CHRISTIANITY

Christianity

Christianity

Christianity, the religious movement that grew out of the teaching and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago, has spread in a variety of forms and churches across the globe. Jesus was a Jew; his followers never abandoned the Jewish scriptures, though little by little they added to the Jewish "Old Testament" a further collection of writings that became the "New Testament" of their Bible. Christian beliefs and practices of life have to be understood as a mixture of elements and influences in part derived from their Hebrew ancestors, in part the result of the teachings of Jesus of the circumstances in which Christianity subsequently developed (Gregory, 1997).

Judaism was the religion of a single people, claiming to be uniquely chosen by God. Its sense of civic identity was reinforced, by the way, in which so many of its sacred books were historical in nature, relating to rise and fall of a kingdom of Israel centered upon Jerusalem. Inevitably, this kind of political focus was totally lost in a religious movement that contrasted itself with Israel strictly in terms of not being a people in the general significance but being rather a new people of God chosen from all peoples of the world. Whether or not this universalism was incorporated in the teaching of Jesus himself, it was a key characteristic of the Christian Church within a generation of his death and was at the heart of the teaching of his most prominent disciple, St. Paul.

The politics inherent in the Judaism from which Christianity came could have no possible place in a community stressing in science and achieving in practice a rapidly growing "catholicity," that is to say openness on equal terms to residents of every nation and language. While Jesus must surely have spoken to Aramaic or Hebrew and ...