JEWS AND CHRISTIANS LEARNING TO RELATE PART 1: THE RETURN OF CHRISTIANITY TO ITS JEWISH ROOTS |
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For the first time in almost 2,000 years, Jews and Christians are learning how to be friends and relate to one another with respect and appreciation. To fully understand how new and how delicate this relationship is, we must know our history and what has brought us to this moment.
If charted out graphically, the history of Jewish-Christian relations would look more like a circle that is about to be completed but still has an open gap. The beginning of the circle some 2,000 years ago is from the time of Acts 2 when the early church was born and was an internal sect of the Jewish faith.
The various stages of the relationship included a separation into two totally separate faiths who then became enemies. Over the last 500 years the trajectory began to change, and the circle began to close as a large segment of Christianity returned to its biblical foundations. While we have made tremendous progress in mending the breach that was our history, we still have a way to go before it can be described as repaired. |
Early Jewish Christianity Becomes Increasingly Gentile |
Today, most Christians understand Jesus was Jewish, as were his disciples, the apostles, and even all Christianity. This is where the early church and our journey begins. All that we hold dear as Christians came through the Jewish people, and the better we understand the Jewish roots of our faith, the stronger our Christian faith becomes.
The early Christian movement—known as “The Way”— was entirely Jewish for almost 10 years after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. The book of Acts chronicles early tensions between the mainstream Jewish community and the early believers in Jesus. In fact, there were times when Jews persecuted the apostles for preaching Jesus. For example, Steven was stoned to death, and when a Jewish mob sought to kill Paul, the Romans put him into custody in Caesarea to save his life. But at this point, these were internal squabbles within Judaism.
Within a few years, gentiles began to join the early church, and tensions surfaced within the movement itself—between the Jewish believers in Jesus and the gentile converts coming in from the pagan, Roman society. Many of Paul’s epistles address matters of disagreement between these different groups inside the early church.
As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire it endured periods of intense persecution. As long as it had been a sect of the legal Jewish religion, the believers were safe. But this became impossible as the two faiths developed quite separately from the other. Christians were not just persecuted by zealous Jews but also the Roman authorities.
In addition to an ideological separation, the two faiths also became separated geographically. After Rome destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70, the headquarters for the Jewish faith moved north into the Galilee at Yavne; Jewish leaders began to look inward as they focused on the survival of Judaism while in exile and without a temple. The headquarters for the Christian faith began to develop in Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, where churches and their leadership were quickly becoming less Jewish and predominantly gentile. |
—by Susan Michael, ICEJ USA Director (www.icejusa.org) and creator of Israel Answers |
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WHAT IS THE JEWISH CONNECTION TO THE LAND? |
Despite many expulsions and millennia of persecution, Jews have maintained a continuous presence in the land—and their eternal capital, Jerusalem. |
| IS CHRISTIAN ZIONISM BIBLICAL? |
Christian Zionism is rooted in the Abrahamic covenant, which is described in the book of Genesis and confirmed throughout the Bible. |
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The US Branch of the ICEJ has developed IsraelAnswers.com, an easy-to-use website, to help the American Christian community find the information needed to defend Israel and their own support of Israel. |
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International Christian Embassy Jerusalem - USA, Inc. PO Box 332974 | Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37133 (615) 895-9830 | Email |
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