The early Christians were messianic Jews
A quick anti-rabbi thought here…
I’ve been reading a bit more about early Christianity and I experienced one of those moments: I come across an idea so obvious and trite that I don’t even think about it. And yet the idea stayed in my head and rattled around in there and I slowly realized that this thing is a lot more significant than I thought.
The idea is this: All the early Christians were Jews — not converts to Christianity, which didn’t really exist back then as a totally separate religion, but Jews. They were real Jews, born and raised in the Israelite culture of their time. What made them stand out only slightly from other Jews was that they believed that the messiah had already come…in the form of Jesus. But in all other ways, they were Jewish — their customs, their beliefs, their eating habits, their cosmology, etc.
What made me think about this was the Book of Revelation. This book is central to Christianity. Naturally it was written by a Jew, a John of Patmos. The scholarly view is that he was a Jew who probably witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple by the Romans. So he hated the Romans and their gods with a passion. His book of prophecy was essentially him channeling his real world desire for revenge and his religious conviction that Jesus was about to deliver it: the Lord would return as a warrior king and slay these demonic Romans and their demonic gods.1
There’s one passage in the Book of Revelation that hits you over the head with the Jewishness of its author. In it he describes the holy army that will go fight the forces of evil in the name of Jesus, aided by some cool angels. And this army he saw in his visions would be made up entirely of Jews. Twelve thousand warriors taken from each of the twelve Israelite tribes:
After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth. They held back the earth’s four winds so that no wind would blow against the earth, the sea, or any tree. I saw another angel coming up from the east, holding the seal of the living God. He cried out with a loud voice to the four angels who had been given the power to damage the earth and sea. He said, “Don’t damage the earth, the sea, or the trees until we have put a seal on the foreheads of those who serve our God.”
Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed from every tribe of the Israelites:
From the tribe of Judah, twelve thousand were sealed;
from the tribe of Reuben, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Gad, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Asher, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Naphtali, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Manasseh, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Simeon, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Levi, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Issachar, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Zebulun, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Joseph, twelve thousand;
from the tribe of Benjamin, twelve thousand were sealed.
In short: the guy wrote the Book of Revelation was so Jewish he believed Jews would be fighting for Jesus Christ. Lol. That’s how Jewish the early followers of Jesus were.
I guess in that sense these early Christians were a little bit like the Chabad-Lubavitchers, the biggest and most influential Hasidic/Orthodox sect in the world. The Chabadniki also see themselves as Jews and most Jews see the Chabadniki as Jews, too. But unlike most other Jews, the Chabadniki believe that the messiah has already come in the form of their late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The guy died in 1994 but the Chabad faithful believe that he’s The One. He’s biding his time for now. But when he reveals himself to the world, a global Jewish/Israelite theocracy will emerge, the Third Temple will be built, and all sorts of other great things will happen. You can see the Chabad “Messiah” flags everywhere — inside a ruined Gaza, at protests in Brooklyn, on bikes in Central Park…
It’s true that Christianity pretty quickly started evolving a new conceptual and biological base. Christian Jews became a minority in the movement and later Jewish practices were repressed with formation of the Church. Still, the whole thing rested on Jews and Judaism.
I can see why various Christian movements developed a problematic relationship with Jews and Judaism. If you dig deeply enough, you realize that true Christians were Jews — everyone else came later. So if Judaism is the original faith and Jesus was a practicing Jew and all his disciples were Jews…what are you, a Christian, supposed to think? It really elevates Judaism to a superior level. It’s a bit of a bummer for your average Christian, if you ask me. Wouldn’t some of them to try to live the original way of life, the life that Jesus led and his disciples led? I know that with the way that my mind works, if I had been born into a Christian family, I’d for sure go that way…I’d seek out the original. It’s dangerous stuff. Or to look at it from another angle: It kinda sucks being Christian because you'll never be as Christian as the first Christians...who were Jews. So the Church wants to memory hole that part of it as much as it can.
This is what came up with we interviewed Rachel Feldman about the growth of the messianic Temple Movement among Jews and the new subsidiary religion that has been emerging as part of this Jewish messianism: Noahidism. She found that a growing number of Christians have been working back from Christianity to the original Israelite faith. But because they’re not Jewish (and are too poor to convert and live in places that can’t support a Jewish way of life with kosher food and all that) they’re offered a secondary status that’s still supposedly in line with the original Old Testament life: Righteous Gentiles who observe the Laws of Noah. And one of the biggest players in offering this new religion to these disillusioned Christians are the Chabad-Lubavitchers. A messianic Jewish sect is brining non-Jews into its fold — a strange repeat of what happened 2,000 years ago with Jesus and his followers. Pretty wild if you look at it like that. Maybe Chabad will become is own religion in a century or so…based off of this Noahide development.
Thinking about this it’s hard not to appreciate the grip that the Hebrew Bible has on the world. It’s incredible actually. Despite never having an empire to back it up, this text has wielded immense power — and continues to do so. It’s the original international bestseller. The idea moves spiritual product.
You can’t say the same thing about the Greek or Roman pantheon, which was in direct competition with Israelites/Jewish religion for a time. Rome naturally didn’t think it was competing because all it did was crush the Hebrews time and time again. And yet despite all their victories and powerful empires, no one’s bowing down to Zeus or Mars or whoever. These deities are now just dead cultural objects with little intrinsic transcendent power in them, other than providing some masturbation fantasies to dweebs fantasizing about being Spartan. Christianity is what ultimately took root with Rome’s power and Christianity was built on Judaism and its central texts. So you could say Judaism — or a version of Judaism — is what won.
Following this logic I can also understand where the crazy antisemites get their ideas. There’s something almost magical about the power this text wields. How were Jews able to spread their message despite being on the losing side of history time and time again? Some biblical scholars think that the Hebrew Bible is a unique text, like no other in human history…its stories and myths have a power unmatched. I’m inclined to agree. But I also find it surprising. Because the Hebrew Bible never held this power for me. I have only been able to see it in comic terms. The god that it describes does not inspire nor does it fill me with awe…it makes me chuckle. But clearly I’m in the minority here…maybe my being unmoved is the result of my atheist Soviet upbringing. But I know other Soviet people who have been swallowed up by Hasidism hard. An old friend of mine is at a Chabad synagogue every day. So who knows what it’s all about. The spirit moves us in strange ways.
—Yasha
I think you are running into an issue that a lot of people get caught up in when studying ancient history: you have underestimated the crucial importance of textual transmission.
To take a modern example, Beowulf is the most influential Old English text. However, the book was only influential because of 19th century translations and especially because Tolkien was an Old English scholar. The Hobbit and LOTR took many elements from Beowulf and became a world wide foundation for modern fantasy.
Paradoxically, a person who doesn't speak Old English (or even English) today is more likely to know the Beowulf story than actual Old English speakers at the time it was written down. That book only survived in a single manuscript tradition.
While the Hebrew Bible was always a more popular text than that, the transmission has much more to do with not a defeat of Roman religion, but an explicit act of adoption by Romans. The most prevelant form of Roman Religion was The Imperial Cult, which focused on the Emperors and their family as gods or semi divine living rulers deified after death.
The best example of this is how Antinous is the most artistically depicted individual in antique statues, outside of Augustus and Hadrian, and was widely worshiped as a god. Antinous was Hadrian's boyfriend who tragically died at a young age.
The grief stricken Emperor made him a god, agaisnt the will of the Senate and tradition. Such was the power of the Imperial Office to set religious policy.
After Constantine, the Imperial Cult officially (with the permission of the Senate) switched to Christianity, with Saints and Jesus/God all taking from existing depictions without much change.
That is the root of the Iconoclasm issue, by the way: the art was just too exactly the same for some to tolerate.
Basically the only big difference is that Zeus would never have white hair (red or black only).
After that, you have Justinian's law code and that books enormous influence on modern lawmakers and nationalists.
To sum up, the world wide impact of the Hebrew Bible has more to do with how the Roman Empire adapted it to Roman needs in Late Antiquity, and how the European Empires in modern times used Roman precedents.
There's quite a bit of writing about this in early Christianity, beginning with the Pauline Epistles, which make up the earliest expression of Christian theology. After Paul's decisive break with the Judaizing elements, it doesn't seem to have been a great problem within the church. Tertullian and Augustine were also massively influential here. Another important influence to account for is that Christian theology came to be expressed through the language of neoplatonism (though there has always been speculation that Greek theories of monotheism were themselves borrowed from Jewish and Egyptian sources).
As a Christian, I never really experienced much anxiety about this. My understanding of Jewish chosenness was always that Jews had this special history *because* they would bring forth this messianic ministry (this is more or less Paul's take). So, Jews are "special" because of Jesus, Jesus was not special for being Jewish. This racial concept is antithetical to Christian theology as I understand it.
I read Pascal's Pensées just this year and he talks about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity extensively. His basic take is that post-Temple Judaism exists to provide independent verification of the messianic prophecies (a nice little irony that resembles God's sense of humor in scripture). But he also divides both Jews and Christians into those "of the flesh" (sinful) and "of the spirit" (redeemed). So, it ends up as kind of a wash. This is all to say that the racial or national aspect of choseness is dropped within one generation, and, where it is encountered later, is generally condemned as a form of idolatry of the flesh. The whole religion is founded upon the rejection of a national Messiah in favor of a universal one.