The Biggest Questions About Judaism & Jesus ANSWERED

- Christians and Jews, the best of friends. But at times things have become a little rocky, like the dark ages and the middle ages and a good portion of everything before the mid-20th century. Cut from the same Abrahamic cloth, the two religions have a lot in common; origins tied to Jerusalem, reverence for the entire Hebrew Bible and profound moral concepts that preach forgiveness and 'love thy neighbor'. But among some serious differences, the two religions have a distinct jumping off point: A man known as Jesus. Jesus, take the wheel. How did this split happen? Why don't the Jews believe Jesus is the Messiah? And why don't the Christians keep the laws of the Torah for instance, shrimp cocktails and bacon cheeseburgers became permissible for them, while circumcision became optional? And why did one become one of the most populous religions in the world while the other thousands of years older remains perpetually few in number? (upbeat music) Let's jump to Israel in the midst of the Roman occupation. When Rome first arrived in 63BCE, Emperor Pompey put Hyrcanus in charge as both Nasi - or Prince, and also as high priest of the temple, mostly to be a puppet. Rome kept its control by aligning itself with the Jewish aristocracy, as well as the priestly class who ran the temple rituals. For the most part, all Rome really cared about was collecting taxes. So they allowed the Jewish people to practice their rituals and excuse them from worshiping the emperor as a deity. A kindness not afforded to others conquered by Rome. However, these taxes were steep and compounded with the Torah-mandated tithes to the priests. They made it nearly impossible for peasant farmers to make ends meet. Many of them had to take out loans with crushing interest rates and ended up defaulting and becoming indentured servants to the aristocracy. The dire straits of the peasant class, along with concern from the compromised Jewish authority, led to an air of rebellion. Jews at the time were fractured with as many as 24 different recorded sects. There were Hellenized Jews, the Sadducees, the Pharisees and then there were more radicalized extremist sects generally referred to as "Zealots". Though they were actually several distinct splinter groups. The compromised Jewish leadership, lack of unity and economic hardships, all bubbled over not only into rebellion, but also messianic fervor. During this period, hundreds of leaders arose citing Scripture, predicting the end of days and amassing followers. Then a Jewish man named Jesus entered the revolutionary rank. No matter what your faith is there's no disagreement that Jesus was an iconic figure. Libraries are filled with books about the man who birthed one of the biggest movements and religions in history. Jesus, Greek for Joshua was born sometime around six or four BCE in Bethlehem and became a carpenter in the city of Nazareth. Hence his title, Jesus of Nazareth. He was born and raised in the Jewish faith and circumcised according to tradition at eight days. His mother was named Mary, his father was Joseph and he had at least one brother James, but likely other siblings as well. Upon returning to Jerusalem, he became engrossed in temple worship and eventually started teaching followers. Around the age of 30, Jesus started to accuse the Jewish temple of corruption. Whether his preaching was that of revolutionary incitement or universal pacifism, varies depending on the source. But either way, Jesus had tapped into the messianic fervor common for the time becoming known as the son of man. After meeting the preacher John who baptized him in the Jordan river, Jesus is reported to have performed miracles of healing the sick and feeding the hungry. Eventually, he had that iconic dinner eternalized in Leonardo da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper". It's generally believed to have been a Passover Seder, but accounts in the book of John problematize that. So maybe Jesus and his apostles were just doing what Jews do best, eating. Preach! When one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot betrayed him that very night, Jesus was brought before a Jewish court and found guilty of blasphemy. The court then handed him over to the Roman governor Pontius pilot. He was tried and executed by Rome for sedition sometime between 30 and 35 CE. Jesus was crucified. The manner of capital punishment most common in Rome with the letters INRI, an abbreviation for King of the Jews over his cross. Not the mocking statement one might think, the inscription was instead a label of his crime. He claimed kingship a crime otherwise known as treason. By all Christian gospel accounts, Jesus was buried then rose from the dead three days later to ascend into heaven as the Messiah of all mankind. Dozens, if not hundreds of Messiah figures were tried and executed by Rome. But what is a Messiah? And where does the term come from? The Hebrew word Mashiach literally means anointed. The term the first to Jewish figures that are inaugurated into leadership via ritual anointing with holy oils. Moses anointed his brother, Aaron as the first high priest as well as Joshua, his own successor. Samuel, the prophet anointed the first Jewish King Saul and then David. The written Torah has virtually no specific mention of a Messiah figure. Though it does foretell the Jews exile and return. It's not until we get to the prophets of Tanakh, such as Isaiah, Micah, Zephaniah, and Ezekiel that we start to get clear pictures of a singular leadership ushering in the return of godliness to the world. The 11th century rabbinic scholar Rambam streamlines the Torah's criteria for the Jewish messiah as the following; 1) comes from the line of Kings i.e the line of David to restore the Jewish leadership. 2) will rebuild the temple and lead back the Jewish people to Israel from exile. 3) will reinstate all the Torah laws in their proper form. The Jewish idea of Messiah is a wise man certainly not God himself, a leader and a prophet. Much more along the lines of Bar Kochba. The prophet, Isaiah foretold the coming of a hero who with the spirit of the Lord shall judge the earth revealing the full knowledge of God to the land. Then he hits on the famous, wolves lying with lambs, leopards lying with goats, depiction of world peace. Nowhere in the prophets does the Messiah perform miracles, rise from the dead or need to be born from a virgin. In fact, the virgin birth idea comes from a translation of Isaiah 7:14 mistaking the Hebrew word for young woman to mean virgin. The miracles didn't disqualify Jesus as the Messiah, but the continuing dispersal of the Jewish people and the unrestored lack of world peace after his death, that Isaiah foresaw and the unrestored Davidic line directly challenges the few messianic prophecies the Jews did have. It wasn't until Paul came along that the early Christian doctrine went from being somewhat at odds with Judaism to contradicting what the religion stands for altogether. After Jesus's crucifixion, his apostles continued to preach his message with his brother James at the head of the Christian congregation. The story goes that when a Pharisee named Saul was struck blind with the prophetic vision of Jesus, everything changed. After this vision Saul renaming himself, Paul brought a whole new dimension to the narrative. The story of Jesus went from that of a revolutionary man to an embodiment of God himself. Very different from Judaism. Paul decided circumcision wasn't necessary and the Laws of Moses no longer applied. He even began converting non-Jews. This rubbed James and other leaders, like Peter the wrong way. And they summoned Paul to the Jerusalem council. But eventually the early Christian Church embraced Paul's approach of appealing to non-Jews, and at that point Christianity became its own distinct religion. Paul's shift to a new target demographic was also accompanied by a large redesign. The Hebrew prayers were changed to the common tongue of Greek. Paul believed that the covenant of Moses had been fulfilled with Jesus's sacrifice and a new covenant was forged. The new perspective was that the single act of Adam and Eve's original sin in the Garden of Eden condemned all of humanity. So the single act of Jesus's sacrifice would be the rectification for all of humanity. As said in Romans 5:18, "Therefore just as one man's trespass "led to condemnation for all, "so one man's act of righteousness "leads to justification and life for all." The practitioners didn't need to do the 613 commandments that Judaism held so sacred. A follower simply needed to believe in Jesus and they would be granted eternal salvation. The five books of Moses regarded as the fundamental revelation of Judaism was relabeled as the Old Testament, while the writings of the apostles, the epistles of Paul, the book of Revelation and a few other writings would comprise a New Testament. With the new religion rooted in Judaism, but now combined with a doctrine that welcomed assimilation into the society at large, conversion for Hellenized Jews sounded extraordinarily appealing. The Jews had always been outsiders with religious practices that resisted integration into surrounding cultures. But now pagan converts could jump on board without having to change their dress, livelihood, diet, and in many cases their religious customs. As Christianity often adopted foreign practices to encourage conversion. Over the next few 100 years, Christianity would spread as it developed its core beliefs and practices. The movement caught on by the tens of thousands, a size which threatened Rome's security leading to Christianity being outlawed. Christians were openly persecuted with the full brutality of the Roman empire. Then one night in 312 CE on the Eve of battle, Constantine the first had a vision in a dream of a cross imposed over the sun. The next day he won the battle that granted him the emperorship. The combination of vision and victory was good enough for him. So he legalized Christianity in Rome once again with the Edict of Milan, protecting worshipers and freeing them to practice how they wanted. Side note, Constantine's mother was already a Christian. So that probably nudged him in this direction as well. In 325 CE, Constantine had bishops set Christianity with the writings of the Nicene Creed in Byzentine, modern day Turkey. The religions practices and beliefs were finally codified and Jesus was officially declared the literal Son of God. In 380 CE, the Emperor Theodosius the first was baptized and he made Christianity the sole official religion of the empire, banning all other religions. Finally free of persecution, and for once nationally advantageous, the religion flourished with the power of Rome behind it. Jews on the other hand weren't doing so well. At this point, after nearly 300 years of exile, the Jews were still recovering from Rome's decimation of Jerusalem. Adding insult to injury, Rome renamed the region, Palestine after one of the Jewish people's arch enemies in an attempt to wipe out any Jewish remnant from their homeland. As terrible as that had been, the persecution from the Christians in the following centuries arguably would be worse. Before, Jews had to contend with the pagan world, but Christians actively sought to convert other religions and didn't tolerate those who resisted. Judaism's existence threatened their claim that Christianity was the spiritual inheritance to Israel. Jews fought to remain in Palestine as Christians claimed holy sites in the land, including the location of the crucifixion, Bethlehem, Jesus's birthplace and the church of the Holy Sepulcher. With the codification of the New Testament at the end of the fourth century, the focus and story of Jesus's death shifted from the Romans who crucified him to the Jews who found him guilty of blasphemy. In this now official Christian doctrine, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, historically known for his brutality and sentencing many revolutionaries to the cross, suddenly became a sympathetic figure who tried to pardon the condemned Jesus, but failed due to the insistence of the Jewish populace. As a result throughout the following centuries, labeling Jews Christ killers was used to justify horrible acts of persecution including riots, burning of synagogues, forced conversions and worse. But they had a brief reprieve of relative calm for a couple of centuries that all ended when Emperor Justinian came to power and renewed persecutions for anti-Jewish edicts. He removed safeguards for Jews rights and essentially legislated them as an inferior class. Though Rome fell in 476 CE, the feud between the Jews and Christians would grow in the coming middle ages and beyond with the crusades, the Spanish inquisition, blood libels and the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492. Persecution took on a new dimension with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Eventually, the two religions would somewhat make peace in the modern era. After the catastrophe of the Holocaust, the attitudes of Christians began to change. In 1965, the Catholic church published the Nostra Aetate which mitigated Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion and argued that modern day Jews shouldn't be held accountable for the act. With the founding of the modern state of Israel, many Christian groups have pledged support and aid for both the Jewish nation and the state of Israel. And though the two groups may still have many points of contention, their disagreements are much more likely to be dealt with via interfaith dialogue than with violence and persecution. Thank you so much for watching. We're going on a short break, but we'll be back with the next part of the series in a few months. In the meantime, feel free to check out our other shows and turn on the notification bell so you know when we drop season two.