Jewish Christianity

Christianity started with Jewish eschatological expectations, and it developed into the worship of Jesus as the result of his earthly ministry, his crucifixion, and the post-crucifixion experiences of his followers.

[17] Christianity arose as a Pharisaic movement within the syncretist Hellenistic world of the first century AD, dominated by Roman law and Greek culture.

Some scholars have argued that the idea of two messiahs—one "suffering" and the other fulfilling the traditionally conceived messianic role—was normative to ancient Judaism, predating Jesus, as can be seen from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Cohen, the fact that Jesus did not establish an independent Israel, combined with his death at the hands of the Romans, caused many Jews to reject him as the Messiah.

After forty days, he ascended to Heaven, but his followers believed he would soon return to usher in the Kingdom of God and fulfill the rest of Messianic prophecy, such as the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment.

According to McGrath, Jewish Christians, as faithful religious Jews, "regarded their movement as an affirmation of every aspect of contemporary Judaism, with the addition of one extra belief – that Jesus was the Messiah.

[54] John Elliott also characterizes early Christianity as an 'Israelite sect' or a 'renewal movement within Israel', where followers were called 'Galileans', 'Nazarenes' or members of 'the Way' by the native inhabitants of 1st century Judea.

[63] According to Lüdemann, in the discussions about the strictness of adherence to the Jewish Law, the more conservative view of James the Just became more widely accepted than the more liberal position of Peter, who soon lost influence.

[note 7] According to Ehrman, most of the alleged parallels between Jesus and the pagan savior-gods only exist in the modern imagination, and there are no "accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead.

[94][44] Philippians 2: 5–11 contains the Christ hymn, which portrays Jesus as an incarnated and subsequently exalted heavenly being:[70] 5 Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 6 who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; 8 and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient [even] unto death, yea, the death of the cross.

Dunn further notes that the hymn may be seen as a three-stage Christology, starting with "an earlier stage of mythic pre-history or pre-existence," but regards the humility-exaltation contrast to be the main theme.

[44] According to Martin Hengel, as summarized by Jeremy Bouma, the letters of Paul already contain a fully developed Christology, shortly after the death of Jesus, including references to his pre-existence.

While this "Logos Christology" is recognizable for Greek metaphysics, it is nevertheless not derived from pagan sources, and Hengel rejects the idea of influence from "Hellenistic mystery cults or a Gnostic redeemer myth".

According to Larry Hurtado, "the christology and devotional stance that Paul affirmed (and shared with others in the early Jesus-movement) was… a distinctive expression within a variegated body of Jewish messianic hopes.

[99][note 10] Fragments of their beliefs in an exalted and deified Jesus, what Mack called the "Christ cult," can be found in the writings of Paul.

However, L. Michael White's From Jesus to Christianity[118] claims: "The blowup with Peter was a total failure of political bravado, and Paul soon left Antioch as persona non grata, never again to return."

[119] Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin has argued that Paul's theology of the spirit is more deeply rooted in Hellenistic Judaism than generally believed.

In A Radical Jew, Boyarin argues that the Apostle Paul combined the life of Jesus with Greek philosophy to reinterpret the Hebrew Bible in terms of the Platonic opposition between the ideal (which is real) and the material (which is false).

Judaism is a material religion, in which membership is based not on belief but rather descent from Abraham, physically marked by circumcision, and focusing on how to live this life properly.

The two schools of thought eventually firmed up their respective "norms" and doctrines, notably by increasingly diverging on key issues such as the status of "purity laws", the validity of Judeo-Christian messianic beliefs, and, more importantly, the use of Koine Greek and Latin as sacerdotal languages replacing Biblical Hebrew.

[139] Talmudist and professor of Jewish studies Daniel Boyarin proposes a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and Judaism in late antiquity, viewing the two "new" religions as intensely and complexly intertwined throughout this period.

[note 20] They held the Jewish scriptures to be authoritative and sacred, employing mostly the Septuagint or Targum translations, and adding other texts as the New Testament canon developed.

The unique combination of ethnocultural traits inhered from the fusion of a Greek-Macedonian cultural base, Hellenistic Judaism and Roman civilization gave birth to the distinctly Antiochian "Middle Eastern-Roman" Christian traditions of Cilicia (Southeastern Turkey) and Syria/Lebanon:The mixture of Roman, Greek, and Jewish elements admirably adapted Antioch for the great part it played in the early history of Christianity.

[174]Members of these communities still call themselves Rûm which literally means "Eastern Roman", "Byzantine" or "Asian Greek" in Turkish, Persian and Arabic.

Counting members of the surviving minorities in the Hatay Province of Turkey, in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Israel and their relatives in the diaspora, there are more than 1.8 million Greco-Melkite Christians residing in the Northern-MENA, the US, Canada and Latin America today, i.e., Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic Christians under the ancient jurisdictional authority of the patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem ("Orthodox" in the narrow sense) or their Uniat offshoots ("Catholic" or "united" with Rome).

Some of those families carry surnames such as Youhanna (John), Hanania (Ananias), Sahyoun (Zion), Eliyya/Elias (Elijah), Chamoun/Shamoun (Simeon/Simon), Semaan/Simaan (Simeon/Simon), Menassa (Manasseh), Salamoun/Suleiman (Solomon), Yowakim (Joachim), Zakariya (Zacharias), Kolath and others.

[176][177] The first major author to assert that Jewish Christianity played an important role in the formation of Quranic tradition was Aloys Sprenger in his 1861 book Das Leben und die Lehre des Moḥammad.

[183] In the last few years, the thesis for the specific role played by Jewish Christians has been resisted by Gabriel Said Reynolds,[184][185] Stephen Shoemaker,[186] and Guillaume Dye.

They also baptize messianic believers who are of the age of accountability (able to accept Jesus as the Messiah), often observe kosher dietary laws and keep Saturday as the Sabbath.

The two groups are not completely distinct; some adherents, for example, favor Messianic congregations but they freely choose to live in both worlds, such as the theologian Arnold Fruchtenbaum, the founder of Ariel Ministries.