History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

If Christ was not God, Christianity was nothing. If Christ was God, then Judaism was false. There could be absolutely no compromise on this point. Each faith was thus a threat to the other. The quarrel was all the more bitter because, while differing on the essential, the two faiths agreed on virtually everything else. The Christians took from Judaism the Pentateuch (including its morals and ethics), the prophets and the wisdom books, and far more of the apocrypha than the Jews themselves were prepared to canonize. They took the liturgy, for even the eucharist had Jewish roots. They took the notion of the Sabbath day and feast-days, incense and burning lamps, psalms, hymns and choral music, vestments and prayers, priests and martyrs, the reading of the sacred books and the institution of the synagogue (transformed into the church). They took even the notion of clerical authority – which the Jews would soon modify – in the shape of the high-priest whom the Christians turned into patriarchs and popes. There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology, which was not adumbrated in Judaism.