In the Western world, Christians imagine Jesus as tall, probably with blond hair and beard, blue eyes, and wearing a white robe and an other-worldly expression. Almost certainly, he was short by modern standards and dark-skinned. His black beard was long and untrimmed. He undoubtedly wore earlocks, the peyot that are displayed today not only by the ultra-Orthodox but were once worn by all Jews as a matter of course. It is legitimate to infer this from the fact that Yemenite Jews, who had been separated from the mainstream of Judaism for many centuries, turned out to be wearing the earlocks when they were brought to Israel in 1948. The practice of cutting the rest of the hair close in order to emphasize the earlocks is modern and is not followed by the Yemenites. The New Testament is silent on the point, which was doubtlessly taken for granted at the time. We know from the Gospels that he wore fringes on his garments like other Jews. Like other Jews, he wore tefillin (called "phylacteries" in the Gospels) when he prayed formally, and perhaps at other times, and he took it for granted that others would do the same. He objected only when they were ostentatious in wearing them in public, as some did in his day. He observed the feasts and fasts, and he must have gone to the ritual bath on appropriate occasions to purify himself (before each Sabbath and before celebration of festivals and feasts; totaling at least 59 times a year), for we know from archaeological findings that the ritual bath (mikvah) was in common use in Jesus' time. He said the customary blessings when he drank wine (Kiddush) and when he ate bread (ha-motzi). He washed his hands whenever he sat down to eat (considered a type of immersion), thought apparently his disciples sometimes neglected to do so, without being reproved by him.

He personally obeyed all the commandments, ethical and ritual, and took part in the sacrificial worship of the Temple when he was in Jerusalem. Like the prophets in whose tradition he stood, he objected to these things (ethical and ritual obedience to Torah) only when they were done mechanically, without the intention toward God that made them valid, and without the social morality that God demanded above all.

Jesus was a faithful and observant Jew, according to the halachah, the interpretation of the Torah, accepted in his day. He did not regard the Jewish Law itself as mechanical and ritualistic, or those who kept it carefully as spiritually decadent. He loved the Torah and observed it with the deepest faithfulness and spiritual dedication. He lived by it until his last breath.

The "real" Jewish Jesus was in no way like the gentle Gentile Jesus, seen always as a meek and non-offensive teacher as portrayed in the Christian tradition. While he advocated the transcendence of anger to the point of loving enemies, he evidently did not always avoid it himself (take for instance the cleaning of the Temple). His criticism of all religious phoniness is as direct and even brutal as anything to be found in religious history. In this, he was the toughest of teachers. Yet his compassion for sinners is rightly regarded as remarkable, and it is this that marked him out as the bearer of a distinctive message concerning divine compassion.

If this message aroused opposition, and it seems that it did, it was not because it was un-Jewish. It was not. Rather, Jesus' convictions concerning the compassion of God for sinners and the way human beings should imitate it went even beyond what some of the devout of his day had been able to imagine of God. And if Jesus was scathing in his criticism of religious phoniness, it was not because he was opposed to Judaism, or regarded it as intrinsically defective, but because he wanted the Torah to be fulfilled by everyone as completely and perfectly as possible, from the heart.

His personal name was Yeshua, in the Aramaic he spoke, or Yehoshua in Hebrew, a very common name usually translated as Joshua. We get the form Jesus from the Greek rendering of the Aramaic name Yeshua, which comes out as Iesous, which is Jesus in Latin and also in English. His parents were Yossef and Mariam, or Miriam. He had brothers called Yaakov (James), Yosef, Shimon (Simon), and Yehudah (Judah). He also had sisters, but their names were not remembered.

Jesus was probably born a few years before the date usually reckoned as the beginning of the Common or Christian era, during the reign of Herod the Great (4 B.C.E.). Unfortunately, we have no reliable means of ascertaining the exact date. The methods usually employed depend on the birth stories in Matthew & Luke, which have many obviously legendary elements, and in any case do not agree with each other (check it out for yourself). He died during the rule of the Roman governor, or Perfect, Pontius Pilatus, which lasted from 26 to 36 C.E. It seems certain that the Romans executed him because they regarded him as an insurgent, on account of his reputation as a claimant to the title of Messiah, whether or not he actually made the claim. The Gospels do tell a story of growing conflict between Jesus and SOME of his fellow Jews {Sadducees and the Shammai Pharisees but not the Hillel Pharisees], ending in a religious trial before the highest and most solemn court of his people, which condemns him for blasphemy on account of a claim to be the Messiah and hands him over to the Romans for execution. This is the basis of the ancient and long-standing belief that the Jews killed Christ.

Answer for yourself: Did the Jews kill Christ (Messiah)?

There are many stories in the Gospels that suggest that they did, but upon close examination seem exceedingly improbable. The Jews did not kill Jesus because they had no reason to do so. He was not guilty of any religious offense. It is in the highest degree improbable that such a trial before the Sanhedrin as we read of in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew ever took place. What we read in the Gospels about the trial of Jesus is the product of later Christian imagination, and it reflects Christian, not Jewish, views of the nature of the Messiah.
It was not the Jews but the Romans who killed Christ. They did it for their own political reasons; evidently, the Romans did believe him to be a claimant to the title of "The Messiah", although he made no such claim (such as promise to be the Messiah who would liberate Israel from Roman bondage). No doubt, the Romans correctly understood that from their own point of view a Messiah must be a rebel and an insurgent, since he is expected to deliver the Jewish people from pagan domination. In any case, enough people thought Jesus was the Messiah (both Jewish and Romans) to constitute a political danger to Roman rule. No one should any longer imagine that it was the Jews who were the Christ-killers.

We cannot reconstruct the order of the events in Yeshua's life from the Gospels, because the writers of the Gospels did not know what it was themselves, as was already recognized in the second century. Nevertheless, it is possible to discover the kind of person Jesus was and what he stood for, by a careful comparison of the gospel stories about him with what we know of the religious environment in which he lived.

To imagine Jesus in a thoroughly Jewish way is very difficult even for Jews, most of whom have been conditioned to think of him as some kind of Christian.

Jesus was not and never would be a Christian or adhere to traditional Christian doctrines of today.

For Jesus to believe the Christian doctrine over Apostolic doctrine of the first century would be out-right sin in many instances.

For Christians, it takes real effort to see and understand Jesus within the Judaism of his time. The degree of effort required reveals the anti-Jewish prejudice with which all Christians have been inflicted, including those who do not think they have such prejudices.

DID JESUS FOUND CHRISTIANITY?

Even as recently at the late 1970's, a justly celebrated New Testament scholar entitled one of his books The Founder of Christianity. Like almost everyone else at the time, he assumed that Jesus had been its founder.

Answer for yourself: But can we really imagine the Jewish Jesus founding Christianity?

This is the first assumption we have to call in question.

Answer for yourself: How could this authentic and faithful Jew, living according to the halachah [accepted and orthodox interpretation], have thought of founding a new religion in opposition to the one he loved and lived? To do so would have been absurd, not to mention sin!

The Prophets of the Bible were very critical of the Jews of their day, much more critical in fact than the Gospels represent Jesus as being, but they never dreamed of founding a new religion. They envisaged a national repentance from all the sins they reviled, followed by divine forgiveness and the full restoration of Israel to its status as God's beloved people.

Answer for yourself: Could it have been otherwise with Jesus?

Nevertheless, no new religion was founded in the name of any of the biblical prophets, and it is a fact that a new religion did grow out of Judaism in the first century. It was called Christianity. The name of Christianity comes from the title Christ (Christos, the Greek form of the Hebrew word meshiach, our word Messiah), but not from Jesus' personal name. By the time the movement received the name by which it has ever since been known he was already most often referred to simply as Christ, Messiah. But there was no doubt which Messiah was meant.

There were also other first-century messianic claimants. No large-scale religious movement emanated from their careers, however. In the case of Christianity, its early leaders acted "in the name of Jesus of Nazareth," whom they proclaimed as Messiah, or Christ.

Answer for yourself: Were they justified in invoking his name to legitimate their action in spreading a new religion?

The very name of Christianity shows that in its earliest days it was understood by everyone to be inseparable from the belief that Jesus was the Messiah (Christ).

JESUS WOULD NEVER HAVE FOUNDED CHRISTIANITY AS WE KNOW IT TODAY

\The new religion that emerged from the events of the life and death of Jesus contained too many divergent movements to have been the product of a single creative mind. At any rate, if Jesus had intended to found a new religion, he did not succeed in doing so in any coherent form. Much more probably, he had no intention of doing so. The "real" Jewish Jesus is not likely to have founded the movements that collectively constituted early Christianity.

Historians used to suppose that early Christianity was united in the legacy left by Jesus; only later did disunity arise, as new and unorthodox interpretations of the tradition developed. We now think it was otherwise. Early Christianity moved in several divergent directions, and it was not possible to unify them by appealing to the authoritative teaching of a founder.

Only in the second century did it begin to be unified around a form of Gentile Christianity, as a result of strenuous efforts by some of its leaders, most of them associated with the Church of Rome. The effort was never completely successful, and in later centuries new forms of disunity set in.

If we look back to the state of the Christian movement at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, we find amazing variety and diversity. Scholars usually group Christianity into three main tendencies, only one of which is at all familiar to us today.

This is Gentile Christianity, sometimes called by historians Early Catholicism, since it represents the earliest form of the Catholic church of history. It is the ancestor of all modern forms. But alongside it were two other movements, equally popular at the time, and in some places certainly more so, but not destined to survive. It would not have been obvious to an observer in the year 100 that early Catholicism, at that time largely a religion of urban slaves, and the underprivileged, was the movement of the future.

One of these competing movements was Gnosticism, which has come into public attention recently as a result of new discoveries. Another, now lesser-known movement was composed of Christian Jews [Ebionism], remaining faithful to their Jewish heritage, while adding to it a belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Scholars refer to the various movements that attempted to remain faithful to Christianity's original basis in Judaism as Jewish Christianity.

Obviously, there were sharp disagreements between these movements. Gentile and Jewish Christianity soon parted company. In the second century, the Gentile or early Catholic church fought a sharp, and in the end, largely successful battle to rid itself of Gnosticism and to put down the independent Gnostic communities. At the same time, it stigmatized as "heretical" all those groups that still held on to Jewish observance. In other words Jewish Christianity was considered as heretical by Early Gentile Catholicism.

GENTILE CHRISTIANITY

Christianity began with the preaching of the earliest Apostles of Christ, all of whom were Jewish. It made its appeal to Jews, and as a movement it differed from other forms of Judaism only in its belief that Jesus was the Messiah. Soon its members began to preach to Gentiles and met with success, creating a distinct branch (Gentile) of their movement. Before long, its leadership was assumed by Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles. As the name the historians give it indicates, its members were Gentiles, and following the teaching of Paul, they did not consider conversion to Judaism a possible option. Obedience to the Torah as the Word of God was too much for the majority of them, let alone circumcision; thus when given the opportunity of all it's privileges without the responsibilities, they majority readily accepted. Such was a big mistake and would later cause the irrevocable severing of the Jews from the Gentiles as the people of God.

The Gentile community interpreted Paul's writings as meaning that Judaism was seriously defective, considering that the new faith had superseded Judaism in the plan of God. In other words, Sinai, Moses, etc., was not sufficient because God had made a mistake giving them His teaching (the Torah), but all would be corrected by rescinding the Torah with Grace. Gentile Christianity soon came to think that the Jews had been rejected by God and lost their place as his chosen people, because of their rejection of their Messiah (read Hosea again). They erroneously regarded those Jewish Christians who attempted to continue their membership amidst the Jewish people as neither Jews nor Christians, and they fought other Gentile Christians who wanted to retain within the later Catholic church customs practiced by Jesus and the early Jewish-Gentile Church such as keeping the festivals of Passover, Pentecost, First-Fruits, Rosh HaShannah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. The Catholic church's substitution of pagan holidays for Jewish and Biblical holy days was blatant Idolatry and broke the first Two Commandments.

Gentile Christianity differed from the earliest form of the new faith in more than one important way as detailed above. From the beginning Gentile Christianity had rejected the Torah, together with its commandments constituting the human side of the covenant with God. At the same time, it had radically reinterpreted the Jewish Bible (the book that Jesus said that in the Law and the Prophets it was written of him), reading it as a complex web of prophecy of Christ (Messiah) & a presenting it as a systematic slander of Jews and Judaism.

Gentile Christianity soon developed beliefs concerning the role of Jesus that differed greatly from those of the earliest Christians (Jewish as well as Early Gentile Christianity). Later Gentile Christians (following the first century) believed that Jesus had brought forgiveness to individual sinners through his death, and they came to see him also as a cosmic redeemer, irrespective of the role or repentance in the Bible. These beliefs were largely based on the teachings of Paul, who had begun the systematic adaptation of an originally Jewish message to a Gentile audience. He, like them, mush have been influenced by ideas drawn from the surrounding culture and environment which had paganism as its core.

The earliest Christians (first century Jewish believers) themselves, had not thought of Jesus' death in this way. Jesus' death was something that required explanation in the light of their overriding belief that he was the Messiah; on the face of things it was incompatible with it, since it was not part of the destiny of the expected Messiah to be put to death. They believed, however, that with the resurrection of Jesus the general resurrection of all the dead had begun. Perhaps they also saw his death as a martyrdom (the death of a righteous man "tzeddek" atoned for the sins of Israel). They would not have regarded Jesus' suffering on the cross as a unique way of obtaining forgiveness for their sins, since (like Jesus himself) they knew that forgiveness was already freely available within the existing covenants to repentant sinners. The changes introduced by Gentile Christianity were therefore of major consequence, a fact masked from modern people due to their lack of understanding and study of the events of the first century.

Answer for yourself: Does it not sound preposterous to believe that Gentile pagans, once accepting the Messiah, are better interpreters of the Jewish Bible than the Jewish scholars and sages, since they had never seen it before, let alone studied it for thousands of years as had the Hebrews?

Salvation is of the Jews, was of the Jews, and will always be of the Jews.

Gentile Christianity gained further momentum at a period near the end of the first century, when the original expectation of the Jewish originators of the new movement, that Christ would very shortly return and do all that had been traditionally expected of the Messiah (which was not done by Jesus in his first coming), had died down. Instead of a literal return of Messiah Yeshua, they came to understand his Parousia as a spiritual coming or presence in 70 C.E. with the destruction of the Temple and the deliverance of the Messianic community of Jerusalem before the annihilation of the Jews by the Romans.

Jesus had preached the imminence of the kingdom, or kingship, of God. After his death, his followers preached the arrival of the messianic age under his auspices. All the earliest Christians, whatever their other differences, were united in the ardent belief that the end of history had come, that it had only a few months or years to run before being utterly transformed into a new age. Such an age began after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. as "the age of the Gentiles."

The Jewish Christians did not think of themselves as originators and shapers of a new religion but as those upon whom the duty had fallen of announcing this new age to their fellow Jews, in the name of Jesus. But Jesus did not physically return, and as the years passed, it became impossible to sustain the original tension of anticipation of his physical coming. Gradually, the new movement settled down into history to await the judgment of 70 C.E.

The expectation of a new age was too fundamental an element in the original Jewish heritage of the Church to be simply discarded by Gentile Christianity. It had to be retained in some form. In its original form, it meant very little to Gentiles, who had not learned to share the Jewish expectation that God would assert his sovereignty over a rebellious world and deliver his own people. And it did not seem that the expectation would not be fulfilled very soon, in any case.

The expectation of a new age, called eschatology by scholars, was reinterpreted by the Gentile church, now assuming the shape of a new religion. The original contrast between the present age and the new age to come, already dawning in the life of the Christian movement, became transformed into a contrast between the natural and the supernatural. Such a contrast was much easier to understand for pagans, especially the philosophically educated.

Now the Gentile Church thought of itself as privileged to be the bearer of a new supernatural life of grace, stemming from the incarnation of God in Christ, a divine-human life to which the sacraments of the church gave entrance. The Church could then contrast itself with Judaism, which lacked this supernatural element of grace, stemming from God incarnate. Thus, a Jewish contrast between two historical ages in time became transformed into a Greek contrast between two metaphysical levels, this material world and an invisible, spiritual one.

The new Gentile Christianity became greatly assimilated to the Graeco-Roman culture in which it lived, as it rethought the whole Jewish heritage of Christianity, stemming from the Bible, in the terms of Greek philosophy. Soon the theology of the early Catholic Church would be expressed exclusively in Greek philosophical language, even when it was translated into Latin, and the simpler and more concrete language of the Jewish Bible reserved for popular preaching and devotion.

Greek philosophy was often monotheistic in its theology and ethical in its teaching about personal conduct, but it was pagan in origin and had no natural affinity with Jewish ways of thinking and acting. Gentile Christianity felt much more at home with this kind of pagan philosophy than with the Jewish heritage mediated to them through the original Christian preachers (Jewish), and through the Jewish Bible that had been bequeathed to them as the foundation of their faith. The Jewish Bible in Greek translation was for a long time their only Scripture, but they read and interpreted it in ways Jews would not have done.

The reinterpretation of Jewish eschatology into Greek metaphysical terms led to extremely important changes in the pattern of religion by which the church lived. So effective and sweeping were these changes that it is now hard to imagine Christianity without them. Gentile Christianity, now developing into Early Catholicism, changed the whole pattern of religious life by its introduction of the sacramental system, to become the core of later Catholic Christianity. The sacraments are rituals (significantly called "mysteries" by Greek Christianity) believed to have a supernatural effect on the believing participant.

Like Jews themselves, which indeed they were, the earliest Christians knew nothing of sacraments. They did, of course, possess rites and rituals, especially immersion (mikvah) an the breaking of bread (ha-Motzi associated with Sabbath services), soon to be understood in a sacramental sense. Ideas that may have been the precursors of sacramental theology can be found as early as the writing of Paul. However, the rites which would become sacraments for the Gentile church were originally understood in a Jewish way. Indeed, Paul may have been the one responsible for transforming them into something Gentiles could understand and respond to, in the light of their experience of the pagan mystery religions of their own culture.

In other words they paganized Judaism and called it Gentile Catholic Christianity!

Greek ways of thinking in a Gentile church led to radical reinterpretation of rites originally understood with a Jewish frame of thought. It is most likely true that, as many historians have supposed, the model for the transformation was the Hellenistic mystery religions. These promised the initiate a new life through mysterious rituals of death and rebirth. Instead of understanding the words of Jesus that a man must be "born again" in their Jewish context, they removed them from association with renewal and enhancement of one's relationship with God through the mikvah immersion bath, and translated the meaning to a mystical, heavenly experience patterned after the pagan mystery religions. Being "born again" was a Jewish concept that pre-dated John chapter 3 and was not created by Jesus. God gave the concept as far back as the Garden of Eden and we see Adam was the first to be "born-again". Due to erroneous Gentile Christian teaching we have lost much of the truth God had given to his people, and we must diligently study to recover that truth for our generation.

The Jewish rites of incorporation into the community, circumcision and immersion, are not comparable in meaning to Christian baptism as it came to be understood by the Catholic church, and later by the Protestant church. They more closely resemble naturalization to citizenship of a new country. The earliest Christians must certainly have interpreted the "breaking of bread" as comparable to the Jewish common meals of religious significance, such as the meals taken together on the Sabbath (called the Lord's supper), or the Passover Seder.

Gentile Christians soon came to think of these rites as having a supernatural effect. They were supposed to transform the believer invisibly, bringing about spiritual effects humanly impossible to accomplish through the identification of the believer with Christ. Membership in a sacramental church meant participation in a supernatural or divine-human life of grace, sharing in fact the divine-human life of Christ.

The center of this transformation of Jewish into Greek, or in fact pagan, ways of thinking was the new Greek doctrine of Christ, now thought of as fully divine. From the second century on, theologians became centrally interested in the relationship of Christ to God and preoccupied with questions about the divine nature. This is not a typically Jewish concern, since Jews regard the divine nature as beyond human comprehension, and suspect attempts to explain it as idolatrous.

Now the developing Gentile Christian myth presented a problem for monotheists.

Answer for yourself: How could two persons be divine?

Yet Gentile Christians were convinced that their redemption had been the work of no one less than God. It was now axiomatic to them that Christ was nothing less than divine. Indeed, it was his human nature, originally taken for granted, that now became problematic.

The model on which the theological solution was arrived at was Platonic and Stoic. The Greek philosophers of these schools had already though of a Logos, or creative Word, the pattern on which the whole universe had been created, its immanent rationality or logic. Since the New Testament had described Christ as the Word of God, it was not difficult to identify this Word with the Word or Logos already spoken of in Greek philosophy.

Answer for yourself: Have you ever asked yourself if Jehovah (YHVH) wanted to share with the Jewish people a Platonic concept from Greek philosophy? Does not sound right does it?

The author of the Fourth Gospel had already done so in his prologue.

Answer for yourself: Would John, a Jew, familiar with Jewish religion, write a letter to Jewish believers and use Greek concepts let along continually say "which being interpreted mean" as if Jewish concepts would not be common knowledge to a Jewish audience?

Thus the theologians came to teach that God had created the world through His Logos, Christ, and had then redeemed it through him also. The Word or Logos was divine, but in a derivative sense.

In the second century, we find the theologians of the Gentile church thinking of Christ primarily as the Word, or Logos, of God, and even as a "second God." The latter term was too risky and threatening to the monotheism to which the church intended to adhere, and it was soon abandoned. Eventually, though not until the fourth century, the complex theology of the Trinity, which also incorporated the Holy Spirit on the same level of divinity, was worked out. Such a Trinitarian ideas goes completely against Jesus and his declaration of the Greatest Commandment in Mark 12, where he states..."Hear of Israel, I Am the Lord God, I am One".

Eventually this transformed Gentile church became the state religion of the Roman Empire, dominating the world in which Jews had to live. Now there arose a remarkable synthesis between Graeco-Roman culture of classical antiquity and the beliefs of the Christian movement, already transformed by the impact upon them of Greek and pagan ways of thinking. The Catholic church of history, including its Eastern wing that later became the Orthodox church, was the bearer of the synthesis into the Middle Ages. This classical Christian civilization is in turn the basis of modern culture.

From the pagan world from which they had come, Gentile Christians had inherited many prejudices against the Jews, and these prejudices played in to the anti-Jewish reading of Paul to create a very anti-Jewish outlook in the Gentile church from early times. Christian anti-Semitism is not the same thing as pagan anti-Semitism, though they are often thought to be continuous with one another. The destructive energy of Christian anti-Semitism is inconceivable without the myth that the Jews killed Christ, a myth absent from pagan anti-Jewish calumnies, many of which were also leveled against the early Christians. Nevertheless, there was little or nothing in the form of Christianity that these Gentiles were receiving to rid them of their preconceived attitudes of hostility and contempt toward Jews, or to cause them to read Paul's writing otherwise than as confirmation and intensification of these existing attitudes.

Gentile Christianity saw itself as a new and superior religion, intended for Gentiles, and adapted to their situation. It is not surprising that very soon theologians were arguing that the Jewish Bible should be discarded, and no longer incorporated in the Christian Scriptures. Looking back, it is in fact astonishing that it was not discarded in the second century by Gentile Christianity. The reason it was not discarded was its grounding in Judaism, which was necessary to give Christianity a pedigree deriving from an ancient past that people of that day thought a religion ought to have. And of course it was already basic to Christian faith that Jesus had been the Jewish Messiah and that he had died on the cross and thus become the Savior of the world as a result of the rejection and hostility of the Jewish people. Such ideas, un-Jewish as they are, would have been unintelligible without the Bible as their background.

Because Gentile, or Early Catholic, Christianity has had this immense influence on the culture in which we all live today, Jews, Christians, and secularists alike, it is hard to imagine other forms of early Christianity except in this image. Yet, other forms did exist, and at the turn of the first and second centuries they were formidable rivals to Gentile Christianity.