The statement is commonly made, even by those who
should know better, that the Christians owe a debt to the Jews, for they got their Bible and their religion from
them.
While many people have been deceived into believing this, it is completely false. Part of the mistake comes from the complete confusion in the minds of nearly all people as to just what they mean by Jew. Are they referring to people of a
certain race, or referring to a people of a certain religion, for the two are not the same.
There are in Africa today, some people who are Jews by religion; in India today there are some Indians who are Jews, and there are in China today, some who practice Judaism.
Likewise, there are some people today who are racially of the stock we know as Jews, but who have been converted to other
religions.
First let’s consider the claim the Christians got their Bible and their religion from the Jews, as meaning Jews by religion. It is certain they didn’t get the New Testament from them, for it condemns the Jewish religion throughout all the
New Testament.
But did they got the Old Testament from them? No, for several
reasons: in the first place, no Jew by religion existed before the return from the Babylonian captivity,
shortly after 536 B.C.
Jewish great historian Josephus writes, “So the Jews prepared the work. Jew is the name they are called by from the day that they came up from Babylon.”
The only books of the Old Testament that were written after the return from Babylon are, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah (all of them historical, rather than doctrinal) Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.
The late Rabbi Stephen F. Wise, formerly the Chief Rabbi of the United States said, “The return from Babylon and the introduction of the Babylonian Talmud mark the end of Hebrewism and the beginning of Judaism.”
The learned Rabbi was correct in distinguishing the true religion of the Old Testament as Hebrewism for it was the religion of the real Hebrews, who were not Jews at all.
Judaism, the religion of the Jews, is as the learned Rabbi says, based upon the
Babylonian TALMUD, which contains the supposed oral law. It was never reduced to writing as part of the Bible. This oral law
gradually gained greater force among the Jews than the written law in the Bible, with which it often conflicted in Jesus’ day, the Babylonian Talmud was known as the Tradition of the Elders.
This is why Jesus told the Jews: “Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoreth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. Howbeit, in vain do they worship Me, teaching for doctrines the Commandments of men.
For laying aside the
commandments of God that ye may keep your own tradition, ye make the Word of God of none effect through your tradition which ye have delivered”
(Mark 7:6-13).
“Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God”
(Matthew 22:29).
“Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, Hypocrites! for ye pay tithes of mint, anise and cumin and have omitted the weightier matters of the law,judgement, mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23).
This was the religion of the Jews. As the learned Rabbi Stephen F. Wise said, Judaism was distinguished
from Hebrewism, the real religion of the Old
Testament.
Certainly Christianity took nothing from any Jewish religion for they have never taken
any part of Christianity from the Talmud.
Well then, can it be said that they got their Bible or their religion of Christianity from men of the Jewish race? No, it cannot.
“Antiquities of the Jews,” tells that the Jews were a people distinct and separate from Yahweh’s people Israel, although living among them. The Jew
were the Canaanite people who lived in Palestine, before Israel entered the promised land and who were not driven out.
These Canaanite people, and the mixed offspring from intermarriage with the
Israelites, were allowed to remain in the land while paying heavy tribute taxes.
The prophets who wrote the books of the Old Testament were all of pure Israelite stock, from one or another of the 12 tribes of israel,Moses, Jeremiah,Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Haggai and Zechariah were of the tribe of Levi. Joshua and Samuel were of the tribe of Ephraim. Isaiah, Daniel and Zephaniah were of the
house of David, Jonah was of the tribe of Zebulun. Hosea was of the tribe of Edomite.
Judas came from the village of Kerioth in southern Judea Iscariot is a corruption of Ish
Kerioth, man of Kerioth.
Paul tells us that he was of the tribe of Benjamin and that the other apostles
except Judas Iscariot were from Galilee where the tribe of Benjamin settled
after the return from
Babylon.
This is confirmed by Jesus.
In Matthew 15:24 He said,
“I am not sent but unto the sheep of the house of Israel.”
In John chapter 10
Jesus tells the Jews, “I am the good Shepherd and i know My sheep and am known of Mine. Bye believe not because ye are not of My sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me.”
Christianity and Judaism are completely and irreconcilably inconsistent.
Whichever way, Judging with the perspective of Islam, both (Christianity and Judaism) are wrong
because Islam mutually repudiate with them.
Supplementary Notes : Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser
wrote, “This is not an uncommon impression and one finds it sometimes among Jews as well as Christians—that Judaism is the religion of the Hebrew Bible. It is, of course, a
fallacious impression . . .
Judaism is not the religion of the Bible” (Judaism and the Christian Predicament,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967, p. 59).
Rabbi Moshe M. Maggal,
President, National Jewish Information Service wrote: “. . . you will notice the great difference between
the Jewish and Christian
religions. But these are not all. We consider the two religions so different that one excludes the other, we emphasized that there is no such thing as a Judeo- Christian religion.
There is not any similarity between the two concepts” (Letter of August 21, 1961).
The London Jewish World March 15, 1923 declared: “Fundamentally, Judaism is anti-Christian.”
Rabbi Martin Siegel: “I am devoting my lecture in this seminar to a discussion of the possibility that we are
now entering a Jewish century, a time when the spirit of the community, the non-idealogical blend of the emotional and rational and the resistance to categories and forms will emerge through the forces of anti-nationalism to provide us with a new
kind of society. I call this process the Judaization of christianity because
Christianity will be the
vehicle through which this society becomes
Jewish” (New York
Magazine, January 18, 1972, p. 32).
Johnson Abdul Azeez Ayomide
(A collective research work)
English 