Notes on Paper 4: Judaism and Christianity

Writing about the separation of Judaism and Christianity, many students fall into the trap of attributing everything positive to Christianity, and therefore, everything negative to Judaism.

For example:

In Judaism they followed the Old Testament which was very tough and things were black and white. There wasn’t the idea of forgiveness and eternal love as seen in the New Testament.

You might want to consider, for example, Psalm 103:

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities.

For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove his transgressions from us.

That sounds like forgiveness and eternal love to me. Jesus did not invent these ideas, he was drawing on Old Testament traditions.

An example from another paper:

Another example is the cleansing. Jews think they should be apart from things that make them “dirty” especially during ceremonies … He (Jesus) wanted to tell people that they could socialize with publicans and sinners without fear of going to hell because what matters is to keep being a good religious person and trying to make other people be a good religious person too; nonetheless, Jews didn’t like this point of view very much. For them, God chose their people and they have always been and always are the only chosen ones. For Jesus, anyone could be part of God’s community.

Notice that the teaching about cleanliness is attributed to all Jews, and the use of the present tense suggests no differentiation between Judaism now and in the time of Jesus. In class, I discussed the role that cleanliness played in the teaching of the Pharisees. I pointed out the asking everyone to maintain cleanliness was a visible sign that the whole nation was a priestly nation – God deals with everyone, not just an elite, and that visible signs of loyalty to God’s law had a political motive, demonstrating national unity against the Romans. Of course, some Jews did object to Jesus’ breaking social boundaries, but the tax-collectors and sinners he ate with were themselves Jews. Eating with them, the lost sheep of Israel, is not at all the same as treating non-Jews as members of the Kingdom. Consider what Jesus says to the Syro-Phoenician woman (a Gentile) who asks Jesus to cure her daughter in Mark 7:27; Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.

The children are the Jews, the Gentiles are the dogs – that is Jesus speaking. It is true that Jesus does then cure the woman’s daughter, the story shows him willing to help gentiles, but it cannot be said that his language here breaks down the barriers between the chosen people and the rest.

The fundamental error made by many students is this:

… They had a closed mind they couldn’t accept that Jesus was neither rich nor a king … For a Christian, a Jew is someone who doesn’t believe.

It is true that the Jewish hope was to find a Messiah who would lead them in revolt against the Romans, and Jesus was not a military leader – that is the fundamental task of a king, and ‘Messiah’ was a title of the King. But Jews cannot be defined simply as people who do not believe in Christianity, with no reference to what they did believe or do believe. Americans love freedom. We British are not Americans. But you would not understand the British by seeing us as, fundamentally, anti-Americans who do not care about freedom. To have an open mind, you must ask not what they did not believe, but what they did believe.

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