|
|
The main thrust of these anti-Judaic premises could be summarised thus:9
- (1) The church is the New Israel, being the expression of the New Covenant in Christ.
-
(2) The Jews killed Christ.10
- (3) For this reason, and because the Jews did not recognise Jesus as the Messiah, they are rejected by God. The fall of the temple is a sign they are no longer the chosen people.
-
(4) Typology negatively contrasts Christian virtues with Judaism.11
- (a) The exposition of the christological meaning of the scriptures shows Christ to be the Messiah long promised by the prophets.
-
(b) The law of Moses, in particular the ritual law, is said to be abrogated in favour of a spiritual law.12
- (c) Salvation history as revealed in the Holy Writings was interpreted in terms of a dialectic of judgement and promise, which reinterprets the past, present, and future in terms of the response to Christ, and describes the election of the gentile church in supersessionist terms of God's rejection of the Jews.
‘Christ’ (
), the Greek translation of the Hebrew (
), appears in the New Testament as a title for Jesus before the end of the first century (Mark 8: 27–33; Colossians 12: 18). Outside the New Testament, references to Jesus Christ are few. Tacitus (Ann 15.44)13 said that the Christians were named after a ‘Christus’ who had been condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, while Josephus (Ant. 20.9.1) speaks of the martyrdom of James, ‘a brother of Jesus who is called Christ’.
Sources
As pointed out, the topic under examination—the tracing of relations between Judaism and Christianity from the first century until the sixth century and their moving apart—is fraught with difficulty, the problem