Theme for discussion:
In what respect did the "Academy" differ from a school?
CHAPTER XXVI.
JUDAISM AND THE CHURCH.
The Development of Christianity.
In the meantime the new religion that had sprung from Judaism was entering its second stage of development. We have seen (p. 133) how its adoption of pagan ideas tended to separate Jews from Christians theologically. We will now see how the trend of events tended to separate them socially. There were still two Christian sects—the pagan Christians, many of them Greeks, to whom Jesus was the Son of God, whose blood shed on the cross was an atonement for the sins of mankind and whose coming abrogated the Law. These had small sympathy with the Jews in spite of the fact that it was the lofty morality of the Hebrew Scriptures that formed the backbone of the new Faith.
On the other hand there were the Jewish Christians, the original group, but now the small minority, who remained Jews in all respects, but clung to the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, that he had risen from the grave and would come a second time to gratify the hopes not fulfilled in his first advent. They also fostered the belief that they could cure by miracles and drive out demons by declaration of a formula of their faith; for Jesus had also believed in this power of exorcism. They still maintained to a degree the customs of the Essenes (from which body, perhaps they may have been an outgrowth),—particularly the duty of voluntary poverty. Indeed, the Sanhedrin seriously considered whether they might not be regarded as Jews.
But when Judaism and Jews became discredited through loss of land and Temple and Jews were taxed for the privilege of remaining loyal to the former, these Jewish Christians began to drift away from a people who had lost power and status in the world, and threw in their lot with the controlling majority. Such is the way of the world. Furthermore, some of the Jewish country folk, losing faith in the validity of Judaism through the loss of its Temple, were attracted to Christianity with its new scheme of salvation, in which Jesus took the place which had been filled by the altar of sacrifice. In this way many of the Gentile proselytes to Judaism in Alexandria and Asia Minor went over to the new creed. So the loss of the Temple with its priestly service had much to do with the spread of Christianity.