When Christianity Began
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When Christianity Began
Memo To: My Muslim and Jewish Brethren
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: When Judaism Became Christianity
Benjamin Disraeli, the British Jew who became one of the most illustrious of
Victorian prime ministers in the 19th century, once made the comment that
"Christianity is Judaism for the masses." I never would have known what
exactly he meant had not I stumbled upon a passage from Matthew in the Good
Book. In Chapter 15, Jesus excoriates the scribes and the Pharisees for their
hypocrisy when they come from Jerusalem to complain that his disciples don't
wash their hands before they eat, breaking tradition. Jesus then says their
hands may not be clean, but their hearts are pure: "Do you not realize that
everything that enters the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled into
the latrine? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart,
and they defile. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery,
unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy. These are what defile a person,
but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile." Then comes the turning point
for this Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth:<dl>
<dd>Then Jesus went from that place and withdrew to the region of
Tyre and Sidon. And behold a Canaanite woman of that district came and called
out, "Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a
demon." But he did not say a word in answer to her. His disciples came and
asked him, "Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us." He said in
reply, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But the
woman came and did him homage, saying "Lord, help me." He said in reply, "It
is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs." She
said, "Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the
table of their masters." Then Jesus said to her in reply, "O woman, great is
your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed
from that hour.</dd>
</dl>In that moment, the Good Shepherd of the Israelites became the Good
Shepherd to the world. In the Judaic tradition, the holy men to this day
minister only to their own, eschewing evangelism, wary even of intermarriage
between Jew and non-Jew. Christianity, by contrast, has become the most
evangelical of the three dominant monotheistic faiths. Islam, founded by the
Prophet Muhammad seven centuries later, is a direct offshoot of Judaism and
Christianity. The Islamic Holy Book, the <i>Qu'ran,</i> which was revealed by
the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, a man who could neither read nor write,
consists of material found both in Jewish and Christian biblical scripture.
At his Savior's Day sermon in Chicago on February 28, Minister Louis
Farrakhan pointed out that the name "Moses" appears more often in the
<i>Qu'ran </i>than does the name of the Prophet Muhammad. In the trinity of
faiths, if Judaism is the father of all faiths and Christianity the mother of
all faiths, Islam is the offspring of the two.
If Judaism is the most culturally self-contained and Christianity the most
evangelical, Islam is certainly the most ecumenical. In two thousand years,
the relatively small number of Jews have easily made the greatest
contributions to global living standards, through innovations in science and
finance. They have suffered continuously, though, as a result of their
self-induced cultural insularity that protected them from assimilation. They
became the easy scapegoat during times of great economic distress. The Muslim
world, which now equals Christianity in its global numbers, with each of more
than one billion souls, continues to be the fastest growing by virtue of an
ecumenical nature.
The political intersections of the three faiths can be traced to the very
first Easter, which came as a result of the crucifixion of Jesus. As long as
Jesus limited himself to his spiritual ministry, the Jewish political leaders
let him be. But on the Passover celebration preceding that first Easter,
Jesus became angered at the defilement of the Temple by fellow Jews who were
transacting business and changing money there. He and his disciples chased
them away, and this now became a matter for the Sanhedrin, the Jewish elite
of Jerusalem, who were permitted political autonomy by Rome as long as they
kept the peace. In this case, they decided that Jesus was a political
liability, who might cause Rome to intervene if the commercial class pressed
its case against his insistence on keeping the Sabbath. In withdrawing their
support from Jesus, they assured his conviction and the mob was led along to
vote for his crucifixion.
Three hundred years after the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the
first Christian Emperor took it upon himself to evangelize, by force if
necessary. As Constantine the Great proclaimed: "I shall advance till He, the
invisible God who marches before me, thinks proper to stop." With this energy,
the eastern political notion of a wedding of temporal and spiritual power
intruded on the west, giving a peculiar bent to Christianity for the next
millennium.
Muhammad lived from 570 to 632, inspiring the simplest, least mystical and
least ritualistic of the great monotheistic creeds. By opening itself to
Christians and Jews alike, it swept across the Mediterranean states with
advanced ideas of public finance that made heavily-taxed Christians in many
cases welcome their advance. When Jews became the object of Christian
persecution in the early years of the second millennium, they could find safe
harbor in the Islamic world. Prior to the 20th century there are very few
instances of Muslim persecution of Jews, usually limited to specific local
rulers in isolated cases. The contentiousness between Muslim and Jew is a
late 20th century phenomenon. It may not seem like it now, but this
divergence should end rather soon, I think, with the establishment of a
Palestinian state and a flowering of the Middle East economies.
The central idea of all three faiths, which all flow from the father of all
patriarchs Abraham, is that there is but one true God who made us all,
whether He is called God, <i>or Allah</i> (the Arabic word for God), or the
Hebrew Y*h*w*h. The most distinctive secular idea to which each creed aspires
is the concept of the Good Shepherd, the ruler or guide who will leave the
ninety nine to restore the one. It was on that fateful day that Jesus left
the ninety nine to tend to the Canaanite woman, and in so doing made of
Christianity the Judaism for the masses.
How then is it today that on the eve of the millennium we still find the
children of Abraham -- Jew, Christian, Muslim -- in bloody conflict with one
another? To change this, rather than dissolve into a common soup of good
feelings, each simply must build upon the strengths of their faiths, always
cognizant of what unites us -- the fatherhood of God. The world sorely needs
more Good Shepherds. Pope John Paul's initiatives for repentance and
reconciliation among the children of God -- a universally held but unrealized
aspiration -- is the task for the new millennium. The monothestic faiths are
designed to elevate that responsibility as so much more unites us than divides
us.
Related links:
The Gospel According to Matthew --
http://www.genesis.net.au/reference/bible/kjv/matthew/
Savior's Day Coverage from The Final Call --
http://www.finalcall.com/savioursday99.htm
The Catholic Encyclopedia -- http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/
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