In the middle years of the first century of the Common Era how did the Jesus followers see themselves? How did the varieties of Jews see the Jesus Movement? First it is worth remembering that temple Jews (the ones in Jerusalem with access or awareness of temple matters) may have seen themselves as different to rural Jews. And there were self-aware differences between Pharisees (learned by training) and Sadducees (status predicated on birth connection to the relevant family lines). And there were Zealots and Essenes, as well. Followers of one rabbi or another may further have drawn distinctions between themselve and other followers. And even with a given tradition or locale, there may have been distinction between those who were more secular and those who were more dedicated to knowing God.
So when Reb Jesus/jeshua was killed (and rose again) and certain Jews (such as those the book of Jesus' brother James is writing to), along with more general 'God Fearers' and former pagans all gathered to form a tradition of Fulfilled Jews [one wonders how Jews today view such a statement; "Judiasm 2.0"?], then who drew lines that defined Jew and non-Jew? After all if the primitive Christians (so-called by Roman authorities?) embraced the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) and loved the same teachings and Creator God, then would there not be reason to consider all under one large tent in common? As establishment types, the orthodox Jews maintain boundaries and distinctiveness not by downplaying small differences in detail, but instead amplifying the things that set them apart from the others. So perhaps the Jews who turned to The Way considered it all one thing: God's People in common. But those of the orthodox traditions continued to exclude such claims of brother/sisterhood.
The primitive body of believers had no hierarchy, postal address and prominent, public meeting place for so many generations. In the eyes of Roman occupiers it was all a Yaweh tradition, whatever else the locals might say. And at a given time the Romans scapegoated or hunted down the early Christians in certain places. All that changed with the Roman emperor Constantine making Christianity the State Religion in the beginning of the 4th century: untaxed and publicly promoted, now the tables turned and the Jews were relatively excluded and confined to a smaller society of themselves. All the trapping of public institutional organizing grew and the pyramid structure of governance emerged in an echo of the rational organizational trees of the Roman Empire.
Thus in the first few generations perhaps there were those Christians, either Jews or others, who considered themselves to be Jews and God's most loved people, whatever the orthodox Jews may say. And then, either with the public prominence of becoming State Religion or sometime before that unveiling, both sides -- the Jews excluding those students of rabbi Jesus, as well as those Jesus followers who saw absolute and irreconcilable differences between their love of God and the traditions of Jewish neighbors-- dug the trench to separate themselves from their spiritual brothers and sisters ----tied to the same creator God nonetheless.
For the average, not particularly zealous Catholic or Protestant Christian, it probably comes as a surprise that Jesus was a Jew who never saw what he was doing as a split from what was before. And even more of an eye-opener, these same people might recoil at the fact that all the Abrahamic traditions --Jewish, Christian, Muslim-- share the same Heavenly Father and by extension then are in common for their expressions of love to God and to one another.
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