When Christianity Fell – Part A by slaveofone
I purposely chose for this title a term heavy with theological connotation. For it has seemed to me that just as there was a historic point at which mankind fell away from the perfection of Yahweh, so there was a historic point at which Christianity did so as well. Here I will argue that Christianity jumped the shark
(to use a pop cultural term) when it began to lose foundation, authority, and definition in Judaism. I do not mean by this that Christianity lost its way once gentiles began bringing Hellenism into the church. Greek thinking and pagan philosophy had long be assimilated into Judaism already. And one could argue that it brought as much good as ill to the Christian table. The point is, however, that whereas the Jews made outside ideas and ways of thinking subservient to their own perspective and traditions, in Christianity, it was Judaism that became subservient.
We can easily see things which would inevitably lead to feelings of estrangement and hostility between Christianity and Judaism in the first (AD 66-70) and third (AD 132-135) Jewish revolts. When Jerusalem and the very Temple of YHWH itself, the twin centers of Judaism, were threatened with destruction, Jewish and gentile believers left them both to be destroyed. After such great a tragedy, not one gentile Christian wrote or spoke to comfort Zion. And when Judaism rallied behind Bar Kochba, hailed by Rabbi Akiba as the Messiah and their last and final opportunity to re-establish themselves as the chosen people, believers of Yeshua didn’t follow. Apparently, they were violently persecuted for it. For a time, Christianity must have looked really stupid, not only outside but within, as this declared Messiah led the Jews against principalities and powers, overthrew them, and returned the exiles to Jerusalem in triumph. When this last rebellion was crushed, however, it provided Christians with salt to smother into the wounds of those Jews who had not long since tormented them.
It was during the second century that Christianity began earnestly walking the road of Judaic abandonment. I trace the beginning of the end to the writing of the Epistle of Barnabas about AD 130. Barnabas was written to instruct new believers in the way of Yeshua. Though it borrows a great deal from Hebrew scriptures and even Rabbinic sources, it betrays an inherent lack of knowledge and understanding. Here is a document that would have not a little impact on the church, which felt free to parrot the Judaic perspective as if grounded and established in it, when this was clearly not the case. To make matters worse, even though the author of Barnabas concluded that Torah was eternally binding on believers, he spiritualized the entire thing and vehemently rejected the written law, which had the effect of making any Jew…let alone a Jewish believer…seem redundant and perhaps even spiritually absurd (quite a contrast to those first Apostles and believers of Acts who could not even conceive of followers of Yeshua who weren’t converted Jews). This had the effect of yanking Judaism out from under Christianity.