Just How Jewish was 1st century Christianity?

45degreeN

Probably everyone here knows that Paul was one of the best Rabbinical scholars of the ancient near East. And we are all pretty familiar with the "break" made by Jesus into a new covenant when He placed Himself squarely where the messiah would be as far as the Jewish scholarship was concerned.

But how many of us realize that rabbinical scholarship had moved far along the lines of Pauline thinking even before Jesus' appearance. That aside from including Jesus as the messiah, Paul's theology was not revolutionary in the Jewish sense.

Even as to the "eternal laws of Moses" there were Jewish scholars who had participated in a general reduction of the law to just a few principles. (certainly not all Rabbis but, but more than a few.) We know that Jesus listed two principles: Love God and love your neighbor. Even those two were not as "original" as some people might think. Other Rabbis had taught these two prior to Jesus' time on Earth.

The main problem Paul faced was the idea that God had intended for the Jews to be His ambassadors to the world, to bring awareness of God and His principles to everyone and they had failed miserably in this task. The Jews of first century Israel were an insular people, they had isolated themselves and their doctrines and rarely if ever offered them to outsiders. Paul's wonderful vision was to bring them to the whole world and remarkably he succeeded wildly.

The churches Paul started were primarily a form of "neo-Judaism." The battles Paul fought over "following the law" were battles other Rabbis also fought amongst other synagogues it was not unique to Paul and his ministries. While the gentile converts didn't identify themselves at all as Jews, primarily their theology was remarkably Jewish if it came from Paul.

Where we in this modern day talk about the "eternal laws" yet the Jews of first century Israel never did deal with this issue the way we do here on this debate forum. Prior to Jesus coming, the Mosaic law had been modified many times (probably hundreds of times)and our modern confusion was in the use of the term "eternal" (in Hebrew: the word Olam).

You can read about this in the Christian think-tank at

www.christian-thinktank.com/finaltorah.html the author there documents his thesis well with literature of the period and it just might shed some light on the issue over the fate of the law we have spent so much time exploring here.
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Mattathias

45degreeN · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2008 10:30 am Post subject:

Contained within OT Judaism is the trinitarian idea and even though the typical Jew might disagree with that, a simple discussion would expose their ignorance of their own scriptures. Yes, I think Paul would have taught these principles. But I cant point to any place in scripture where he wrote it.

I dont think that the trinity is an "essential" doctrine anyway so.
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