Sorry to have to create a thread here again, this is the only section I was able to create a new thread at, the other forums require "christian" designation, until a moderator changes that for me, I create here. You can move my threads to the right place later if its a problem.
Well basically, my question is are Christians just Jews with different beliefs? To me it seems that way. I live in Israel and, I'm not really a Jew, but the Family I come from has jewish background. But since Christianity came after Judaism, not before, and Christians are originally Jews who have simply believed Jesus was the Messiah, why arent they called Jews?
Christians still have the same Old testament which Jews follow and believe in, they still believe in heaven/hell, still believe in various Jewish related traditions and behaviors and so on. So I dont understand why arent Christians considered Jews. Christianity itself is originally Judaism except they accepted Jesus as the Messiah. So how did a new religion was created like that? It doesnt look very sensible.
Personally, I think Jews and Christians are almost the same thing. I even heard somewhere Jew+Jesus = Christian. Is that true?
Hope you all can please explain things, thanks.
Historically Judaism in the 2nd Temple Period was fairly diverse. Jewish historians and writers of the first century mention several streams of Jewish religion that existed. The big two were the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
The Pharisees represented what could be described as the ordinary person's Judaism of the time, it was the Judaism of the synagogues, with rabbis as teachers providing guidance to matters of Jewish practice and interpretation of the Torah; they embraced three groups of Scriptures: Torah, Prophets, and Writings (though the exact contents of the Jewish Bible were not yet fully settled). They believed in life after death, resurrection, the coming of the Messiah, and most of the things we usually attribute to Judaism. In fact, the Pharisees were, more-or-less, the only real surviving form of Judaism that continued on after the destruction of the Temple in the first century.
The Sadducees consisted primarily of the Jewish priesthood and Jewish aristocrats, they only accepted the five books of the Torah as being authoritative, and denied the resurrection of the dead, the life of the Age to Come, and things like that. They didn't get along well with the Pharisees, and vice versa, on account of these significant differences. Though they recognized each other as Jewish brothers, Pharisees still attended the Temple for sacrifice and prayer and honored the priesthood which God instituted through Moses' brother Aaron.
Besides these, early Jewish writers like Josephus and Philo of Alexandria mention a few other groups.
The Essenes were an ascetic Jewish sect that tended to keep to themselves in communities. While we don't know for certain, it is usually believed that the community at Qumran that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls were an Essene community. If the Qumran community is representative of the Essenes as a whole, then we know that they practiced intense ritual purification, they regarded the Temple system and priesthood corrupt, and things of that nature.
The Zealots are a group also mentioned as one of the "Big Four" Jewish sects at the time; they were largely inspired by the Maccabeans who had thrown off foreign Greek rule a couple centuries prior and desired to liberate Judea from Roman occupation. The Zealots were largely responsible for several rebellions, including what would become the Jewish-Roman War that ended with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.
Philo also mentions another group who lived in the region of Elephantine in Egypt called the Therapeutae, who were described as living more ascetic lives. It's possible that the Therapeutae were the closest thing that Judaism ever had to having monks, and it may have been due to Buddhist influence due to Buddhist missionaries which had brought some Buddhist ideas westward from India.
In all of this came Jesus of Nazareth. In most ways Jesus was, theologically, a Pharisee. As much as Jesus speaks negatively about the Pharisees as hypocrites, He also said that they sit in Moses' seat and thus what they say should be listened to. If we believe the Gospel accounts (which I, obviously, do) then Jesus was the Messiah and therefore fulfilled the hopes and expectations of the Messiah; but in such a way that was counter-intuitive and which did not match the expectations of the Pharisees. When Jesus was arrested and crucified, His movement could have ended, as many other would-be messianic movements have; but according to His closest followers He demonstrated His messianic claims by rising from the dead and then ascending into heaven to take His seat as King Messiah at the right hand of God.
As such Christianity can be said to have originated as a distinct and highly unusual messianic sect of Judaism. After all, the chief claim of Christianity is that Jesus is the Messiah, or Hellenized as Christos (Christ in English), and hence the name for His followers and of this religion became known as Christians and Christianity respectively. However, Christianity did not remain a Jewish movement as it quite soon welcomed non-Jewish converts. That's what really began to set it apart from Judaism. To welcome non-Jewish converts who remained non-Jewish (they didn't become Jews though they became Christians) meant a mixed religion of both Jews and Gentiles. And this topic of both Jews and Gentiles comprising covenant people of God through the Messiah who fulfilled and finished the covenantal and prophetic promises of God which are found throughout what Christians call the Old Testament meant that Christianity--even if originally thought of as a Jewish sect--did not remain that way.
With the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, and the end of the Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots; leaving only the Pharisees to pick up the pieces and preserve the Jewish faith. The divide between Judaism and Christianity was rather cemented. Judaism was the religion of the Pharisees and the rabbis; Christianity was a distinct religion that had both Jewish and Gentile members; but who regarded themselves not as Jews or Gentiles, but as Christians; something new. A new kind of person whose identity is tied not to their old lives before, but to their new lives as followers of Jesus the Messiah who founded a new way which He called His Church (Greek: ekklesia, literally meaning "called-out assembly") a community, a family, a brother-and-sisterhood of human beings whose identity is found in Jesus.
There were, still are, and always have been Jewish Christians, that is Christians who converted from Judaism or have Jewish heritage. But whether Jew or Gentile, we're Christians. Regardless of where we came from, who we came from, or whatever defined us before; when we were brought through the waters of Baptism, when we were born anew by God's grace and the Holy Spirit and became partakers of Jesus Christ, we became something new. Many Jewish Christians still do treasure their Jewish heritage; just like many Christians from many diverse backgrounds continue to treasure their heritage--so it's not like those things just go away. But it's not about being Jew or being Gentile, or being <fill in the blank here>, it's about being in Jesus Christ.
-CryptoLutheran
