Christianity

Overview

• Christianity is the faith of those who confess Jesus of Nazareth as the risen Lord and God become man. It is not a break with the faith of Israel but its promised fulfilment.

Summary

Christianity did not begin as a new religion set against Israel's but as Israel's own hope come true. Christ Himself said He came "not to abolish the Law or the Prophets… but to fulfil" them (Matthew 5.17), and the first believers were Jews who understood themselves not to be converting to another system but to be continuing their own as the prophets had foretold. The Judaism of Christ's day and the Rabbinic Judaism that took shape after it are not simply identical; and much of what the Church would later confess about God — that He is more than a bare, solitary monad — was already stirring in Second Temple Jewish thought before Christ (see The Trinity#Origin of Doctrine and Judaism#Effects of Christianity).