Did Christianity betray Judaism — or fulfill it? And whose Torah is it anyway?

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  Diego _x1w ago

  My grandmother survived the camps. She lost her entire family to people who called themselves Christians. So when you ask me whether Christianity 'fulfilled' Judaism — I want you to sit with what that theology produced on the ground in Europe for fifteen centuries before you answer. Ideas have consequences. Supersessionism has a body count.

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• Y_

  Yuki _x5d ago

  Bottom line: Christianity didn't betray Judaism. The institutional church — drunk on Roman power and Gentile arrogance — betrayed the Jewish Jesus. There's a difference. And recovering that difference might be the most important theological task of our generation.

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• T9

  Taylor 925d ago

  My dad is a rabbi. My mom is an evangelical pastor. Christmas in our house is... something else. But I'll say this: they both love the same scriptures. They argue about what they point to. But the love for the text is identical. That has to mean something.

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  Sam1w ago

  I serve as a pastor in a Reformed congregation and I want to say something that might surprise people: I think supersessionism — the view that the church simply replaced Israel — was a serious theological mistake that has caused enormous suffering and requires genuine repentance. The New Covenant doesn't cancel God's covenant fidelity to the Jewish people. Romans 11 is crystal clear that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. We have badly misread this.

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  Drew1w ago

  look i just want someone to explain to me why God would write a covenant with one specific people for like 1500 years, fill it with promises about THEIR land and THEIR king and THEIR future, and then go 'plot twist, it was all metaphors for the church.' that seems like the most elaborate bait and switch in history

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• T_

  Taylor _x5d ago

  This whole conversation has made me want to read Romans 9-11 again very slowly. Like really slowly. With a commentary. Because I think I've been breezing past the most important three chapters in the New Testament for twenty years.

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• F2

  Feli 211w ago

  This question hits different when you realize the New Testament is essentially one long argument that Jesus IS the point of the entire Hebrew Bible. Every Passover lamb, every Year of Jubilee, every high priestly sacrifice — all of it is pointing somewhere. The writer of Hebrews didn't think he was betraying Judaism. He thought he was finally explaining it.

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  Leo S.6d ago

  lmaooo 'the Jerusalem Council was essentially a very intense comment section' im using this forever

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  Drew1w ago

  I'm not Jewish, not Christian, just someone who took a lot of religious history in college. The thing most Christians don't know is that 'Judaism' in the 1st century wasn't one thing. There were Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and a dozen other movements. Jesus was one more voice in a very crowded room. The rabbinical Judaism that said 'no, not him' was itself a post-Temple reconstruction. Both traditions rebuilt themselves after 70 AD. They're cousins, not parent and child.

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  Avery T.5d ago

  If you believe Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, then yes — Christianity fulfills Judaism in the deepest possible sense. But fulfillment does not mean erasure. The covenant with Abraham still stands. God's election of Israel is real and permanent. The church does not replace it; the church participates in something Israel was always meant to be for the nations. We got arrogant and started thinking we were the main thing instead of the overflow.

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• Q9

  Quinn 921w ago

  Honest question: if Christianity truly fulfills Judaism the way Christians claim, why do the people who WROTE the scriptures and preserved them for three thousand years almost universally read them differently? At some point 'you're all wrong and we figured it out' is a strange argument.

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• DR

  Drew R.1w ago

  I was a secular Jew for forty years. Then I read Isaiah 53 and I couldn't read around it anymore. If you disagree that it's about Jesus, I want you to tell me exactly who the Servant is — and tell me with a straight face that the rabbinical answers don't feel like special pleading.

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• YL

  Yuki L.6d ago

  I think what makes this question so volatile is that it isn't just intellectual for most people. For Jewish people it's about survival and identity. For Christians it's about the validity of their entire framework. When those are the stakes, neutral academic discussion is almost impossible.

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  Omar6d ago

  can we take a second to appreciate that this thread is basically a seminary class and im learning more here than i did in three years of sunday school

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  Omar1w ago

  Because 'fulfill' in Greek — plerosai — does not unambiguously mean 'complete so it goes away.' It can mean to fill something to the full, to bring it to its fullest expression. But the Protestant tradition has mostly read it as 'the Law is now retired,' which is... a very convenient reading if you want to eat pork and not circumcise your kids.

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  Casey6d ago

  Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the moment the church went majority Gentile and plugged into Roman imperial power, the Jewish roots of the faith became politically inconvenient. A lot of what we read as 'theology' in the 2nd and 3rd century is actually ethnic power moving under theological cover. That's not an anti-Christian claim. It's history.

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  Feli1w ago

  Guys the whole 'the theology is separate from the history' move is EXACTLY how abuses get perpetuated. You cannot keep cordoning off your beliefs from what they produce in the world indefinitely.

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  Avery6d ago

  Where do you think the Word of God gets worked out between real people? Paul's letters are literally arguments with communities. Acts is full of disputes. The Jerusalem Council was essentially a very intense comment section.

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  Leo 921w ago

  okay but the person above JUST said ideas have consequences and you responded with 'bad actors exploit ideas' which is... exactly what she was talking about. you kind of proved her point

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  Omar5d ago

  the question in the title asks 'whose Torah is it anyway' and nobody has answered that yet. I'll try: Torah was given to Israel. Gentiles who follow Jesus are grafted into the commonwealth of Israel according to Paul in Ephesians. So Torah is Israel's — and the church is invited to understand itself as part of that story. Not the replacement of it. That's the answer and most churches don't preach it.

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  Leo6d ago

  Okay here's my hot take that will make everyone mad: both rabbinic Judaism AND gentile Christianity are post-Temple reconstructions that drifted from Second Temple Jewish faith. The rabbis moved toward Torah-centered community without the temple. Christians moved toward Jesus as the temple. Both are creative responses to catastrophe. Both have validity. Neither has a monopoly on the original.

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  Diego1w ago

  Thank you. That took courage to write. Most pastors I know won't touch Romans 11 with any real honesty because it blows up too much of what their tradition taught.

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  Reese M.6d ago

  That's because Sunday school is designed to give you answers. Real faith can handle the questions.

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• D

  Diego1w ago

  Or — hear me out — Paul was a brilliant but very human theologian who was working through the trauma and ecstasy of his Damascus Road experience and building a system to make sense of it. Some of it coheres beautifully. Some of it strains credulity. That's what smart humans do.

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  Feli1w ago

  hard disagree. the rabbis who rejected jesus werent ignorant. they had read the same scrolls. they knew exactly what the messianic prophecies said. a suffering messiah who dies and comes back and then lets rome keep running the empire for another 2000 years wasnt what the text promised. calling it 'fulfillment' is just the winning team writing the program notes.

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  Kofi1w ago

  I grew up in a Messianic Jewish congregation. We kept Shabbat, we observed the feasts, we read Torah every week. I have sat through endless debates about whether we were 'really Jewish' or 'really Christian.' The honest answer is that those categories became mutually exclusive largely because of politics in the 1st and 4th centuries, not because of anything Jesus taught.

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  Feli5d ago

  That means something beautiful and I'd love to have dinner with your family.

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  Hana5d ago

  That's the most coherent framework I've seen in this thread. Saves the 'fulfillment' claim AND takes Romans 11 seriously AND explains the church's role without requiring Israel to be erased. I'm genuinely reconsidering some things.

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  Jordan1w ago

  if you think evangelizing jewish people is okay youre not actually grappling with the history. that 'invitation to be grafted in' has looked like forced baptisms and inquisitions for most of christian history. maybe sit with that.

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• H2

  Hana 211w ago

  Because the Pharisees missed it too. Jesus said so repeatedly. Being the custodians of the text doesn't guarantee you correctly interpret it — the disciples misread it constantly and they were standing right next to the Author.

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  Leo1w ago

  The servant in Isaiah 53 is Israel. Specifically Israel in exile. That's the reading in its original context before Christian interpreters retroactively applied it to Jesus. The suffering nation who carries the sins of the nations by absorbing the violence of empire. The plain contextual reading.

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  Elena6d ago

  Nobody said he didn't rise from the dead. The claim was about how the communities organized meaning after 70 AD. You can believe in the resurrection AND acknowledge that the post-Temple period involved enormous theological creativity on both sides.

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• A9

  Avery 921w ago

  The moment you say Paul was 'just working through trauma' you've exited orthodox Christianity. Fine to hold that view, but be honest about what you're saying.

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• L2

  Liam 211w ago

  The 'plain contextual reading' of Isaiah 53 has been debated by Jewish scholars since well before Jesus. Some first-century Jewish texts applied it messianically. This is not a simple 'Christians corrupted an obvious reading' situation.

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  Yuki1w ago

  That comment up there is rude AND wrong. The Messianic movement has serious theological and historical grounding. Disagree with the conclusions fine but 'cultural cosplay' is just dismissive nonsense.

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  Noah5d ago

  Good. It SHOULD be personal. The incarnation is a personal claim. History is personal. Doctrine isn't a puzzle to solve it's something you stake your life on.

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  Drew1w ago

  Romans 11 doesn't say Israel retains a separate covenant path to salvation apart from Christ though. Paul says they can be grafted back IN — which presupposes they need to be grafted back in. This is not the same as saying God has two separate covenants running simultaneously.

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  Jamie1w ago

  From a purely academic standpoint, the 'parting of the ways' between Judaism and Christianity was messier and slower than most people realize. We're talking well into the 4th century before the boundaries are clearly fixed. There were Jewish Christians and Christian-adjacent Jews for generations. The clean break is partly a later story both sides told about themselves.

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• FB

  Feli B.1w ago

  That's literally the argument Paul makes in Galatians. That the covenant with Abraham was ALWAYS about faith in the promised seed, and the Mosaic law was a temporary custodian until Christ came. Either Paul's inspired or he's the greatest revisionist of his own tradition in history. I think he's inspired. Your mileage may vary.

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• MT

  Marco T.1w ago

  Then by that logic every theology that ever produced a bad outcome is automatically false. That standard would leave you with nothing. Atheism has a body count too. Doesn't make atheism false. We need a better principle than 'bad consequences = wrong idea.'

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  Nina L.5d ago

  Go read N.T. Wright on Paul and the faithfulness of God. Long, worth it. Changes everything about how you read those chapters.

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  Casey6d ago

  Exactly. The Dead Sea Scrolls changed a lot of these conversations. Some sectarian Jewish groups were reading parts of Isaiah very differently from mainstream temple Judaism long before Jesus showed up.

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  Jamie1w ago

  With respect to the above comment — you're conflating the abuse of a theology with the theology itself. People committed atrocities in the name of nationalism, science, and a hundred other things. Bad actors exploit ideas. That doesn't make the underlying claim false.

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  Elena1w ago

  This is the most historically accurate comment in this thread so far and I guarantee it'll get fewer likes than the hot takes.

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  Kofi6d ago

  I agree the power dynamics shaped the reception of theology. I'd push back on the implication that the theology itself is therefore reducible to power dynamics. That's a reductive move. True things can be suppressed or weaponized. Weaponized truths are still truths.

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  Feli K.6d ago

  That is the most relativist thing I've ever read. Jesus is not 'a creative response to catastrophe.' He is Lord. He rose from the dead. This isn't a sociology seminar.

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• P2

  Priya 211w ago

  The Author. That's a lot of confidence packed into two words.

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  Marco 921w ago

  The history is real and shameful. The theology is a separate question. Conflating them is understandable emotionally but it doesn't resolve the exegesis.

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  Marco1w ago

  Or maybe orthodoxy should be questioned. Just a thought.

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  Hana1w ago

  Jesus literally said 'I did not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.' He said that. In Matthew 5. I don't know why this is controversial.

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  Leo6d ago

  Real faith is built on the Word of God not on internet comment sections. Just want to say that.

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  Maya1w ago

  Messianic Judaism is cultural cosplay and everyone knows it. You're Baptists who light Hanukkah candles.

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