I could use the help of those of you who have years of studying the Old Testament. I say that because there is a tremendous amount of Scripture to digest that can cause a person to wonder what the Nature of the Jews actually was at the time of Christ.
Is it possible that Israel had been infiltrated and/or, become corrupt because of the Jews' inability to keep themselves from procreating with the Nations considered abominations?
Does anyone have any estimations on how Pure or corrupt their Vine had become?
Thanks!
And by the way, because we are Brothers and Sisters in Christ, we talk to each other with kindness and gentleness. Thank you.
Firstly, what difference does it make? A large percentage of the adherents of Second Temple Judaism converted to Christianity. Indeed, if we look at, as I noted in another thread, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Antiochian Orthodox Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East, and also various Roman Catholic schisms from them, such as the Melkite Catholics, Syriac Catholics, Chaldean Catholics, and Maronite Catholics, these two groups, along with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, are largely descended from Second Temple Jews, and also from converts from later Rabinnical and Karaite Judaism, for example the Syriac Orthodox bishop Mar Gregorios bar Hebraeus. Additionally, the Mar Thoma Christians of Kerala and the Malabar Coast are descended largely from the Kochin Jews, who first arrived in Kerala, India following Alexander the Great in the 2nd century BC, and there continued to be a substantial Jewish community in Kerala until the end of the British Raj, when most moved to India, but they still own their historic main synagogue, the Paradesi Synagogue.
It is small in comparison with the cathedrals and many parish churches of the St. Thomas (Mar Thoma) Christians, some of whom are members of an endogamous ethnically Jewish sub-ethnic group descended from the survivors of a shipwreck, who upon their deliverance converted to Christianity and are a part of the same denominations (primarily, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the schismatic Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, which has the same liturgy, but seeks to be independent of the Patriarch of Antioch, and has treated those Syriac Orthodox under the Patriarch of Antioch, known as the Jacobites, rather poorly with lawsuits over church property), and the Syro Malabar Catholic Church, and a portion of the Assyrian Church of the East. The Indian church is part of the continuum of Syriac Aramaic speaking Christianity, which like the Church in Edessa and Mesopotamia, was evangelized by St. Thomas the Apostle, who together with his disciples Saints Addai and Mari, who were members of the seventy, reached Kerala, where an enraged Maharajah threw a javelin at him, in which manner St. Thomas received the crown of martyrdom in 53 AD. Thus, the Christians of India are called St. Thomas Christians (or Mar Thoma Christians in Syriac and the hybrid Syro-West Indian language, Malayalam). Some of them are also Protestants, members of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, which was the result of a rogue Syriac Orthodox bishop conniving with the British East India Company, who agreed to release the gold that the Orthodox had deposited with their banking division in the early 19th century only to the aforementioned bishop, in return for that bishop setting up a church that was doctrinally fairly generically Protestant, much like Anglicanism, and today that church is a member of the Anglican communion.
Then we have the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, who are almost entirely descended from the Beta Israel, the Abyssinian Jews, who had converted following the conversion of the Kandake, the Queen of Sheba, whose son Prince Solomon was the result of her affair with King Solomon as recorded in the Bible. The Beta Israel also extensively intermarried with the Jews in Israel. Most of those who still practiced Judaism were evacuated to the State of Israel in the late 1970s after the rise of the anti-Semitic Derg Communist regime, which strangled the highly respected Emperor Haile Selassie, who was a Christian, the last Emperor of the Solomonic dynasty, who was tolerant of the Jews (he styled himself the “Lion of Judah.”
Secondly, in Scripture we see Israel procreating under legitimate conditions with persons who converted from other nations. Ruth comes to mind. Also the Queen of Sheba. So the idea that the Israelites expanding their gene pool by marrying converts from other nationalities being an abomination makes no sense. Now if they married persons of other ethnicities who did not convert to Judaism, well, that has also happened quite a lot actually, and in Rabinnical Judaism, someone is only considered Jewish if their mother is Jewish; conversely, in Karaite Judaism and, as far as I know, Samaritanism and the Beta Israel, Judaism is Patrilneal. One might say it is frowned upon, but the question you pose is hypothetical and has no bearing on Christian salvation, or indeed on Jewish salvation, because the path for adherents of Judaism to be saved is the same as for anyone else, which is to be baptized into the Christian church and receive the Eucharist, thus being grafted onto the Body of Christ, as described clearly in 1 Corinthians and in Matthew 28:19, and thus benefit from faith in Christ and the eternal life this promises, as we are assured in John 3:14.
Finally, I would say that Rabinnical Judaism and Karaite Judaism have become very different from how they were in the Second Temple era; I recently wrote about that in this thread:
loyalty to the people of Israel?
