I
use the phrase “Yeshua, the Jewish Jesus” to distinguish between the
person that lived in the first century who was named “Yeshua” and the person they read about in the
New Testament called “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ” and “beliefs
about Jesus” that were created centuries after the Romans executed
him.
I
think there are a lot of people, Christian
and Jewish, that have a “Pre-K
understanding,” like I used to have, about what “Christian and Jewish” mean. I was an ordained minister and I
viewed 2,500 years of history as the histories of two religions – Judaism and Christianity. Back then I
viewed “Jesus as the founder of
Christianity” and “the Jews as the
people that opposed Jesus.” In other words, my whole reality was built
around “my beliefs about Jesus.”
In
order to know what “The Jewish Jesus”
means we have to view Yeshua in the
context of the world in which he lived and know what “Christianity” was like in the second and third centuries
CE.
The World of Yeshua
Based
on our research, Yeshua was born in 6
BCE and was executed around 27
CE. He was a resident of the village of Nazareth in the Galilee for almost his entire life. Around 24 CE he founded a movement and
preached “The Gospel of the Kingdom of
God.” In Yeshua’s world there were other groups that were much older and
larger than his – and some preached a “Kingdom
of God” message too. They included the Sadducees,
Pharisees, Essenes, Hellenists and Herodians.
They were all “Jewish” too.
Understanding what “Jewish” means in relationship to
Yeshua,
requires knowing what distinguished Yeshua’s group from
the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Hellenists and Herodians
–
and what Yeshua’s group shared with them.
Yeshua
had attended the synagogue in
Nazareth all of his life. He had gone with his family to Jerusalem to celebrate
the major festivals at the Temple
all of his life. Two things members of the above groups shared were God’s covenant with Abraham and a
commitment to the Torah. Yeshua became a part of God’s covenant with
Abraham when he was circumcised and he made it very clear that he was totally committed
to the Torah.
Yeshua
clearly worshiped the same God as the members of the above groups and the Temple in Jerusalem was the closest
place a person could come to His presence. He kept many of the same Jewish
customs as members of the other groups, and just like them, he had his unique interpretations of words of
the Torah. All of the apostles were “Jewish” like him. His teachings were about
Jewish things that his Jewish audiences understood.
Early Christianity
A
lot is known today about Christianity during the second and third centuries. It
was a period of rich theological diversity that surprises most Christians today.
●
Christian Beliefs About God
-- Some Christians believed that there was only one God, the Creator of all there
is. Other Christians insisted that there were two different gods — a God of wrath and a God of love and mercy.
These were not simply two different facets of the same God, they are two
different gods. And there were other Christians that insisted that there were twelve
gods -- others said there were thirty
gods – and still others said there
were 365 gods! All these groups claimed to be Christian, insisting that
their views were true and had been taught by Jesus and his followers.
●
The Christian New Testament
-- Why didn’t the groups above simply read their New Testaments to see whose views were wrong? It is because the New Testament Christians read today did
not exist. All the books of the modern New
Testament had been written by this time, but there were also lots of other
books that claimed to be written by Jesus’ own apostles — other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses. They had very different perspectives from
those found in the books that eventually came to be called the New Testament. The New Testament itself emerged out of these conflicts over God (or the
gods), as one group of believers acquired more converts than all the others. That group decided which books should be
included in the canon of scripture.
●
No Centralized Theology -- During
the second and third centuries, there was no agreed-upon canon of New Testament
books and no agreed-upon theology. There was a wide range of diversity: diverse
groups asserting diverse theologies based on diverse written texts, all
claiming to be written by the apostles of Jesus.
●
Some Christians Celebrated Passover
– As late as 170 CE the Christians
in Asia continued to observe the Passover.
But everything
changed with “the conversion” of Constantine the Great, Emperor of the Roman Empire. The event that changed
everything was the Council of Nicea
in 325 CE, a meeting called by Emperor
Constantine. He invited all Christian bishops of the Roman Empire to attend.
However, because Christians had witnessed
many persecutions in the first three centuries – some by officials of the Roman Empire and others by pagan mobs
– many bishops chose not to attend.
By
the end the fourth century, the Roman Catholic Church emerged as a religion
backed by the authority of Roman Emperors and institutions and it gave Christians
a theology and a New Testament. It also made Christianity and Judaism two separate
mutually exclusive religions.
I
hope you found this informative and thank you for reading it.
Shalom,
Jim
Myers
SOURCES
●
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who
Changed the Bible and Why By Bart D. Ehrman © 2005; HarperCollins
Publishers, New York, NY; pp. 152, 187.
