Judaism

Overview

• Judaism is the religion of the people of Israel, God's covenant people of the Old Testament. Orthodox Christianity understands the Church as the continuation and fulfilment of that covenant people in Christ, into whom the nations are now grafted.

Summary

Judaism is not one unchanging system across history: the faith of Israel under the Law and the Temple, the Judaism of the Second Temple period in which Christ lived, and the Rabbinic Judaism that developed after the Temple's destruction in AD 70 differ from one another in important ways. Orthodox Christianity confesses that the promises made to Israel — a new covenant written on the heart (Jeremiah 31.31-34) and God's own Spirit placed within His people (Ezekiel 36.25-27) — are fulfilled in Christ and His Church, so that the Church is not the replacement of Israel but Israel brought to its promised goal, now opened to all the nations.

Not one "Judaism" but many

It is worth stressing how diverse the Judaism of Jesus' day actually was. Scholars increasingly speak of Second Temple "Judaisms" in the plural, because the period held not one uniform system but many competing ways of being faithful to the God of Israel — the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the followers of John the Baptist and of Jesus, and more, each reading the same Scriptures differently.[^jant] The very word behind "Jew" carries this breadth: the Greek Ioudaios can mean both a Jew by religion and a Judean by birth and homeland, so that first-century identity was at once ethnic, geographic, and religious — a nuance that lies behind many disputes over how the New Testament should be translated and read.[^jant] Seen this way, the earliest Church was not a departure from Judaism into something wholly other but, at first, one more movement within this crowded Jewish world — before, over the following generations, the "parting of the ways" set Church and Synagogue on their separate paths.

[^jant]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament (eds. Amy-Jill Levine & Marc Zvi Brettler, Oxford Univ. Press), essays "Judaism and Jewishness" (Shaye J. D. Cohen) and "Ioudaios" (Joshua D. Garroway) — the diversity of Second Temple "Judaisms" rather than a single system, and the double sense of Greek Ioudaios ("Jew"/"Judean") as ethnic, geographic, and religious, (paraphrased). Scripture quoted from the WEB/Brenton corpus.