic message and his subserviance to Roman authority (the “give unto Caeser” passages of the Gospels) would have made it very hard for Jews of the time to believe he was the Messiah. The book also points out that Jewish-Roman relations, while never great, did not start really decaying until Caligula’s reign (37-41)–after Jesus’ death. Since Jewish messianic thought has traditionally been associated with periods of great Jewish persecution, there were far fewer people open to messianic notions even if Jesus had catered more to their beliefs.
Any time there’s any kind of change in a religion, some people like it, and some don’t. You see it over and over again- now, we’re seeing it among the Episcopalians/Church of England over gay issues, and among the Catholics over the reforms of Vatican II. Judaism right now is split over the issue of who is a Jew, the role of women in Judaism, and some other issues. Some people just prefer the old way of doing things. If a religion has a strong hierarchy, they can sometimes suppress either the new way or the ones who want to stick with the old. You may recall that Jesus didn’t get along so well with the Jewish hierarchy of the time. So why should they try to convince Jews who didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah to do so?
In a sense, it’s kind of like asking “why didn’t all Jews become Reform when the movement started in Germany in the 19th century” or “why didn’t all Catholics become Protestant when the Reformation happened”. What’s really rare is for a change to happen in a religion and all the followers of that religion to go along with it.
When the Messiah does come, everybody might agree, as the Messiah is supposed to have the power to change human nature (you’d have to be able to do that to eliminate evil, tyranny, and war from the world).
Christianity was not just a “change” in Judaism. It was a completely new religion with a new theology. It was much more a Gentile movement than a Jewish one.
It did become that, but AIUI it started out as a movement in Judaism.
Jews expect the Messiah to take over the world and rule it as God’s viceroy. Jesus didn’t do that. Jesus got crucified. The Christians retconned that, reformulating the Messiah’s mission as a sacrificial victim who dies to redeem the sins of humanity, but it’s not at all surprising most Jews didn’t buy it. Furthermore, the Messiah is not supposed to be God, or even the son of God, except in a metaphorical sense; trinitarian Christianity is flatly incompatible with Jewish monotheism.
And in this dichotomy, it is/was the Jews who got it right.
Can we refrain from calling other religions’ beliefs silly?
People who live in glass houses and all…
Cause coming from a religion whose god wants you to cut off a part of your penis and who cares if you eat cheese with your burger, accusations of silliness are a bit ludicrous.
I disagree.
In time, (and as when that time arrived is another discussion) it became a completely different religion.
But it remains true that Christianity could not exist without Judaism as it’s genesis, and foundation. It can be said that at the time that Jesus chose his 12 Apostles everyone involved considered themselves a Jew practicing Judaism. The Jews had been in anticipation of the Messiah; a savior that was part of the Jewish religion. In fact, even the Samaritan woman at the well-----the first person Jesus identified himself to as the Messiah----even went back to her countrymen and said, “This is not perhaps the Christ, is it?”
The “Christianity” practiced by Jesus and his followers was actually Judaism.(and there is no biblical cite that shows that the contemporaries of Jesus saw themselves as practicing “Christianity” or anything else except Judaism) As such, Christianity was “not just a change” but represented a division within Judaism; a division between those who saw Jesus as the promised Mesiah and those who didn’t. Even so, both camps believed they were following correct Judaism.
And so it is/was not a change at all. It was a disagreement among people who worshipped the same God and had the same beliefs and expectations. Further it’s conception, nourishment, leadership, hierachy and spirit all came from Jews. The account of Peter’s vision (in Acts) that signaled the acceptance of Gentiles came after the time that the “Christian sect” was well established and growing. The fact that Gentiles accepted the message about Jesus Christ (and particularly since centuries later Christianity would be dominated by Gentiles) hardly makes a case that the “movement” was a Gentile movement.
ETA: What Anne Neville said. (more succinctly)
We don’t know what the original followers of Jesus believed or how they perceicved him. It’s highly unlikely they thought he was God and not even a certainty that they thought he was the Messiah. Pre-Pauline Christian beliefs are pretty much lost to us and Paul’s movement was almost entirely Gentile. There is little evidence that any significant number of Jews ever subscribed to Paul’s Christology. Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles – complete with Paul’s own peculiar soteriology and reinterpretation of Jewish scripture – became the default heirs to the Jesus movement after the original movement (which may have had very little in common with Paul) became essentially extinct after the destruction of Jerusalem.
Theer is little to no evidence — and very little likelihood – that the original followers of Jesus were “Christians” in any way which we would now define it. They may have revered him as a teacher and a prophet but the deification and the formation of a new religion was a Gentile phenomenon. It doesn’t appear to have ever gotten any traction with Jews, even in 1st Century Palestine.
It’s what I call Zev’s Law. Most questions about Judaism are posted between Friday at sundown and the following Saturday at sundown.
I have read that many Christians still attended synagogues well into the second century; they were still considered a Jewish sect.
Not exactly true. Christians were expelled from Jewish synagogues ~85 CE. While a few stray Christians still attended synagogues here and there into 2nd Century, Christians were decisively split from Judaism before the end of the 1st Century.
I just wanted to echo again, fascinating thread guys, this is why I read the Dope. 