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Christianity began as a movement within Second Temple Judaism, but the two religions gradually diverged over the first few centuries of the Christian era.Today, differences of opinion vary between denominations in both religions, but the most important distinction is Christian acceptance and Jewish non-acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah prophesied in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition.
According to historian Shaye J. D. Cohen, "the separation of Christianity from Judaism was a process, not an event", in which the church became "more and more gentile, and less and less Jewish". [138] [note 14] According to Cohen, early Christianity ceased to be a Jewish sect when it ceased to observe Jewish practices, such as circumcision. [25]
The term Judæo Christian first appeared in the 19th century as a word for Jewish converts to Christianity. The term has received criticism, largely from Jewish thinkers, as relying on and perpetuating notions of supersessionism, as well as glossing over fundamental differences between Jewish and Christian thought, theology, culture and practice.
Most historians agree that Jesus or his followers established a new Jewish sect, one that attracted both Jewish and gentile converts. According to New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, a number of early Christianities existed in the first century CE, from which developed various Christian traditions and denominations, including proto-orthodoxy. [13]
The term Abrahamic religions (and its variations) is a collective religious descriptor for elements shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. [6] It features prominently in interfaith dialogue and political discourse but also has entered academic discourse.
Two notable books addressed the relations between contemporary Judaism and Christianity. Abba Hillel Silver's Where Judaism Differs and Leo Baeck's Judaism and Christianity were both motivated by an impulse to clarify Judaism's distinctiveness "in a world where the term Judeo-Christian had obscured critical differences between the two faiths." [39]
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[8] [9] Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University, says that The comparative study of religions is an academic discipline which has been developed within Christian theology faculties, and it has a tendency to force widely differing phenomena into a kind of strait-jacket cut to a Christian pattern.