How Jewish was the early Church?

Written by Knut Hoyland

Caspari Staff Nov 3, 2017

"The Disciples Admire the Buildings of the Temple" by James Tissot (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In Matthew 15, we read the story of Jesus meeting a Canaanite woman. After initially dismissing her pleas for help, Yeshua (Jesus) ends up healing her daughter and acknowledging the woman’s faith. As one of the few encounters between Jesus and non-Jews recorded in the gospels, this passage has been interpreted as providing a model for the relationship between the Jewishness of the early Jesus movement and the predominantly Gentile Christian church which emerged in the post New Testament era.

Today we speak of Judaism and Christianity as two separate and distinct religions. It is true that the Messianic movement challenges this distinction by reconciling faith in Yeshua with Jewish identity, even making it a natural consequence of that identity. However, for most of the world, Judaism and Christianity remain two clearly different religions. The que…