A Parting of The Way

The sad story of the Church’s treatment of God’s chosen people.

The earliest Israelite Jesus Movement was altogether a part of the Jewish community, the matrix from which it emerged. Neither Jesus nor his apostles had any intention of separating themselves from their extended family, the nation of Israel, nor did they envision the creation of a new religion as a replacement for the Judaism in which they lived and expressed their devotion to God. The first generation of the followers of Jesus, then, were in reality a Judaism, one of the many Judaisms that existed in the first century of the common era.

What differentiated this Jesus Judaism from its sister Judaisms (Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, Essenes, and others) was their common belief that the Messianic expectations of the Hebrew Scriptures and of the sages of Israel were fulfilled in Yeshua of Nazareth. They were first called Notzrim, followers of the Netzer, the branch from the stem of Jesse, whom they understood to be Jesus.

The focal point of the theology and methodology of this new movement or sect within Judaism was their passion to make their views about the Messiahship of Jesus normative for all of the Jewish people. Dialogue and disputation with other Jews was an intramural exercise which was common and expected in that time. Creation of a new religion and a new Israel, however, was not even a consideration in their minds. Despite their disagreements on key issues, the early believers in Jesus were part of the unity in diversity that was Second Temple Judaism, the faith founded upon biblical Judaism.

Christianity, however, was the institution that emerged from the Jesus Movement around the turn of the second century of the common era. It was birthed and established upon the principle of division–separation of Christianity from Judaism and separation of Christians from Jews. The great proto-schism that wrenched Christianity from the roots and matrix of its heritage with and among the Jewish people and their Judaism was for the most part a Christian invention. The resultant centuries of animosity and persecution resulting from this conceptual breach is, therefore, largely the responsibility of the church.

Hatred wins out …

Christianity’s separation from Judaism produced a corporate psychosis in the church that was subsequently manifest in Judaeophobia – anti-Judaism, and anti-Semitism. When the church denied its patrimony in biblical and Second-Temple Judaism, it suffered an identity crisis and rose up with antipathy toward its sibling, Rabbinic Judaism which had also emerged from Second-Temple Judaism after Titus destroyed Jerusalem and its temple.

This condition and its results were nurtured in the violation of two divine imperatives, one from the lips of Jesus himself, the other from the pen of Paul the apostle. The first divine command is, “Think not!”, and is recorded in Matthew 5:17: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” The second command is, “Boast not!”, and is recorded in Romans 11:17-18: “If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, boast not against the branches.”

“Think not!” and “Boast not!” Simple divine imperatives! Yet, the church has unrelentingly and unabashedly violated both since the time they were spoken. The church has continued to think of ways in which it could circumvent the perfectly lucid intention of Jesus’ words so that He could be presented the destroyer of the law (of the Torah and Judaism). The church has systematically and categorically boasted against both the natural branches of God’s family tree of salvation and covenant relationship (the Jewish people) and against both the tree and its roots.

On the foundation of theological super-sessionism asserting that Christianity had replaced Judaism, the church built the monstrous structure of anthropological supersessionism that claimed that Christians had forever replaced Jews in the economy of salvation. Ultimately this scheme came to view the Jewish people per se as forever cursed, eventually to be demonized and demoted to the status of a subhuman species. This anthropological view prepared the way for systematic and unrelenting acts of anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust.

Who rejected who?

Most Christians in history have attempted to place the blame for Christian separation from Israel upon the shoulders of the Jewish people. It has been purported that Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah was the core issue of the separation. It should be noted that “the Jews” did not reject Jesus, for both Jesus and all of his followers in the first decade of the movement were Jews themselves, most of whom were “zealous for the Torah.”

While it is true that the leadership of Pharisaism (which eventually became Rabbinic Judaism) rejected the claims of Jesus and his disciples as to his being the Messiah, this was not the key issue of separation. Many movements had arisen and were subsequently to arise in Israelite faith that asserted various candidates for the Messiah, some of which persist to the present day. Such belief, however, has not been a cause for excommunication from the Jewish faith. And, such was not the case in the first century.

The Jesus movement in Jerusalem, though debated hotly and at times violently by their siblings, the other Judaisms of the day, remained a part of the community of faith. James, the brother of Jesus, who assumed leadership of the Jerusalem community after Jesus’ death, was respected by the larger Jewish community as “James the Just,” a Torah-observant man of piety and justice. When the Roman-appointed high priest ordered his execution, the traditional Jewish community that did not accept James’ faith in Jesus rose up in rebellion against the high priest and demanded his removal from office.

Some have suggested that it was the Jews who expelled the believers in Jesus from their synagogues and therefore produced the separation. It is true that such expulsions occurred in the first century; however, it is also true that the leaders of the Jesus movement found their first audiences in the synagogues of the Diaspora.

An adjunct to this argument of expulsion has been the formulation of the benediction (malediction) against the heretics that was added to the Shemoneh Esreh (eighteen benedictions) of the Amidah (standing) prayer that is the focal point of the synagogue liturgy. The timing of this formulation and its application is not certain, however. It may have been a later addition after Christianity took its stance of persecution of the Jews rather than a tool to expel Jewish Christians from traditional synagogues.

Bitterness and Separation

The core issue which precipitated the proto-schism of separation between Christian and Jewish communities was the increasingly antinomian doctrine and polity of the church. While Jesus and his immediate disciples were Torah observant and conformed to the tradition of the sages that did not violate the Hebrew Scriptures, second-generation Christianity became increasingly hostile to the Torah and to the Judaisms that it had produced.

As the church became increasingly Gentile in demographics and leadership, it sought to distance itself from the Jews and their religion. Greek philosophy began to replace the teachings of Jewish prophets and apostles. The Torah, with its righteous demands for ethical conduct, was increasingly attacked as a relic from a failed religion that had no place in Christian faith.

The earliest champion of this idea was Marcion, who advocated a version of Gnosticism in which Jesus was the good God who had come to replace the Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, and to cast him into hell. Marcion developed the first canon of Christian Scripture which contained a truncated and abridged version of the gospel and Pauline epistles that deleted all reference to Christian connection with Israel and Judaism. Christianity was a completely new religion that had descended from heaven with Jesus to replace Judaism. Though Marcion was eventually excommunicated and branded a heretic, his teachings have since permeated the Christian church and even to this day survive in a neo-Marcionism of antinomianism, supersessionism, and Christian anti-Semitism.

Positing the total incompatibility of “the law” and “grace” has been a feature of Christian theology and has been the primary basis for separation between Christianity and Judaism. While it is true that Christian teachings on theology and Christology, particularly on the deity of Jesus, have been unacceptable to the Jewish community, it was Christian rejection of the Torah (law) that was responsible for the initial separation and for the continuing division.

The rejection of the Torah has inspired subsequent Christian theologians to declare Paul as the great pathologist of Judaism and to view Judaism as a failed, fossilized religion that needs nothing more than an adequate sarcophagus in which to entomb it. The pitiful record of Christian-sponsored violence against the Jesus people is the resultant scar on the face of Christianity that can never be removed or forgotten.

Finding a cure

The only cure for this malady is to discover its root and then apply radical treatment, not to the symptoms, but to the cause. The breach with Israel and Judaism for which the church was primarily responsible must be mended. Rapprochement with Jews and Judaism is essential to the health and ongoing viability of the Christian community.

The proto-schism must be healed. The church must begin by recovering its own self-identity as a Jewish faith. The first step should be a full restoration of Christianity’s Jewish roots. An over-Hellenized, over-Latinized Christianity must undergo a rejudaizing process to restore it to its original ideal. Removing the rubble from generational accretions of accumulated Gentile traditions will reveal the golden Hebrew foundations of the faith practiced by Jesus and the apostles.

When Judaeophobia, anti-Judaism, and anti-Semitism are eradicated from its midst, Christianity will restore a relationship of loving support for the international Jewish community, and the church will again stand with the synagogue as it did in the days of Jesus and the apostles.