March 20

Lately, the texts for our lectures discuss the beginning of the Judeo-Christian split and the possible reasons behind it. From what I have read in the materials and heard during the lectures, I began to suspect that one of the reasons that this split has occurred is in the fact that Christians started to re-interpret the Jewish prophecies and scriptures.

This has started with Jesus himself, I believe. Though he claimed to be a savior (a messiah), he certainly did not behave as one according to the Jewish religious canon, but rather he reinterpreted it as and when he saw fit to do it. Incidentally, there is nothing particularly inherently wrong with it: at that time, the Jews themselves often interpreted and reinterpreted their canon as they saw fit: four official variation of the Jewish faith show this, to say nothing of the various sects, such as Dead Sea one. The Christians, in the beginning, were just one Jewish sect out of many, and only their elevation by the emperor Constantine gave them their new status as a global – or at least all-European – religion.

The Jews, for better or for worse, did not quite realize the change in the relationship between them and the Christians, and that resulted in a rather rocky relationship between the two groups. On one hand there was the harassment of Christians by the Jews and of Jews by the Christians; on the other...

Even with Constantine’s edict (let alone some time before it), the Christians were ‘new kids on the block’ both in terms of religious history and European history in general. Therefore, when they began to send missionaries to new countries and people, such as the German tribes in the north, they began to encounter such problems as proof – how could they prove to the Germans, the Franks, the Celts, etc that there really had been Jesus, he was crucified, he ascended, etc? The northerners were less sophisticated people than the people of the Mediterranean Sea basin were, they did not believe in myths and legends and logical speeches slash philosophies, they were more of a ‘doubting Tom’ sort of people, and they needed something concrete. The Jews, who were around for much longer than the Christians were at this point, served as this concrete proof – maybe unwillingly, possibly in a negative way regarding the Crucifixion, but serve as proof they were.

The Jewish faith has also served another purpose – to bulk up the Bible. As a recent lecture revealed, about three quarters of New Testament consists of letters, personal documentation (and of the remains one half are the Gospels) that are short, precise and to the point – and also lack even the scanty description and the hefty religious history of the Genesis. When preaching to initially sceptical people of northern Europe anything that could help sway them was considering important enough to be Christian, and that included the Torah, refurbished and eventually reinterpreted as Old Testament.

And so, as far as I can see, the relationship between Jews and Christians has started uneasily, and it continued uneasily, and it remains relatively uneasy even in modern times. Does anyone wants to disagree?