Early Christianity’s Relationship with Judaism: A Historical Perspective
Christianity, after its first century of emergence, can be thought of as a religion desperately attempting to define its relationship to Judaism. Its founder, whose exact divine status was the subject of debate among Christians, was a practicing Jew who riffed on and provided new interpretations of traditional Hebrew scripture.
The defining feature, then, of pre-medieval Christian history is one where the lines between it and Judaism are codified through creeds (like the Nicene Creed), patristic writings (like those of Origen or Augustine), and the emergence of new practices of Christianity that rejected traditional Jewish practices (like keeping the Sabbath or practicing circumcision).
The issue with ‘distinguishing’ the ‘religion’ of ‘Judaism’ and the ‘religion’ of ‘Christianity’ in antiquity is that there was no one Judaism and one Christianity. In fact, sometimes, they were the same.
The Ebionites, for instance, were sometimes considered Christians who practiced Judaism. Like the Ethiopian Christians, they kept the Sabbath and continued performing circumcision. This stands in contrast which another Christian sect, the Marcionites, that struggled to reconcile the teachings of Judaism and Christianity so much that Marcion went so far as to claim that they did not follow the ‘Old Testament God’ at all.
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