This may seem like an obvious question. Many would answer that Christianity began with Christ. Others, thinking a bit deeper, might assert that the apostle Paul really began Christianity. But, historically speaking, both answers would be wrong.

It is commonplace to assume that the religion called Christianity is as old as its namesake. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Jesus, believed by some Jews to be the Messiah (or Christ – both mean “anointed”), thought he was starting a new religion. Nowhere in the gospels, for example, does Jesus say anything like, “Come on people, quit your Jewish way of life and join my brand-new religion.” Historians remind us that people did not think this way in the time of Jesus. One’s religion was not, unlike today, usually a choice people made. It was, instead, their inherent birthright. For the ancients it was all part of their ethnos.

Ethnos is a Greek word that means more than just one’s racial or genetic identity. The modern West no longer accepts that religion, occupation, social position, gender roles, and so forth are permanently assigned. But in the time of Jesus, the circumstances surrounding one’s birth determined all of those things, identity indicators that one usually held for life.

Jesus was of course Jewish. He inherited all of the cultural and religious identifiers incorporated in his birth identity. He could no more have started a new religion than he could have espoused a different God. That did not mean of course that Judaism was monolithic in its beliefs. Jews understood and lived their identity in a variety of ways. For example, the Jews responsible for authoring and preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls, often thought to be Essenes, lived and behaved in ways that were different from Jews who belonged to the Pharisee movement. Even so, most Jews agreed on certain fundamental “Jewish” characteristics (one God, covenantal membership of the elect, Torah obedience, etc.). Often, however, they disagreed on exactly how to interpret such things.

Jesus may have thought he was creating a new (or renewed) way of being Jewish, one that focused on the observance of Torah from a position of love. But his teachings were not anti-Jewish. In the words of Daniel Harlow, “Jesus was an observant Jew who did not directly oppose any significant aspect of the Torah. He was circumcised, he observed the Sabbath, he attended the synagogue, he taught from the Torah, he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and celebrated the Jewish festivals, and he accepted the atoning efficacy of sacrifice at the Temple (Mark 1:44; Matt 5:23). When asked about the greatest commandment, he affirmed the Shema and the obligation to love one’s neighbor….”

Jews who believed that Jesus was their Messiah simply added that revelation to their Jewishness. They did not join anything called Christianity. They apparently were not even called Christians. According to the Acts of the Apostles, which describes the earliest Jewish Jesus movement, participants called themselves The Way (9:2, 16:17, 18:25-26, 19:9, 23, 22:4, 24:14) and perhaps the Nazarenes (24:5). But they remained Jews.

Then there was Paul. Many point to Paul as the founder of Christianity, establishing a worldwide religion separate from Judaism. This misconception is often accompanied by an equally incorrect notion that Paul was an apostate Jew who rejected his ethnos for a non-ethnic movement called Christianity. As modern historians are now coming to acknowledge, Paul remained Jewish throughout his life. His mission was not to invent a religion. Rather, Paul set out to offer salvation to non-Jews to prevent them from experiencing the wrath that he expected was coming soon.

Paul did not invite Gentiles to become Jews, nor did he ask Jews to renounce their Judaism. He held out the hope of redemption and resurrection to non-Jews through a mystical process whereby Gentiles could be baptized into Christ’s death, receive the Spirit (Spirit of Christ? see Rom. 8:2, 8:9-10; 2 Cor. 13:5; Phil. 1:19), and live in the righteous hope of an afterlife. Non-Jews were not invited to enter this state of righteousness in lieu of Jews but alongside them in fulfillment of the many prophecies interpreted by Paul and other apocalyptic Jews as pertaining to the End Times (Isa. 56:6-7; Ps. 22:27-29; Dan. 7:13-14; Zech. 8:23; Mic. 4:2). Paul never called his outreach movement Christianity, nor did he refer to his baptized Gentiles as Christians. If anything, he referred to them as a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15).

So, if neither Jesus nor Paul began Christianity, who did? We cannot identify any specific individual as the first to understand themselves as belonging to a religious movement separate and distinct from Judaism. But we can trace out its formation from the late first century, probably in Antioch. Acts reports that (Gentile?) believers were first called Christians there at some point (11:26). A collection of letters authored by Ignatius, one of Antioch’s early-second-century Gentile bishops, referred to his religion as “Christianity” (Philad. 6:1; Rom. 3:3; Mag. 10:1, 3). Ignatius seems to have been participating in a new wave of ecclesiastical teaching that understood Christianity as something necessarily different from Judaism. In his letter to the Christians at Magnesia, Ignatius wrote “Learn to live in accordance with Christianity. For whoever is called by any other name than this one does not belong to God” (Mag. 10:1). He added that “it is utterly absurd to profess Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism” (Mag. 10:3). What led to the conviction that a new religion separate from the religion of Jesus and Paul was desirable? We can point to a number of contributing factors. Here are a few.

Reading between the lines of the letters of Paul, we can already detect the seeds of a social problem for baptized Gentiles. Remember that Gentiles were not invited by Paul to become Jews. Paul considered Jewish proselytism unnecessary for salvation. Faith in Christ (Gal. 3:26, etc.) and obedience to God’s law (Rom. 2:13, etc.) were all that was needed by non-Jews to become righteous before God. But one of the most important of God’s laws, if not the most important, was that God’s people could not worship any other god, even those of their inherited ethnos. Never mind that they risked creating breaches within their families and social networks by their obedience. Never mind the community chastisement they risked for angering the gods with their refusal to pay proper homage. Never mind the blame they would suffer should their apostasy result in divine catastrophe for the neighborhood, city, or empire. Ostracization and Christ-faith went hand-in-glove within the early non-Jewish churches.

On the empirical front, a situation was developing that convinced some Gentile Christians that it was prudent to separate themselves from Judaism. In 64, the Jews in Israel rebelled against their Roman overlords. The war drug on for over almost ten years. Countless deaths occurred on both sides. The Roman program of defeat and destruction left Jerusalem in ruins and the temple forever destroyed. Jewish slaves were brought back to Rome by Titus and marched through the streets dragging the spoils of war with them. Jews throughout the empire were punished not only with popular resentment but with the fiscus Judaicus, a Roman tax levied on every Jew for the purpose of maintaining the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. General Jewish disfavor made the time seem ripe for at least some Gentile believers to start breaking away from their fellow Jews. In addition, the number of Gentile believers was growing; in some locations they surpassed the number of Jewish believers. The political winds favored a demonstration to Rome on the part of Christians that they were not part of Judaism or of their rebellion.

It would be overstating the case that all Gentile believers felt this way. Remember that the literary evidence left to us about the desirability of Jewish-Gentile separation derives from the literate class, the five percent or so of the population that could read and write. From this class eventually came the Christian bishops and leaders of the various churches. Their views did not always tally with the views or behaviors of the greater body of Christ. Evidence continually demonstrates that, “on the ground” so to speak, Gentile Christians continued warm relations not only with Jewish Christians but with non-believing Jews for centuries. What the intelligentsia desired and urged did not always happen. Ignatius lamented the mixing of faiths, as we saw. But as late as the fourth century, no less a figure than John Chrysostom (“Golden-mouthed”), a priest from Antioch later ordained to the patriarchate of Constantinople, wrote such screeds as this:

“The festivals of the wretched and miserable Jews…trumpets [New Years], booths [Day of Atonement], the fasts [Sukkoth] – are about to take place. And many who belong to us and say that they believe in our teaching [i.e., Christians] attend their festivals and even share in their celebrations and join in their fasts. It is this evil practice I now wish to drive from the church…Do not be surprised if I have called the Jews wretched…The Jews were branches of the holy root, but they were lopped off…Jesus was speaking…to the Canaanite woman, and he called the Jews ‘beloved children’ and the gentiles ‘dogs’ [Matt. 15:26]. But note how the order is reversed later; they have become ‘dogs,’ and we are the ‘beloved children’…I know that many have high regard for the Jews, and they think that their present way of life is holy. That is why I am so anxious to uproot this deadly opinion…The synagogue is not only a house of prostitution and a theater, it is also a hideout for thieves and a den of wild animals…No Jew worships God. Who says these things? The son of God. ‘If you knew me, you would know my father as well. You know neither me nor my father’ [John 8:19]…If they are ignorant of the Father, if they crucified the Son and spurned the aid of the Spirit, can one not declare with confidence that the synagogue is a dwelling place of demons? God is not worshipped there. Far from it! Rather, the synagogue is a temple of idolatry.” (John Chrysostom, First Speech Against the Judaizers 1-3)

Behind the supersessionist bigotry we can smell Chrysostom’s fear arguing against something real: Gentile Christians were warmly embracing their Jewish neighbors, attending synagogues, and sharing in their festivals. For this reason, we should be cautious about thinking that all Gentile Christians were like Chrysostom.

This sort of castigation of “the Other” was largely the same from the Jewish side of things. The growing rabbinic movement had begun forming out of the ashes of not only the failed rebellion of 64-73 but out of another catastrophic attempt at freedom also crushed by the Romans around the year 132. This latter disaster may have resulted in the permanent expulsion of most Jews from their homeland and the reestablishment of Jerusalem as a pagan city renamed Aelia Capitolina in honor of Hadrian’s family and the god Jupiter Capitolinus. The famous Eighteen Benedictions, blessings recited in many synagogues, came to include the Birkat Ha-minim, a curse against heretics sometimes including Christ-believing Jews:

“For the apostates let there be no hope. And let the arrogant government be speedily uprooted in our days. Let the notzrim [Nazarenes] and the minim [heretics] be destroyed in a moment. And let them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be inscribed together with the righteous. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the arrogant.” (Cairo Genizah version)

We can witness the push by the Jewish intelligentsia to have their people separate from largely Gentile Christianity. But as before, things on the ground did not always meet the expectations of the religious leaders; otherwise, such efforts would not have been necessary.

To summarize, we can trace the origin of the new Christian religion, nominally separate and distinct from Judaism, to people like Ignatius who lived toward the end of the first century and into the early second. But it would take a long, long time before the ways parted beyond all hope of recovery. Once Christian leaders became favored by the Roman emperor Constantine, they began to wield real power to enact their ecclesiastical goals. Laws were put into place under Constantine to further restrict the activities of Jews – they were legally prohibited from marrying Christians, from owning Christian slaves, or from trying to convert Christians to Judaism. At the Council of Nicea it was decided, contrary to the practice of many Christian churches, that the date of Easter would no longer be determined by the time of the Jewish Passover. Jews always set the date based on the lunar calendar. Constantine, on the other hand, ordered the date set by the Julian solar calendar. Ecumenical divorce proceedings were underway; final ratification would soon to become a reality.