Quote:
Originally posted by dtb
You're kidding, right? No one really believes this, do they? What, exactly, would he have converted to? There was no such thing as "Christianity" until centuries after his death.
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The essential validity of that point is drowned in the hyperbole in which it is stated. There was no
seperate thing called "Christianity" for probably 150 years or so after the death (or not-death, natch) of the man who came to be called Jesus.
However, the Jesus-cult was probably coequal with the other Jewish political parties of first century Judea by about 135 C.E. --- so you would talk about the Essenes, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Jesus Party (using whatever term was then used) as being movements within Judaism. The destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. pretty much ended the Sadducees, who had been dominant to that point, and the defeat of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt in 135 probably catapulted the Jesus Party to a position of equality in the now-underground Jewish religion.
The fact that the Council of Jerusalem allowed the Jesus Party to recruit members
without requiring adherence to dietary laws or circumcision (which was a taboo form of human mutilation among the Hellenistic residents of the Mediterranean region) gave the Jesus Movement a recruiting edge over other sects within Judaism. The foremost surviving competitor, Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism, was thus the target of the Jesus Movement's ire, and explains the latent or patent anti-Semitism of the early Christian church, where "Pharisee" is a synonym for "any non-Christian Jew." Combine this with the Jesus Movement's whacked-out millenial worldview saying that holy justice was imminent, and you have a recipe for success for the chaotic times to come within the Roman Empire. Around the same time, Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism made the choice to go toward a matrilineal ethnic identity, and away from any kind of proselytization, which made recruiting difficult.
There was a thing called Christianity then, but it looked too much like any other form of then-existing Judaism to consider it a Church.
