Over the Easter weekend, a friend, quite unwittingly I’ve no doubt, passed along an Easter greeting quoting John Chrysostom who wrote that “Christ is risen and death is conquered. Christ is risen and the demons have fallen.” I say it was passed unwittingly because my friend did not know or suspect that Chrysostom, the “golden mouthed,” was one of the most ardent Jew hating Christian clerics of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The “demons,” for John, were Jews.

John Chrysostom, a cleric in Antioch before moving on to Constantinople where he served as the patriarch of that city, wrote eight sermons (screeds actually) against Jews. It didn’t matter if these Jews believed in Jesus (many still did) or not, he hated them all. He refers to them as “kin to dogs,” and “God’s enemies,” whose purpose was “to fill their bellies and be drunk,” their condition being “not better than that of pigs or goats.” He accused synagogues of being home to “choruses of effeminates and a great rubbish heap of harlots,” and a “lodging place for robbers and cheats but also for demons.”

It particularly galled John that gentile Christians were attending Jewish services and participating in some of their festivals (some, no doubt, conducted by Jesus believing Jews). He called this tolerant ecumenism a “Judaizing disease.” He hated that Jews continued to follow the Mosaic Torah, the Law of God, because he believed that that set of rules had become null and void with the arrival of the Jewish Messiah (a proposition hardly agreed upon in early Christian circles). He was forced to concede that many gentile Christians “respect the Jews and think that their present way of life is a venerable one” but in his view this was a “deadly opinion.” And, of course, he accused all Jews of “crucifying the Son.” And those were just the opinions found in his first sermon!

John Chrysostom followed a growing trend of anti-Semitism within the Christian clergy that was first given voice in Antioch by Ignatius, another gentile Christian leader. It was in his religious community among his group of followers that the words “Christian” and “Christianity” were likely coined (Trall. 5:2, 6:1; Rom. 3:1; Magn. 10:1-3; see Acts 11:26). He insisted that the twelve apostles abandoned Judaism for a movement he called Christianity in the form he promoted. He encouraged gentile believers to “throw out … the bad yeast [Judaism], which has become stale and sour, and reach for the new yeast, which is Jesus Christ” (Magn.10:2). Against those who remained Jews and yet followed Jesus, he wrote, “it is utterly absurd to profess Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism” (Magn. 10:3). The situation, he taught, was worse for non-Christ-believing Jews; he looked on them as “tombstones and graves of the dead” (Phil. 6:1).

The Christian vitriol against Jews of any stripe only grew in successive centuries. In part, this was an effort to secure Christ faith as a legitimate religious option in the Roman world. The empire recognized pagan beliefs and Judaism as valid, age-old traditions, but not Christianity. Along with condemning Jews, Christian leaders sought to take their place. They began insisting that gentile Christians were the true Israel, that the Hebrew scriptures were meant for them and not for Jews (though they only valued those prophecies they believed referred to Jesus; they jettisoned most of Torah as well). In their revised history, Christianity had been around for at least as long as Judaism. In the Roman world, venerability was all-important; Romans despised novelties and innovations.

Had these gentiles, who were, it must be said, like most Christians today, almost completely ignorant of Judaism, realized the role of Jewish believers in creating nearly every Christian belief held dear by the faithful, they might have been more tolerant of, and even grateful to, them. Here are just a few of the beliefs and practices of Jewish Christ believers later adopted by Gentiles.

Resurrection itself is a thoroughly and exclusively Jewish concept. The pagan world at the time of Jesus considered the idea abominable. If they believed in an afterlife at all (many didn’t) they imagined it as the immortality of the soul (as did many gentile Christians – many do today!). But the initial Jewish proclamation was that Jesus rose from the dead, not that his soul was immortal. Jewish groups like the Pharisees and Essenes also believed in physical resurrection. Without this fundamental Jewish belief, Christianity would not have been born.

Baptism is another fundamental Christian tenet derived from Judaism. The New Testament Gospels use the Greek baptisma to describe what John did in the waters of the Jordan; he was engaged in the biblically based ritual washing for purity. While the Torah prescribes washings for the purpose of ritually cleansing those who were about to trod upon sacred ground (Lev. 15:31), some Jews, like the Essenes and the group following John the Baptist, washed for moral purity as well. And like the Essenes, gentile Christians practiced an initiatory baptism as part of their indoctrination into the group.

The Christian thanksgiving meal, the eucharistia in Greek, was taken over from Jewish practices. Jewish groups such as the Essenes, the Therapeutai, and the Pharisees shared special in-group meals together. Jesus’ final meal may have been a Passover meal. Jewish believers, and many gentile believers, especially in the East, continued to observe Passover long after Jesus’ death. According to Philo, the Therapeutai sung hymns at their communal meals, prayed to God, and ate bread and drank water. The Essenes broke bread and wine over which their priest prayed a blessing. It was at this meal that they celebrated the arrival of the Messiah.

Millenarianism derives from Jewish belief. The word comes from the Latin mille meaning a thousand. Millenarianism is the teaching that the Messiah will reign in his kingdom on earth for a time, often calculated to be a thousand years (Rev. 20:4-6). Jews who held this belief (not all were Jesus believers) expected the Messiah to reunite the twelve tribes, defeat Israel’s enemies (e.g., Rome), and rule over the earth. Some thought the period of his rule would be followed by a transmigration of all the righteous to heaven. Jesus held millenarian views according to the Gospels. He spoke of his followers receiving “in this age” gifts that would exceed all they had given up to follow him (Mark 10:29-30). He also spoke of those coming from around the world to eat the Messianic banquet “in the kingdom of God” (Luke 13:28-29). This meal obviously occurs on the earth; why would the denizens of heaven require dietary sustenance? Paul was millenarian. He taught that Jesus would descend from heaven (1 Thess. 4:15-17) for no other purpose than to rule over his earthly kingdom. In First Corinthians 15:22-26, he wrote that Christ would have to subdue every enemy power before handing the “kingdom” over to the Father. This kingdom must be on earth; God already presided in heaven. Though many gentile Christians adopted millenarian views from Jewish believers, they would eventually be chastised for doing so until the belief was forced underground.

Prayer continued to follow Jewish patterns for Jesus believers. Jesus recited the shema (Mark 1:35) and the tefillah (Mark 6:46-47). He instructed others to do so as well (Mark 12:28-30). Jesus’ prayer language in the so-called Lord’s Prayer echoes the Aramaic Kaddish Prayer. It blends forms of the Jewish petitionary and penitential forms of prayer. Like the Essenes, early Jesus believers prayed three times a day (Did. 8), combining the twice per day recitation of the shema and thrice per day offering of the tefillah.

The sign of the cross, made even today by certain denominations of Christians, derived from Jewish practice. Its origins lie in the marking of the forehead urged by the prophets (Ezek. 9:4-6) and practiced by the Essenes who interpreted “the mark” as the Hebrew/Aramaic letter tau/tav (which is also the word for “mark”). The letter is made in the form of a cross, either upright (+) or atilt (x). Though the Book of Revelation only refers to a “seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God” (Rev. 7:2-4), its form was interpreted by early Jesus believers as a cross (Test.Sol. 17:1-5; Tertullian, The Crown 3, Against Marcion 3.22).

The belief that during the period between Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection two days later he descended to hell in order to rescue the righteous is a thoroughly Jewish one. The First Letter of Peter may refer to this (1 Pet. 3:19-21) but the Gentile Christians Ignatius (Mag. 9.2), Justin (Dial. 72.4), and Irenaeus (Her. 3.20.4, 4.27.2, 4.33.1, 4.33.12, 5.31.1; On the Apostolic Preaching 78) certainly do. Irenaeus traced the belief back to Jesus believing Jews. Even an early Christian creed, the Fourth Creed of Sirmium (359 CE), includes the statement that the Son of God “was crucified and died, and descended into hell, and regulated things there, whom the gatekeepers of hell saw and shuddered.”

Many other adoptions of Jewish beliefs and practices could be cited but these should serve to give the reader pause before thinking that Christianity somehow split decisively from Judaism leaving all its Jewishness behind. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only thing the gentile Christians succeeded in doing was to leave their Jewish brothers and sisters behind and then castigate them for their Jewishness (!). They succeeded in inaugurating a nearly two-thousand-year anti-Semitic program of rejection of the founders of their faith.