DIFFICULTIES BETWEEN JEWS AND CHRISITIANS IN THE LATE 1ST AND 2ND CENTURY AND HOW THESE DIFFICULTIES ARE REFLECTED IN THE SURVIVING LITERATURE FROM THE PERIOD
Introduction
Factors which led to increasingly difficult relations between Jews and Christians from the late 1st and 2nd century and which led to parting of Christianity from rabbinic Judaism can’t be precisely acknowledged as having happened at a specific point in time or place, as if there were only one parting of the ways. The parting of what are today, two quite self-determining religions, was much more of a process that required much longer to become definite and absolute than many people acknowledge.
A likely separation became ultimately manifest in a number of events and confrontations in specific locations, which patently hastened the process. Several events starting with the crucifixion and resurrection, or from earliest assertions that Jesus had been raised from the dead, are said by some to be more significant than any other. A majority believe that Christianity operated at the outset as a sect within second Temple Judaism, ‘the sect of the Nazarenes’ (Acts 24.5, 14), so that the question whether the ways would or should part was not at all a clear-cut deduction to reach during the first generation and beyond. How the ways parted is to retrospectively discern the paths in fact journeyed. Elemental is the acknowledgment that the categories ‘Jew and Judaism,’ ‘Christian and Christianity’ were emergent processes and acquiring definition in the latter stages of second Temple Judaism and the early years of the second century.
There were countless initial tensions in the vital efforts of the first Christians to discover whether Israel’s heritage was culturally or religiously determined. For it is only in the closing stages of the first century CE where Graeco-Roman writers begin to employ ‘Ioudaios’ as a religious referent, ‘Jew’. The uncertainty was both in self-identification and in the discrimination of the observer. ‘Christian’, first appears in (Acts 11.26) as an allusion to the believers in the Messiah Jesus and followers of his ‘way’. Graeco-Roman writers early in the second century begin to use the designation ‘Christian’, employed by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the younger. For the author of 2 Maccabees, ‘Judaism’ was the synopsis form for a national and religious individuality discernible from its outset by its uncompromising persistence in sustaining distinct and defining Torah practices like customs such as circumcision and food edicts which will be taken up later (2 Macc. 4.13; 6.24).
As Judaism was initially defined by way of contrast or antithesis to Hellenism, so Christianity was initially defined by way of contrast or antithesis to Judaism. Baur, (1845) wrote, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism … asserted itself as a separate, independent principle, broke loose from it, and took its stand as a new enfranchised form of religious thought and life, essentially different from all the national peculiarities of Judaism is the ultimate, most important point of the primitive history of Christianity’.
Scene Setting
Christians were not the first to collect respected writings as one, into a sacred canon of Scripture. Generally other religions didn’t use written documents as authorities however the Jews did. Jesus and his followers were conversant with the ancient texts that were eventually canonized into the Hebrew Scriptures. The majority of Jews as stated previously acknowledged the particular authority of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). Most scholars though, now consider a rigid complete canon of Jewish Scripture didn’t yet exist in Jesus day. In the period under discussion there was no middle-class and very few belonged to the upper class. Slaves made-up a third of the population in major cities and the poor were generally worse off than those enslaved. There was nothing to alleviate most diseases and so many babies died, and women had to bear roughly five children just to keep the population steady. Most people were uneducated and ninety-percent couldn’t read. Everyone, except most Jews, believed in an array of gods; they, recognising that divine beings of all sorts were constantly involved in their everyday lives, bringing rain, health, farming, housing and peace, or its reverse.
During the first six decades of the first century Judaism was composed of about two dozen competing factions: Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenses, Zealots, followers of John the Baptist, followers of Jesus of Nazareth, followers of other charismatic leaders etc. All of whom followed common Jewish practices, such as observing dietary restrictions, worshiping at the Jerusalem Temple, sacrificing animals, observing the weekly Sabbaths, etc. In 70 CE the Roman Army attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the central focus of Jewish life: the temple. This was devastating at the time and Jewish life was completely disrupted. Jews were no longer able to worship at the Temple. Out of this disaster emerged two main movements: Rabbinical Judaism centred on local synagogues and the Christian movement. There was great diversity within the Christian movement during the first few decades after Jesus Execution.
Jesus, during his public ministry led a renewal group, which stayed principally within Judaism itself, but with remarkable features: most importantly his shocking claim to a personal influence situating him equally with the God whom he called ‘Abba’ (Father dear). From a sizeable cluster of disciples which incorporated a number of non-Jews, he selected a core group of twelve men (all Jews) indicating an intention to re-found the twelve tribes of Israel, or the Jewish nation descended from Abraham and Sarah.
Initial Christians wholly expected the risen Christ to come-back, after a short time, in majesty to judge the world. Wholly fixed on Jesus, they shaped their understanding of him by positioning two elements together: (a) their experience of events in which he had been their central character and, (b) the ideas, expectations and customs they thought pertinent in Judaism. To articulate their belief in Jesus, they relied in part upon Jewish tradition. In consequence their rite of baptism took over some values from the purificatory rites of Judaism, mainly from baptism for the forgiveness of sin enacted by John the Baptist. Followers of Jesus continued to find in the Jewish psalms their essential prayer-book. Many continued to worship as Jews and in attending the Jerusalem Temple until they were excluded from Palestinian and other synagogues in the course of the first century.
At first, Jesus’ followers were hesitant whether they ought to carry on respecting the Torah or Jewish law, especially over circumcision and dietary needs. Also the conditions they should enforce on Gentiles accepting the faith in the crucified and risen Jesus. Initial Christians varied from other pious Jews by offering baptism ‘in the name of Jesus’ (e.g., Acts 2: 38), and marking collectively the Eucharist, the service in which bread and wine is consecrated and consumed. (e.g., Acts 2: 42, 45). In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke conveys the story of the source and initial expansion of the Christian faith. In the early chapters, Peter acts notably as the head of the twelve apostles, the central group of public witnesses to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. With his vivid calling on the road to Damascus around AD 36, Paul enters the Acts of the Apostles in ch. 9 and takes-on the story from ch. 15. Upon Paul’s return to Jerusalem in ch. 21, he encounters James and all the leaders. There is however no talk of Peter still being in Jerusalem. Acts concludes with Paul’s appearance in Rome some years before he and Peter are martyred between AD64 and 67. James the brother of Jesus and the leader of the Mother Church, had by now been martyred in Jerusalem. The book of Acts depicts the swell of Christianity through the work of the apostles. The first decades of ‘Christian history feature friction involving two constituencies, the original Jerusalem church with its vision of a non-Torah-focussed vision of Paul and others. The later vision lifted the early Church beyond being merely a reform group within Judaism’. Paul’s love of the community in Jerusalem was by gathering money from local churches for them 2 Cor. 8: 1-9:15. Even so, a Christian universal distinctiveness in Antioch, Rome and other centres was shaped in a tensional affiliation with the Jerusalem community. Paul led missionary action round the Mediterranean world, where he increased faith in Jesus as Lord and Saviour. As Acts frequently points, the risen Jesus and his Holy Spirit continually directed and gave energy to the Christian life and mission.
By the sixties, supporters of Jesus had come to be identified as ‘Christians’ (Acts 11:26). Through baptism in the name of Jesus, they understood their sins to be remitted, they sensed the Holy Spirit, came to the distinctive kinship of the Church, and celebrated the Eucharist. When praying, they called on God as ‘Abba’ (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6), and uttered not only the psalms but the Lords Prayer as well, and other prayers such as the Benedictus and the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55, 68-79), originally written in Greek like the rest of Luke’s Gospel but were afterwards known by their Latin titles.
They discovered Jesus teachings which reached them through their apostolic leaders and their associates. They held that the Spirit was open to all, and that salvation no longer necessitated circumcision and the practice of the mosaic law in all is details. (Acts 15: 1-35). Whilst stressing the holy unity of the baptized, Paul’s letters hint of the moral failures of early Christians. The First Letter to the Corinthians exposes how some suffered from factionalism, indulged doubts over the central truths of the resurrection, committed fornication, incest and drunkenness and demonstrated a selfish indifference to poorer Christians. The reproaches coming from Paul confront the fantasy of an imaginary golden age of Catholic Christianity, which exercised heroic principles on all sides. From its beginning the church endured scandals and divisions. The book of Revelation, with its opening letters to the seven churches, joins the apostle in testifying to a mixture of holiness and sinfulness that categorized Christianity from the beginning. (Rev. 2: 2-3:22).
There was tension between Jews who believed in Jesus and those who didn’t. Tensions were obvious as Jewish Christians began to convert Gentiles to this new faith and to assert that they too could be heirs of the promises given to Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures even without adhering to Jewish customs and practices. Social conflicts followed creating theological worries for the emerging Christian communities: If Gentiles didn’t have to become Jews in order to be Christians, how were they and their Jewish Christian brothers and sisters in the church to comprehend themselves in relationship with Judaism.
How early Christians came to appreciate themselves as a social group as distinct from Judaism, became a problem of self-definition. Christians made negligible impression on the empire during the first hundred years of its existence. It wasn’t a religion on everyone’s minds. ‘In no surviving documents from pagan authors of the first century of the common era – whether histories or philosophical treatises, travelogues or works of fiction, legal documents, private correspondence or public inscriptions or personal notes – in no pagan document of any kind is either Jesus or Christianity mentioned’. Far from inspiring alarm in the minds of the Roman administration, during the second-half of the first century, Christianity was a minor and insignificant irritation, nothing much else. Christians had the same constitutional rights and responsibilities in the empire as everybody else. The right to worship any god they chose, even the Jewish God, for Roman authorities couldn’t care less if Christians who worshiped this God lived and functioned as Jews. Neither was it against the law for Christians to have faith in, and state openly that Jesus was divine, as some of them eventually came to do.
Conclusion
The Christian church in point, matured quite slowly in its early years. At the end of the first century, far fewer than one-percent of the empire’s population of sixty million was Christian. But growth was steady maintained by close social networking, with a steady growth rate of forty-percent every decade. So Christianity was established in the public statements of a Jewish teacher, consequently and somewhat ludicrously, impediments reflected in the paucity of surviving literature from the period stem from one who ascribed authority to written documents. We know that Jesus’ followers thought his own teachings to be convincing. Toward the close of the first century Christians were citing Jesus’ words and calling them ‘Scripture’ (1 Tim. 5:18). And by the start of the 2nd century some Christians were ascribing authority to the words of Jesus and the writings of his apostles. Naturally, due to the nature of individuals, impassioned discussions grew about which apostles were true to Jesus’ own teachings, and a number of writings claiming to be written by apostles were thought of as forgeries. So the New Testament surfaces from Christian conflict. Christians would carry on debating the acceptability of a number of their books and why not, for some of the elements in it do embody remarkably different views when read separately and not as a canon. Different Christian communities had different books – different versions of the same books. So we learn that early Christianity was not the connected monolith that we frequently imagine. It was in fact enormously diverse and messy. This diversity was apparent in a wide range of writings, only some of which have come down to us in the New Testament. The New Testament canon, was formed by Christians who wanted to show that their views were grounded in the writings of Jesus’ own apostles. Sources come in two kinds; Non Christian pagan and Jewish; from Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the younger. The writings of Flavious Josephus (Jewish Source), and Christian sources, such as the letters of Paul and the gospels. See Table 1 for some Christian sources. Finally, Christianity did not move out of Judaism into a context of irreligion or unbelief. Quite the opposite, the Greco-Roman world of the 1st and 2nd century was deeply concerned with religion, and the other world, but Christians had many rivals. ‘Recognition of God’s uniqueness developed over time, beginning with a practical monotheism that first excluded the worship of any other divinities, which sprang from a concrete experience of being in relationship with God, an experience that Israelite tradition traced all the way back to the nation’s ancestors, the patriarchs’.
Christian Sources From Paul
| He was born of a woman | Galatians 4:4 |
| He was born of a Jew | Galatians 4:4 |
| He was of the house of David – Davidic lineage | Romans 1:3 |
| Jesus had brothers | 1 Corinthians 9:5 |
| One of them was named James | Galatians 1 |
| He ministered principally to Jews | Romans 15:8 |
| He had a prohibition on divorce | 1 Corinthians 7:10 |
| He had a requirement that Christians should pay their preachers | Corinthians 9:14 |
| Jesus was betrayed | 1 Corinthians 11:23 |
| He celebrated a last supper and Paul is aware of the actions he performed with bread and the cup at this supper | 1 Corinthians 1:18 |
