Jesus, the Law, and Tradition
SOURCE: Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers; Copyright © 1987 Paul Johnson)
The Jewish doctrine of the Messiah had its origins in the belief that King David had been anointed by the Lord, so that he and his descendants would reign over Israel to the end of time and would exercise dominion over alien peoples. After the fall of the kingdom, this belief had been transformed into a prophetic expectation that the rule of the House of David would be miraculously restored On tope of this was grafted the Isaiac description of this future king as the dispenser of justice, and this was perhaps the most important element in the belief because Isaiah seems to have been the most widely read and admired, as it was certainly the most beautifully written, of all the Bible books. During the second and first centuries BC, this justice-dispensing reincarnation of the Davidic ruler fitted neatly into the notions, in the Book of Daniel, the Book of Enoch and other apocalyptic works, of an end of days and the Four Last Things - death, judgment, hell and heaven. It was at this comparatively late stage that the divinely chosen and charismatic figure was first called the Messiah or "the anointed [king]". The word was originally Hebrew, then Aramaic, and simple transliterated into Greek as messias; but the Greek word for "the anointed" is christos, and it is significant that it was the Greek, not the Hebraic, title which was attached to Jesus.
The messianic doctrine, being of complex and even contradictory origins, created great confusion in the minds of the Jews. But most of them seem to have assumed that the Messiah would be a political-military leader and that his coming would inaugurate a physical, earthly state. There is an important passage in the Acts of the Apostles describing how Gamaliel the Elder, grandson of Hillel, and at one time president of the Sanhedrin, dissuaded the Jewish authorities from punishing the early Christians, by arguing that the authenticity of their Messiah would be demonstrated by the success of their movement. There had been, he said, the case of Theudas, "boasting himself to be somebody", but he had been killed, "and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered and brought to nought". Then there had been Judas of Galilee, "in the days of the taxing", and "he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed". The Christians, he said, should be left alone because, if their mission lacked divine sanction, "it will come to nought".
The other Jewish elders were persuaded by Gamaliel's argument, for they too thought in terms of an uprising designed to alter the government. When Herod the Great heard that the Messiah or Christ was born, he reacted with violence as if to a threat to his dynasty. Any Jew who listened to a man making messianic claims would take it for granted he had some kind of political and military programme. The Roman government, the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Sadducees and even the Pharisees assumed that a Messiah would make changes in the existing order, of which they were all part. The poor people of Judaea and Galilee would also believe that a Messiah preaching fundamental changes would be talking not, or not only, in spiritual and metaphysical terms, but of the realities of power - government, taxes, justice.
Now it is obvious from the evidence we have that Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns. He was not a Jewish nationalist. On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist. Like [John] the Baptist he believed that the programme of repentance and rebirth should be carried to the multitude, as was foreseen in Chapter 53 of Isaiah. It was not the job of the teacher of righteousness to hide in the desert or in caves; or to sit in the seats of the mighty either, like the Sanhedrin. It was his mission to preach to all, and in a spirit of humility before God, who might demand the extremities of suffering. The person of whom Isaiah wrote had to be the "tender plant", the "despised and rejected of men", the "man of sorrows", who would be "wounded for our iniquities, bruised for our transgression", "oppressed and afflicted and yet he opened not his mouth". This "suffering servant" of God would be "taken from prison and from judgment", "brought as a lamb to the slaughter", be buried with the wicked and "numbered with the transgressors". This Messiah was not a mob leader or democrat or guerrilla chieftain, let alone a future earthly king and world sovereign. He was, rather, a theologian and sacrificial victim, a teacher by his word and example, and by his life and death.
If Jesus was a theologian, what was and whence came his theology? His background was the heterodox Judaism and increasing Hellenization of Galilee. His father, a carpenter, died before Jesus was baptized, in 28/29 AD. IN the Greek New Testament Joseph bore a Hebrew name, but Jesus' mother was called Mary, a Greek form of Miriam. Two of Jesus' brothers, Judah and Simon, had Hebrew names but two others, James (in Hebrew Jacob) and Joses (in Hebrew Joseph), did not; and Jesus was the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua. The family claimed descent from David, and it may have been predominantly conformist, since the New Testament hints at family tensions created by Jesus' teaching. After his death, however, the family accepted his mission. His brother James became head of the sect in Jerusalem and, after James' martyrdom by the Sadducees, Jesus' cousin Simon succeeded; the grandsons of his brother Judah were leaders of the Galilean Christian community in the reign of Trajan.
The evidence we possess shows that, though Jesus was influenced by Essene teaching and may have spent some time living with them, and though he was personally connected with the Baptist sect, he was in essentials one of the Hakamim, the pious Jews who moved in the world. He was closer to the Pharisees than to any other group. This statement is liable to be misleading, since Jesus openly criticized the Pharisees, especially for 'hypocrisy'. But on close examination, Jesus' condemnation is by no means so severe or so inclusive as the Gospel narrative in which it is enclosed implies; and in essence it is similar to criticisms levelled at the Pharisees by the Essenes, and by the later rabbinical sages, who drew a sharp distinction between the Hakamim, whom they saw as their forerunners, and the 'false Pharisees', whom they regarded as enemies of true Judaism.
The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies. The aim of the Hakamic movement was to promote holiness and make it general. How was this to be done? The argument centred around two issues: the centrality and indispensability of the Temple, and the observance of the Law. On the first point, Jesus clearly sided with those who regarded the Temple as an obstacle to the general spread of holiness, since the concentration on the physical building, with its hierarchies, privileges (mostly hereditary) and wealth, was a form of separation from the people - a wall built against them. Jesus used the Temple as a preaching forum; but so had others who had opposed it, notably Isaiah and Jeremiah. The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new. On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated. Jesus, like many other pious Jews, saw holiness spreading to the whole people through the elementary schools and synagogues. But he went further than most of them by regarding the Temple as a source of evil and predicting its destruction, and by treating the Temple authorities and the whole central system of Judaic administration and law with silent contempt.
On the second issue, the degree to which the Law must be obeyed, the original argument between the Sadducees, who admitted only the written Pentateuch, and the Pharisees, who taught the Oral Law, had by Jesus' time been supplemented by a further argument among the Hakamim and Pharisees. One school, led by Shammai the Elder (c. 50 BC-c. 30 AD), took a rigorist view especially on matters of cleanliness and uncleanliness, an explosive area since it militated strongly against the ability of ordinary, poor people to achieve holiness. The rigorism of the Shammai school, indeed, was eventually to take his descendants and followers out of the rabbinical-Judaic tradition altogether, and they vanished like the Sadducees themselves. On the other hand, there was the school of Hillel the Elder, Shammai's contemporary. He came from the diaspora and was later referred to as "Hillel the Babylonian". He brought with him more humane and universalistic notions of Torah interpretation. To Shammai, the essence of the Torah lay in its detail; unless you got the detail exactly right, the system became meaningless and could not stand. To Hillel, the essence of the Torah was its spirit: if you got the spirit right, the detail could take care of itself. Tradition contrasted Shammai's anger and pedantry with Hillel's humility and humanity, but what was remembered best of all was Hillel's anxiety to make obeying the Law possible for all Jews and for converts. To a pagan who said he would become a Jew if he could be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel is said to have replied, "What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbour: this is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary - go and study it."
Jesus was a member of Hillel's school, and may have sat under him, for Hillel had many pupils. He repeated this famous saying of Hillel's and it is possible that he used other dicta, for Hillel was a famous aphorist. But of course, taken literally, Hillel's saying about the Torah is false. Doing as you would be done by is not the entire Torah. The Torah is only in part an ethical code. It is also, and in its essence, a series of absolute divine commands which cover a vast variety of activities many of which have no bearing at all on relations between men. It is not true that "all the rest is commentary". If it had been, other peoples, and the Greeks in particular, would have had far less difficulty in accepting it. "All the rest", from circumcision, to diet, to the rules of contact and cleanliness, far from being commentary were injunctions of great antiquity which constituted the great barriers between the pious Jews and the rest of humanity. Therein lay the great obstacle, not merely in universalizing Judaism but even in making its practice possible for all Jews.
Jesus' teaching career saw him translate Hillel's aphorism into a system of moral theology and, in doing so, strip the Law of all but its moral and ethical elements. It was not that Jesus was lax. Quite the contrary. In some respects he was stricter than many sages. He would not, for instance, admit divorce, a teaching which was later to become, and still remains today, enormously important. But, just as Jesus would not accept the Temple when it came between God and man's pursuit of holiness, so he dismissed the Law when it impeded, rather than assisted, the road to God.
Jesus' rigorism in taking Hillel's teaching to its logical conclusion led him to cease to be an orthodox sage in any sense which had meaning and, indeed, cease to be a Jew. He created a religion which was sui generis, and it is accurately called Christianity. He incorporated in his ethical Judaism an impressive composite of the eschatology he found in Isaiah, Daniel and Enoch, as well as what he found useful in the Essenes and the Baptist, so that he was able to present a clear perspective of death, judgment and the afterlife. And he offered this new theology to everyone within reach of his mission: pious Jews, the am ha-arez, the Samaritans, the unclean, the gentiles even. But, like many religious innovators, he had a public doctrine for the masses and a confidential one for his immediate followers. The latter centered on what would happen to him as a person, in life and in death, and therein lay his claim to be the Messiah - not just the Suffering Servant, but someone of far greater significance.
The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having "called all the people unto him", Jesus stated solemnly: "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile the man." This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man's obedience to the Torah which creates God's response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.
To most learned Jews, this was false doctrine because Jesus was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple - and it was on this that his enemies concentrated. False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offense of the "rebellious elder", was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; this was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him "rabbi". Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin - or whatever court it was - he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus' doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion - Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they become troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome. The circumstances attending Jesus' trial or trails appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels. But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.
What mattered was not the circumstance of his death but the fact that he was widely and obstinately believed, by an expanding circle of people, to have risen again. This gave enormous importance not just to his moral and ethical teaching but to his claim to be the Suffering Servant and his special eschatology. Jesus' immediate disciples grasped the importance of his death and resurrection as a "new testament" or witness to God's plan, the basis on which every individual could make a new covenant with God. But all they were capable of doing to further this gospel was to repeat Jesus' sayings and recount his life-story.
The real evangelical work was carried out by Paul of Tarsus, a diaspora Jew from Cilicia, whose family came from Galilee, and who returned to Palestine and studied under Gamaliel the Elder. He possessed the Pharasaic training to understand Jesus' theology, and began to explain it - once he was convinced that the resurrection was a fact and Jesus' claims to be the Christ true. It is often argued that Paul "invented" Christianity by taking the ethical teachings of Christ and investing them in a new theology which drew on the intellectual concepts of the Hellenistic diaspora. His distinction between "the flesh" and "the spirit" has been compared to Philo's body-soul dichotomy. It is also maintained that by "Christ" Paul had in mind something like Philo's "logos". But Philo was dealing in abstractions. For Paul, Christ was a reality. By body and soul, Philo meant the internal struggle within a man's nature. By spirit and flesh, Paul was referring to the external world - man was flesh, the spirit was God - or Christ.
The truth seems to be that both Jesus and Paul had their roots in Palestinian Judaism. Neither was introducing concepts from the Hellenistic diaspora. Both were preaching a new theology, and it was essentially the same theology. Jesus prophesied a new testament by the shedding of his blood "for many" and his resurrection. Paul taught that the prophecy had been accomplished, that the Christ had become incarnate in Jesus, and that a New Covenant had thereby come into existence and was offered to those who had faith in it.
Neither Jesus nor Paul denied the moral or ethical value of the Law. They merely removed the essence of it from its historical context, which both saw as outmoded. It is a crude oversimplification to say that Paul preached salvation by grace as opposed to salvation by works (that is, keeping the Law). What Paul said was that good works were the condition of remaining eligible for the New Covenant, but they do not in themselves suffice for salvation, which is obtained by grace. Both Jesus and Paul were true Jews in that they saw religion as a historical procession of events. They ceased to be Jews when they added a new event. As Paul said, when Christ became incarnate in Jesus, the basis of the Torah was nullified. At one time, the original Jewish covenant was the means whereby grace was secured. That, said Paul, was no longer true. God's plan had changed. The mechanism of salvation was now the New Testament, faith in Christ. The covenantal promises to Abraham no longer applied to his present descendants, but to Christians: "And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise." What Jesus challenged, and Paul specifically denied, was the fundamental salvation-process of Judaism: the election, the covenant, the Law. They were inoperative, superseded, finished. A complex theological process can be summed up simply: Jesus invented Christianity, and Paul preached it.
Christ and the Christians thus took from Judaism its universalist potential and inheritance. Jesus Christ himself had sought to fulfil the divine mission as forecast: "In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed." Paul carried this gospel deep into diaspora Jewry and to the gentile communities who lived alongside it. He not only accepted the logic of Jesus' Palestinian universalism, and transformed it into a general universalism, but denied the existence of the old categories. The "old man with his deeds", the former election and the Law, were "put off'"; the New Covenant, and its new elect, the "new man", formed in God's image and limited by that alone, were "put on". Men were eligible for faith and grace solely by their human condition, "Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all in all."
Here, then, in a sense was the universalistic reform programme of the Hellenistic reformers of Seleucid times. But whereas Menelaus and his intellectual allies had sought to universalize from above, in alliance with power and wealth, armies and tax-collectors - and so had inevitably driven the bulk of the community, not least the poor, into the arms of the Torah rigorists - Jesus and Paul universalized from below. Jesus was a learned Jew who said that learning was not necessary, who took the spirit and not the letter as the essence of the Law and who thus embraced the unlearned, the ignorant, the despised, the am ha-arez, made them indeed his special constituency. Paul carried the message to those who were outside the Law altogether. Indeed, unlike the Hellenizing reformers, he was able to draw upon an emotion deep in Judaism, deep in the ancient religion of Yahweh, a force which was almost the quintessence of the covenanting faith - the idea that God would overthrow the established order of the world, make the poor rich and the weak strong, prefer the innocent to the wise and elevate the lowly and humble. No Jew, not even Jesus, dwelt more eloquently on this theme than Paul, so the religion he preached was not only universalistic but revolutionary - a revolution, however, which was spiritualized and non-violent.
The portion of humanity ready and waiting for this message was enormous. The diaspora, through which Paul and others eagerly travelled, was vast. The Roman geographer Strabo said that the Jews were a power throughout the inhabited world. There were a million of them in Egypt alone. In Alexandria, perhaps the world's greatest city after Rome itself, they formed a majority in two out of five quarters. They were numerous in Cyrene and Berenice, in Pergamum, Miletus, Sardis, in Phrygian Apamea, Cyprus, Antioch, Damascus and Ephesus, and on both shores of the Black Sea. They had been in Rome for 200 years and now formed a substantial colony there; and from Rome they had spread all over urban Italy, and then into Gaul and Spain and across the sea into north-west Africa. Many of these diaspora Jews were pious to a fault and were to remain staunch observers of the Torah in its essential rigour. But others were waiting to be convinced that the essence of their faith could be kept, or even reinforced, by abandoning circumcision and the multitude of ancient Mosaic laws which made life in modern society so difficult. Still more ready for conversion were vast numbers of pious gentiles, close to the diaspora Jewish communities but hitherto separated from them precisely because they could not accept the rules which the Christians now said were unnecessary. So the slow spread of the new religion accelerated. Ethical monotheism was an idea whose time had come. It was a Jewish idea. But the Christians took it with them to the wider world, and so robbed the Jews of their birthright.
The bifurcation of Christianity and Judaism was a gradual process. To some extent it was determined by the actions of the Jews themselves. The consolidation of Judaism round the rigorous enforcement of Mosaic law, as a result of the crushing of the reform programme by the Maccabees, was the essential background to the origin and rise of Jewish Christianity. Equally, the drift of Jewish rigorism towards violence, and the head-on collision with the Graeco-Roman world which inevitably followed in 66-70 AD, finally severed the Christian branch of Judaism from its Jewish trunk. The earliest followers of Jewish Christ in Jerusalem undoubtedly regarded themselves as Jews. Even Stephen, the most extreme of them, went no further than to resurrect some of the intellectual principles of the old reform programme. In the long speech of defence he made before the Sanhedrin, he echoed the reformers' view that God could not be localized in the Temple: "the Most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne and earth my footstool: what house will ye build me saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? Hath not my hand made all these things?" But in his very next breath he called his accusers "uncircumcised in heart and ears" - that is, bad Jews - and both his attack and his execution by stoning were made within the framework of Judaism. Chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles makes it clear that during Paul's early mission the Jerusalem Christians included many Pharisees, who felt strongly that even gentile converts should be circumcised, and only with difficulty did Paul obtain exemption for his flock. In Judaea, Jewish followers of Christ - as they doubtless would have called themselves - continued to be circumcised and to observe many aspects of the Mosaic law until the catastrophe of 66-70 AD....
These two catastrophes, of 70 and 135 AD, effectively ended Jewish state history in antiquity. There were two immediate consequences of great historical significance. The first was the final separation of Judaism and Christianity. Paul, writing in the decade around 50 AD, had effectively repudiated the Mosaic law as the mechanism of justification and salvation, and in this (as we have seen) he was consistent with Jesus' teaching. At a meeting with the Jewish-Christian leaders in Jerusalem he had won the right to exempt his gentile converts from Jewish religious requirements. But none of this meant necessarily that Jews and Christians would come to regard their beliefs as mutually exclusive and their respective supporters as enemies of each other. The Gospel of Luke, written perhaps in the 60s, resembles in some ways the writings of Hellenistic Jews in the diaspora, directed at potential converts to Judaism. Luke's aim seems to have been to summarize and simplify the Law, which he saw as an enlightened body of Jewish customs - the ethics of a specific people. Piety was the same among Jews and gentiles: both were the means by which the soul was prepared to receive the gospel. The gentiles had their good customs too, and God did not discriminate against those who did not possess the Law, i.e. Jewish customs. Nor did God discriminate against Jews. Both categories were saved by means of faith and grace.
The notion that gentiles and Jews could both subscribe to Christianity as a sort of super-religion could not survive the events of 66-70, which effectively destroyed the old Christian-Jewish church of Jerusalem. Most of its members must have perished. The survivors scattered. Their tradition ceased in any way to be mainstream Christianity and survived merely as a lowly sect, the Ebionites, eventually declared heretical. In the vacuum thus created, Hellenistic Christianity flourished and became the whole. The effect was to concentrate Christian belief still more fiercely on Paul's presentation of Christ's death and resurrection as the mechanism of salvation - itself clearly foreshadowed in Jesus' teaching - and on the nature of this anointed saviour. What did Jesus claim to be? The term he himself used most often, and others used of him, was 'Son of Man'. It may have meant a great deal; or little or even nothing at all - just Jesus saying he was a man, or the man for his particular mission. It can be argued that Jesus regarded himself as nothing more than a charismatic Jewish hasid. But the notion that Jesus was divine, implicit in his resurrection and his foresight of this miracle, and in his subsequent epiphanies, was present from the very beginnings of Apostolic Christianity. Moreover, it was accompanied by the equally early belief that he had instituted the ceremony of the eucharist, in anticipation of his death and resurrection for the expiation of sin, in which his flesh and blood (the substance of the sacrifice) took the form of bread and wine. The emergence of the eucharist, "the holy and perfect sacrifice", as the Christian substitute for all Jewish forms of sacrifice, confirmed the doctrine of Jesus' apotheosis. To the question Was Jesus God or Man?, the Christians therefore answered: both. After 70 AD, their answer was unanimous and increasingly emphatic. This made a complete breach with Judaism inevitable. The Jews could accept the decentralization of the Temple: many had long done so, and soon all had to do so. They could accept a different view of the Law. What they could not accept was the removal of the absolute distinction they had always drawn between God and man, because that was the essence of Jewish theology, the belief that above all others separated them from the pagans. By removing that distinction, the Christians took themselves irrecoverably out of the Judaic faith.
Moreover, they did so in a way which made antagonism between the two forms of monotheism inevitable, irreconcilable and bitter. The Jews could not concede the divinity of Jesus as God-made-man without repudiating the central tenet of their belief. The Christians could not concede that Jesus was anything less than God without repudiating the essence and purpose of their movement. If Christ was not God, Christianity was nothing. If Christ was God, then Judaism was false. There could be absolutely no compromise on this point. Each faith was thus a threat to the other.
The quarrel was all the more bitter because, while differing on the essential, the two faiths agreed on virtually everything else. The Christians took from Judaism the Pentateuch (including its morals and ethics), the prophets and the wisdom books, and far more of the apocrypha than the Jews themselves were prepared to canonize. They took the liturgy, for even the eucharist had Jewish roots. They took the notion of the Sabbath day and feast-days, incense and burning lamps, psalms, hymns and choral music, vestments and prayers, priests and martyrs, the reading of the sacred books and the institution of the synagogue (transformed into the church). They took even the notion of clerical authority - which the Jews would soon modify - in the shape of the high-priest whom the Christians turned into patriarchs and popes. There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology, which was not adumbrated in Judaism....
In the diaspora, the expanding Christian communities not only purloined the best Jewish theological and social ideas, and so the role of "light to the gentiles", but made increasing inroads into the Jewish masses themselves, diaspora Jews forming one of the chief sources of Christian converts.
Not least, the Christians sprang from the Jewish literary tradition and therefore they inherited, among other things, Jewish sacred polemic.... The very earliest Christian writings assume the hostile tone with which Jewish sectarians addressed each other. Once the break between Christianity and Judaism became unbridgeable, the only form of discourse between them was polemical. The four gospels, which quickly became the Torah of Christianity, incorporated the Jewish polemic-sectarian tradition.... Alas, these professional religious polemics, these literary exercises in odium theologicum, were lifted out of their historical context and became the basis for a general Christian indictment of the Jewish people....
The collapse of the Jewish-Christian church after 70 AD and the triumph of Hellenistic Christianity led the Jews, in turn, to castigate the Christians.... The prayer against heretics, originally known as "the Benediction to Him who humbles the arrogant", became part of the daily service, or Amidah, as the Twelfth Benediction. At one time it was specifically directed again the Sadducees. Under the rule of Raban Gamaliel II (c. 80-c.115 AD), the Twelfth Benediction or Birkat ha-Minim ("Benediction concerning heretics") was recast to apply to Christians and this seems to have been the point at which the remaining Jewish followers of Christ were turned out of the synagogue. By the 132 rising, Christians and Jews were seen as open opponents or even enemies.... The hostility varied, in place and time, but it tended to increase.
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