The Conflict Between Judaism and Christianity

Christianity, as you will learn in Chapter 12, began life as a splinter movement within Judaism, following the death by crucifixion of its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth, in c.

The philosophical conflict between Judaism and Christianity sprang from a number of incompatible views on the nature of God, the covenant, salvation from sin, and the proper interpretation of biblical texts. For rabbinic Judaism, any material representation of God— either in the form of an image or a living human being—was barely acceptable, and even then only as metaphor. For Christianity, however, the embodiment of the divine in Jesus as the “Christ” soon became a central doctrine of the early Church. As for God’s covenant with Israel, Paul argued that the Christian community had—at least at that moment in time—displaced the Jews as true heirs of the biblical promises made to the Patriarchs and the prophets; the Jews, he insisted, had alienated God by their rejection of Jesus and had (if only temporarily) forfeited their intimate relation to the deity.

With the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity early in the fourth century, Judaism found itself facing not only a determined religious antagonist in the Christian Church but also an even more powerful political antagonist, as a succession of Christian emperors sought to stifle Judaism throughout the Roman Empire by imposing punitive legislation on the Jews and by condoning acts of violence against synagogues. In the eyes of the late fourth­century Christian theologian St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407 ce), the Jews were the devil’s spawn, their synagogues the dwelling places of all evils, and any civil relations between Christians and Jews, he argued, represented a betrayal of God.- Against such a background of institutionalized hatred, the Jews of Christian Europe struggled for the next millennium to maintain not just their faith, but their very lives.