Judaism and Christianity are two of the world's three major Abrahamic religions. Despite having thousands of years of shared history and cohabitation across dozens of countries across the globe, these two religions are often seen as rigidly distinct from one another. However, when Christianity was born in the 1st century CE, it was exclusively composed of Jews in Palestine. Yet in the centuries that followed, as the young Christian faith spread across the Greco-Roman world, the Christian community grew apart from its Jewish roots.
Before long, the two faiths were perceived by each other and by others as distinct religions. When did this happen and under what circumstances? In this video, we will attempt to find the answer to this question. In this journey, we will uncover how the Roman Empire influenced the two faiths, how they came to perceive each other, and how they were connected.
and how they kept in contact with each other. Welcome to our video on how Christianity and Judaism went their separate ways, all while singing the same song of songs. This video is sponsored by our YouTube members and patrons, who get two exclusive videos weekly, not available anywhere else, for their kind support of our channel. You can join their ranks to watch more than 160 videos, including our series on the Pacific War, Punic Wars, Persian Wars, Spanish War of Succession, Russo-Japanese War, North African Campaign of World War II, History of Prussia, Italian Unification Wars, Risorgimento, Albigensian Crusades, and much more.
Click the link in the description or pinned comment to get the exclusive videos, early access to all public videos, our schedule, wallpapers, access to a special Discord server where we are very active, and much more. Thanks for supporting us, we couldn't be doing it without your help. Before investigating when the early Christian faith diverged from its Jewish roots, We need to understand what both faiths looked like in the first century CE, when Christianity emerged. During this century, the Mediterranean basin was dominated by the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire had two main languages, with Latin predominating in the western half of the empire and Greek predominating throughout the eastern half.
Thus, since the majority of Jews in both Palestine and the Diaspora lived in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, they were in constant contact with Hellenistic philosophies. When Christianity was born, an incredible array of cultural and religious diversity oozed all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from prophets like Apollonius of Tyana teaching a brand of mysticism based on Pythagorean philosophy, to the philosophical teachings of Stoicism and Neoplatonism. There was much religious cross-pollination which influenced the many diverse sects of Judaism and Christianity, that existed during this period. In the first century CE, Judaism was in its second temple period, with the faith being focused around the temple in Jerusalem, in particular the sacrifices and pilgrimages which were held in or to this holy site.
However, a variety of streams of Jewish thought emerged in response to Greek and Roman religious influence and political control, as Jewish law and ritual had to adapt to new lifestyles and political systems As well as varying attitudes to the use of the Second Temple, these included the Pharisees, predecessors of rabbinical Jews, who saw less use in the Temple of Jerusalem, as well as the aristocratic Sadducees, who preached the Temple's importance, the apocalyptic Essenes, who lived in communes, and the anti-Roman zealot rebels, who saw rebelling and achieving freedom from Roman rule as a priority. Many Jewish sects that existed during this time were explicitly political. revolving as much around theological matters as they did around how to organize one's social life, family structure, and their relationship to surrounding non-Jewish ethnic and religious groups. Thus, given that there were so many sects of Judaism influenced by so many Hellenistic philosophies, Christianity, a religion born from Judaism, was also bound to be a very diverse religion at its onset. Indeed, much like its Jewish parent religion, Christianity had divided into many different sects, and the Jewish people were divided into different sects.
within a century of its inception, with each sect harboring different interpretations of how to define its relationship to Jesus and Jesus'relationship with the divine. To modern Christians, many of these early Christian sects would appear incredibly alien, with very different canons, ways of thinking, and approaches to ritual and cosmology. These developments were taking place in a time of increasing religious diversity in the Roman Empire, as new faiths like Gnosticism and Mithraism grew popular within certain sects of society, coexisting with the existing pantheons of Rome, Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. During this time, Christianity and Judaism were just two among many regional cults that existed throughout the empire. Oftentimes, Roman state policies from this era lumped the two religions together.
However, Rome sometimes divided the two religions legally, such as with Emperor Nerva's exemption of Christians from Jewish-specific taxes. This was evident that the two religious communities had begun diverging enough that the Roman regime had begun to see them as distinct from one another, if not as separate religions entirely, than as separate sects of the same mother faith. With this context in mind, let us now discuss the story of how the two religions ended up separating entirely.
Christianity was born in the 1st century CE and was a child of the region of Judea. Its original community in Jerusalem was almost exclusively Jewish, as far as we can tell. However, the faith began to spread, and non-Jewish people began to practice and join in Christian rituals.
Things like this had happened before. Even before the emergence of Christianity, there had been Gentile pagans who were sympathetic to Judaism and practiced aspects of it without fully converting to Judaism. However, the role of Jesus as the Messiah complicated religious matters because it was unclear if he was a universal or a Jewish-specific Messiah.
Thus, many schools of thought existed within the early church on how non-Jewish converts should be integrated into the Christian faith. Some groups insisted that non-Jewish converts to Christianity had to practice the rite of circumcision and observe Jewish law in order to practice Christianity. Thus, as Christianity spread to new places like Antioch, more Gentiles started to join in the movement and there was increased friction among the young Christian community as to whether these new non-Jewish converts'lack of adherence to Jewish law excluded them from the faith.
This is one of the reasons behind the First Council in Jerusalem. where various in-between positions emerge, such as those of Paul of Tarsus, one of the biggest apostles of Christianity in the first century CE. Paul emphasized converting Gentiles, seeing it as a duty of Christians due to a new covenant they had with God. Paul ended up convincing a large section of the early Christian community that, while Jews ought to continue to uphold Jewish law, Gentiles were not required to do so. This brought equilibrium to the Jewish and non-Jewish sections of the early Christian community, as well as recognition of the varieties of Jesus movements that existed.
While scholars debate as to whether it was Paul himself who began the emphasis on Jesus as a messiah not just for Jews but the whole world, it cannot be argued that his writings reflect these early divisions that would play a role in the divergent paths of Judaism and Christianity. At the turn of the second century CE, the Jewish and non-Jewish sections of the A series of massive upheavals changed the Judeo-Christian world forever. These were the Jewish Revolt of 66-64 CE, the Kytos War of 115-117 CE, and the Ba Kokhba Revolt of 136-138 CE, which ended in the brutal depopulation of Jews from Palestine.
During these revolts, Christian groups began to diverge from the Jewish community in the eyes of the Romans due to the aforementioned revolts happening mostly within the Jewish community. with the Christians largely staying out of it. During the Jewish revolts, it was the Jews who were persecuted while the Christians flew under the radar, however, throughout the second and third centuries CE, the script was flipped, now it was Christians being persecuted and Jews escaping Rome's notice. During this time, Jews were often exempt from the persecutions that the Roman government inflicted upon the growing Christian community.
Further emphasizing how the Romans had come to see the various sects of Judaism and Christianity as two separate faiths, however, sometimes the two were still persecuted together, alongside other groups like the Manichaeans. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE caused chaos amongst the various Jewish communities in the region of Palestine. Many Jewish groups like the Sadducees declined due to the Temple's destruction, while the Pharisees were set on their own unique trajectory. This trajectory included the slow development of the Mishnah and Tesefta, two compendiums of oral Jewish law, whose need for interpretive analysis drove the rise of the rabbis as a religious class without connection to a Jewish temple.
As these Jewish communities evolved and changed, some of them began to critique Christianity vocally, seeing it as heretical in nature. These were some of the first clear lines being drawn from the Jewish side of the equation. On the Christian side of the equation, Theological texts and gospels attributed to apostles emerged with different attitudes towards Judaism. Some leading Christian figures during this time, such as the Preacher Markian sought to reject any Jewish associations with the Christian faith, denouncing the recognition of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as part of the Christian canon. This likely happened as an attempt to solve the theological conundrums, like how God can be seemingly cruel in the Hebrew Bible while having a different personality among Christian literature.
Other Christian polemics during this time promoted what scholars call supersessionist theology, the Christian idea that the New Testament had cancelled the Old Testament between God and the Jews. Judaizing Christians, in groups known as Ebionites, Alcasites, or Nazarenes, combined the use of both Jewish law and Christian theology. These groups saw Christ as a messiah, but didn't necessarily see him as divine.
This put them both in conflict with the emerging Rabbinic Jews, and the Christians who had developed their view of Christ as God. These groups survived for a few centuries, and average people still merged both belief systems on occasion, but as they died out, the grey zone between Christianity and Judaism began to fade away, leaving the lines between the two faiths more entrenched than ever. Before we see how things changed with the advent of the late Roman Empire, let us briefly discuss the positions of both religions after the Temple's destruction.
After the loss of their sacred Temple, the Jewish community turned to the Rabbis as the spiritual heart of their faith. Through their ritual and interpretive role, rabbis reoriented Judaism, from the devotional practices of the Second Temple, towards new forms of worship, which were based around the already existing community structures of the Jewish diaspora. As these rabbis sought to position themselves in relation to the rest of the world, Jewish belief became increasingly centered around observance of the law, seeing such observance as the center of their relationship to God.
and the main thing which differentiated themselves from the Christians. For instance, some texts in the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish law that is the foundation of rabbinical Judaism, compare the purity of Jewish beliefs to the purity of virgin women, which they juxtapose by comparing Christian beliefs to a brothel. This both meant that increasing boundaries between the two religions had begun to form, but also that some people still merged the two faiths even after these intellectual boundaries were formed. On the Christian side of the equation, there were changes in attitudes due to the growing number of Gentiles in Christian circles and the increasing political prominence of the faith.
On the one hand, Judaism and the Old Testament gave Christianity an ancient lineage that gave it legitimacy. On the other hand, as the Christians grew in power and influence, their more critical views of Judaism often led them to distance themselves from their parent faith. For instance, Ignatius of Antioch a 1st to 2nd century CE patriarch, argued about various shifts like moving the day off from the Sabbath or Saturday to the Lord's day or Sunday.
In addition, many Christian writers sought to draw people to exclusive Christian worship, making the case that Judaism was now obsolete. While modern scholars debate whether or not Christianity was ever designed to supersede or replace Judaism in the original gospels, later Christian communities ended up developing some less than savoury beliefs about Judaism. For instance, John Chrysostom in the 3rd and 4th century CE made several accusations against Christians who also went to synagogues using anti-Semitic tropes.
As these boundaries began to solidify on both sides and as Christianity began to become more established, Jewish Christians became less and less common in the Eastern Mediterranean, thus the fascinating sects of the Ebionites or Alcasites began to dissipate. However, the former may have ended up in Arabia and influenced early Islam, and the latter may have been the sect from which Manichaeism, the great Silk Road religion, stemmed from. By the third and especially the fourth centuries CE, Christianity and Judaism had built distinct foundations which divided themselves from one another.
Moreover, the political evolution of the Roman Empire during these centuries served to drift the two siblings further apart. The adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire was truly the cusp of an era. It was Emperor Constantine who legalized the Christian faith, so his stance towards the Christian religion is fairly self-evident. However, historians are unsure of what his views on Judaism were.
However, later emperors of Rome applied laws to differentiate the two faiths, evidencing their further separation from one another. As Christianity became stronger, it became more restrictive towards Judaism. Moreover, by this time, rabbinical leadership within the Jewish community was becoming more entrenched, and with it, the distinct practices that set Judaism apart from Christianity. With that said, cross-fertilization between the two religions regions still persisted. For instance, in Carthage, Christian and Jewish scholars shared a certain kinship with one another, for they used similar arguments to denounce pagan idolatry.
In addition, archaeological research in the Roman provinces of Palestine during the 3rd and 4th centuries presided over a surge in the building of churches. Jewish synagogues were still being built in the region as well, showing us that the two communities continued to live side by side. The aforementioned comments by John Chrysostom also suggest that some Jewish-Christian hybridization continued even as late as this period. However, it seems that Jewish-Christians were mostly extinct as a community distinct from both their siblings by this period. The following centuries show that the divisions were finalized, despite debates and discussions between the two faiths, for now they saw themselves as separate from each other.
By the 6th and 7th century, another Abrahamic sibling had appeared, Islam. Due to Christianity's role in perpetuating anti-Semitic sentiments against Jews, the coming of Islam was a relief for many communities in the Near East. The Islamic conquests took control of the Near East and caused social changes, but it is obvious from how the notion of the people of the Book who were afforded certain rights due to common Abrahamic origins or al-Al-Khattab developed that Jews and Christians were their own separate groups by that time. These distinctions would continue to grow As both faiths continued their odysseys through history. And so it was that Jewish and Christian communities were split up fully, the former in distinct communities shining like diamonds on the world map, the latter like fields of flowers spreading like a sea over the planet's surface.
Within the larger Abrahamic family, both Christianity and Judaism shine alongside their siblings, like Islam, the Azali and Baha'i faiths, Samaritanism, Mandaeism, and Rastafarianism. all rife with intellectual vibrancy and rich histories which spring from the same intellectual water springs of Jerusalem. This commonality is perhaps best described by some of the oldest sacred and erotic poetry, the Song of Songs, attributed to Solomon, in which Christians and Jews exclaim, Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm, for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave, it burns like a blazing fire. Like a mighty flame.
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