Is There Any Evidence that Xianity Actually Thought it Was a New Religion?

[Secret Alias]

I know this sounds like a stupid question but I was puzzling over something in my head rather basic - every tradition seems to think it was the oldest tradition in antiquity. Jews and pagans argued over the date of Moses (even though it would necessarily have had to have been after the Egyptian religion was established). Church Fathers argued that the heresies came after the true Church. Epiphanius argues in effect that Christianity was the original religion and all the Jewish sects came after. We like to imagine that early Christians were captivated by this 'new message' that swept through the world to love one another - but this seems to go against the grain in antiquity were novelty was shunned and everyone was bending over backwards to prove that they were the oldest religion, the oldest nation etc.

Is there any direct evidence that the Church Fathers actually believed that Christianity started as an innovation by Jesus? A new message never heard before? I can't think of an example. Maybe someone can help me.

[iskander]

Re: The personification of the Shekhinah

Post by iskander » Wed Sep 16, 2015 6:35 am

How far apart from each other were the Christian and the Judaic theological beliefs?

In The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Benjamin D. Sommer provides an answer to this difficult question as follows:


" This study forces a revaluation of a common Jewish attitude towards Christianity. Some Jews regard Christianity's claims to be monotheistic with suspicion, both because the doctrine of the trinity ( how can three equal one? ) and because of Christianity's core belief that God took bodily form. What we have attempted to point out here is that biblical Israel knew very similar doctrines, and these doctrines did not disappear from Judaism after the biblical period....

No Jew sensitive to Judaism's own classical sources , however, can fault the theological model Christianity employs when it avows belief in a God who has an earthly body as well as a Holy Spirit and a heavenly manifestation, for that model, we have seen, is a perfectly Jewish one. "



The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel
Benjamin D. Sommer
Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (January 17, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-1107422261
Page 135
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1828



Professor Benjamin D. Sommer in his book The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel wrote: No Jew sensitive to Judaism's own classical sources , however, can fault the theological model Christianity employs when it avows belief in a God who has an earthly body as well as a Holy Spirit and a heavenly manifestation, for that model, we have seen, is a perfectly Jewish one..



Judaism became a different religion from the religion of their ancestors and hence different from Christianity.

[Giuseppe]

Is there any direct evidence that the Church Fathers actually believed that Christianity started as an innovation by Jesus? A new message never heard before? I can't think of an example. Maybe someone can help me.

there is no evidence. It is probably a Gnostic idea. This is a world of darkness and the light of the gnosis is revealed only now.
This is a strong argument to believe that the Earliest Gospel post-70 was gnostic.

[iskander]

In page 136 of The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Benjamin Sommer writes,



The Maimonidean, of course, still has the right to reject Christianity's theological model; but many a modern Jew recognizes the extraordinarily strained nature of the hermeneutic through which Maimonides attempts to deny the corporeality of the biblical and rabbinic God .

For such a Jew, Maimonides' rejection would also compel a rejection of most of the Written and Oral Torahs. It would entail , in other words, the creation of a new religion whose earliest sacred document would be found in the tenth-century C.E. philosophical writings of Maimonides' predecessor , Saadia Gaon.

[andrewcriddle]

See Aristides

For it is clear to us, O King, that
there are three classes of men in
this world; these being the worshippers
of the gods acknowledged
among you, and Jews, and Christians.

Andrew Criddle

[Blood]

It's not a stupid question at all. I don't get the impression from the church fathers that they thought it was a new religion. In Dialogue with Trypho, Justin tells Trypho that the scriptures belong to Christians, not Jews. This fits into my general theory that the proselytes who joined the YHWH cult circa 1st century BCE broke away and de-Judaized it, aided tremendously by the Septuagint. These new Gentile cults then sought Biblical figures outside the patriarchal and Mosaic archetypes to venerate as their founders: Seth, Melchizedek, and Christus. At some later date, Christus was imagined to have descended and assumed the body of Jesus. But all of this was later theology. Originally, it was all centered around a de-Judaized Septuagint with no gospels or New Testament.

[Peter Kirby]

I know this sounds like a stupid question but I was puzzling over something in my head rather basic - every tradition seems to think it was the oldest tradition in antiquity. Jews and pagans argued over the date of Moses (even though it would necessarily have had to have been after the Egyptian religion was established). Church Fathers argued that the heresies came after the true Church. Epiphanius argues in effect that Christianity was the original religion and all the Jewish sects came after. We like to imagine that early Christians were captivated by this 'new message' that swept through the world to love one another - but this seems to go against the grain in antiquity were novelty was shunned and everyone was bending over backwards to prove that they were the oldest religion, the oldest nation etc.

Is there any direct evidence that the Church Fathers actually believed that Christianity started as an innovation by Jesus? A new message never heard before? I can't think of an example. Maybe someone can help me.

Eusebius distinguishes it from Judaism and Hellenism, but finds it older than both.

http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/euseb ... _book1.htm

I HAVE already laid down in my Preparation that Christianity is neither a form of Hellenism, nor of Judaism, but that it is a religion with its own characteristic stamp, and that this is not anything novel or original, but something of the greatest antiquity, something natural and familiar to the godly men before the times of Moses who |8 are remembered for their holiness and justice.

Lucian of Samosata clearly regards it as the innovation of Jesus.

The Christian counter-claim has obvious apologetic value.

There may be some early texts, maybe even pre-Irenaeus or pre-Justin, where the debate over its novelty wasn't a burning issue and there is a Christian statement that allowed it to be 'new'. There may also be apologists who tackle the dilemma head on and champion its 'novelty'. Worth digging into.

There are plenty of statements that lay the transmission of the faith to the font of the apostles, who got it from Jesus (e.g., in 1 Clement).

[Giuseppe]

See Aristides

For it is clear to us, O King, that
there are three classes of men in
this world; these being the worshippers
of the gods acknowledged
among you, and Jews, and Christians.

Andrew Criddle

Note that what is considered new in this case is the Christian religion but not the personality of Jesus (totally irrelevant for Ariatides). For the Gospels the latter counts as the "new thing".