by Moshe Kerr

Created on: June 16, 2008

Links between Judaism and Christianity

This question requires making a fundamental distinction between physical historical links and spiritual links. Obviously, Jews existed under an exceeding harsh and terribly bitter exile/galut in Christian Europe. The culmination of this galut occurred with the Nazi crimes against humanity and Christian apathy and indifference or commission/omission, resulting in mass murder, theft, slander, and oppression.

The Catholic and later Protestant churches have borrowed heavily from the Jewish Tanach which both religions refer to as the Bible. The Catholic Church has enshrined ritual worship in its high church services. The Protestant churches rejected the use of carved representations of saints, and paying money for church forgiveness of sins. Both Catholic and Protestant religions consider themselves as believer in the one god. The Puritan and Quaker Protestant sects set high moral value to doing acts of good works. The Catholic High Church services closely eyed the ancient Temple services of Israel, they consciously employed smoke and incense in their ritual worship of their gods.
Rambam, an early reshon scholar, born in Cordoba Spain in 1135 CE ruled that Christianity like Hinduism and Buddhism, that these religious belief systems defined the meaning of avodah zarah. This term "avodah zarah" the Protestants translated as idolatry. Hence the Protestants strongly opposed the Catholic tradition of making statues of Catholic saints or putting an image of Jesus on the cross. The Protestant error lay in that they took a specific example of avodah zarah and transformed the specific into a general or universal term. The prophets in the Tanach taught, accursed the person who calls day night and night day. Practically speaking, avodah zarah or "strange work" specifically forbids the worship of idols, but its vision goes far beyond this specific prohibition. And this key term, which serves as the first revelation of Adonai at Sinai, Christianity in all its branches, expression and forms failed to understand this key essential point, unto this very day.
The failure of the New Testament writers to understand this most essential component of cutting a covenant/brit upon the soul testifies to the genesis of the error of Christianity as a faith. The Torah begins with the Creation story because, as the Talmud teaches, the Torah speaks in the language of man. The Creation story teaches a deep spiritual truth by means of a proverb. Because Christian

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