Forgotten Origins: The Lost Jewish History of Jesus and Early Christianity

Okay. So you have the Jews and the Jewish Christians not long after Jesus. Right?

Well, it's way more complex than that and this book covers the ins and outs of those complexities. Early on there were various forms of Judaism just as there were various forms of Christianity at the start. This led to conflict and to the destruction of writings of various groups that the winners of the 'who-s the real ...' contest decided weren't acceptable at all and needed to go. (85% of early Christian writings have been lost to the ages, for example.)

With the Jews you had the Pharisees, the Saducees, the Samaritans, Enochian Judaism, Prophetic Judaism, the Essenes, the Zealots and other groups. It also depended on where you lived. Jews living in Galilee were looked down on by other Jews since they felt those living in Galilee didn't toe the official line closely enough.

Then you have Jewish Christians or Christian Jews, depending on how you wanted to look at things. You had various sub-groups of these (just like you had subgroups of Jewish people) and the subgroups in both major religions didn't get along all that well. You also had some groups emphasize following the Torah and other traditional Jewish beliefs and other groups saying that some parts might be followed but other parts not.

In other words, it was all pretty much a mess.

To add more confusion there was a disagreement over exactly what were the exact conditions necessary for someone to convert. (Plainly, there wasn't any book of procedures to follow on how you handled questions like that so, again, it depended on who did the defining.)

Then there was the matter of piety. How did you define that? For many it meant the observance of the Torah, dieting and purity laws, circumcision, honoring the Sabbath and Temple service.

Not complex enough? Okay. Let's add the effect of Roman culture on things. Then add the effect of Greek culture on things and you have even more sub-groups who didn't exactly like other sub-groups because they followed the 'wrong' cultural influences.

Then there was an approach which combined Messianic beliefs with Gnosticism.

Then there's also a major question. Why do so many people who call themselves Christians hate Jews? (KKK, Nazis, skinheads, radical religious groups, etc. Remember about the Holocaust?) Jesus was a Jew, people. If you hate all Jews then, logically, you must also hate Jesus and everything he said.

Some of the other important points of the book:

The destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. by the Romans had a major effect on Judaism. The Temple was the spiritual center of Jerusalem and Jerusalem was the spiritual center of Judaism. Lose the Temple and have the people of Jerusalem scattered and that alone causes problems.

Anti-Jewish sentiment started as early as around 100 C.E.

One of the questions the book addresses relative to beliefs is this: was there a Messiah or was there The Messiah? In some cases in the ancient writings there were references to two or even three Messiahs.

In one translation of an ancient Hebrew text a Messiah is a soldier.

High Temple priests could have those who spoke out against them arrested.

Jewish identity was an ethnic identity and a religious identity.

The book talks about James the Just, a brother of Jesus, and how he was murdered.

He and Paul didn't get along well.

The Romans didn't want to stop until they wiped out all of the relatives of Jesus.

This is, again, just a small sampling of this book. It is academic in nature but it's also written in a manner that is understandable (although you might want to take notes to keep the players straight.)