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I found much to agree with in the answer by Jenny Hawkins, and I upvoted it for reporting that Christianity and Judaism share significant DNA.In my view, if it were not for the turn which Christianity took away from a belief in the redemption of all nations and restoration of the world, there would today be remarkable agreement between the two religions. Both would agree that a Messiah will rule the earth and bring peace and prosperity to the human race.But since Christianity departed from its Jewish roots, mainstream Christianity has introduced the notion that the Messiah (Christos) is already reigning — and that most humans will suffer in hell.And then the very religion which started as an offshoot of Judaism began to insist that Jews will suffer in hell if they don’t embrace Christianity!I wonder if most Christians realize that a very common belief today among the teachers in many Christian seminaries is that the same Jewish people who had over half of their population exterminated by the Nazis and their “Christian” and Moslem allies during WWII, will be completely exterminated by God himself in the “great tribulation”. This frightful, disgusting idea flows from their teaching that the Jews MUST accept Jesus — or else.That’s the steel fist behind the velvet glove of most Evangelical groups, including Jews for Jesus. Their love and support of Israel is wonderful, their excitement about Bible prophecy is nice, but their expectations about what God will do to Israel are, shall we say, embarrassing?Jewish people are beloved — the way they are. They bring humanity, humor, excellence and character to every field of study or nation in which they live. Though G-d took responsibility for disciplining his people they have been developed into precisely the sort of folks Hashem has in mind to accomplish his work in this world. And through Isaiah the Master of the Universe rebuked Babylon for showing no mercy to the the Jews while they were captive there. The book of Revelation makes it clear that Isaiah was talking about “mystic Babylon” — the geopolitical Christian establishment — as the major fulfillment of that prophecy.For that reason I think that the Jews for Jesus are an existential threat to the Jewish people the way God himself has prepared them. Jews have intentionally been guided away from interest in the message of Christianity. Instead, they have been prepared for the work they are already doing in today’s world.Jews for Jesus may be for Jesus but they are definitely not for Jews — because in my view they try to convince Jews of very non-Jewish — and unbiblical — concepts about Jesus.I would urge all Christians to immediately stop trying to proselytize Jews — and in this article I will attempt to show why Christianity as we know it today is a repudiation of both the Law and the Prophets, as well as of the original message of Jesus.JUDAISM HAS BEEN A VITAL, VALUABLE FAITH SINCE THE BEGINNINGThe Jewish people were originally and — even according to the New Testament — will always be the beneficiaries of El Shaddai’s covenant with Abraham. The Bible itself has been a down payment on the loftiest promise of history — that Abraham’s offspring would become a blessing to all other nations of the earth.G-d threw his people a curve ball when (as it seems to me) he raised up an heir to David’s throne who did not fulfill what they all expected — a world leader to break the yoke of Pagan empire.Instead, they got a guy who seemingly wanted to challenge their teachers and traditions, without defending the principles of Moses’ law they cared about most. Rabbi Jonathan Bernis does an excellent job of articulating just how hard it was for intelligent Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day to embrace his counter-intuitive message. (A Rabbi Looks at Jesus)While I agree with Jenny that there are natural areas of overlap and fraternity between these competing Jewish visions, there were substantive differences which led to their divergence into two distinct religions.Judaism has been designed from the beginning to be a way of life for human beings — a cradle-to-grave ethical framework that illuminates the inner life and outward practical achievements of human society.Moses’ law established ethical guidelines, marital principles, generational responsibilities. It put firmly into place the legal structures for governance, jurisprudence, and correction of human crimes in a multicultural society. It impacted farming, industry, economics, public health, and the arts.The ancient roots of civilization which produced the Hebrew culture of the Bible connects directly and demonstrably to the flower of human progress that we see in Israel today — a “startup nation” that is the world’s hottest economic, technological, agricultural, medical, and humanitarian juggernaut.Nor was ancient Judaism limited to the ethnic heritage of Israel. By the time of Jesus, there were many Jewish teachers who were just as strong in their outreach toward non-Jews as any evangelistic Christian missionary today is in trying to reach non-Christians. In its times of prosperity, Judaism appealed to intelligent people in many places, and spread to the Far East as well as the New World. But due largely to the rise and geopolitical reach of Christianity, Judaism always felt eclipsed, slandered, robbed of its dignity.Originally, Christianity was not structured for power, practice, or privilege. It was conceived as a personal — not corporate and definitely not geopolitical — countercultural journey. What I would call “true Christianity” has from its inception been a pilgrimage of the individual in battle against the world system and, even more importantly, the very self.Christianity initially conceded the government of the present era to the usurping, illegitimate forces which rule now in the kingdom of men. It focused its energy on preparations for the “next age” — the world to come which would introduce the realm of heaven into the management of human affairs. To prepare for that work, first-century Christians focused on their internal moral compass. Character was everything. Longsuffering was the ultimate expression of courage. Humility was the ultimate intellectual attainment.Christianity also saw the current world system as an invisible conflict between competing spiritual forces. It took positions on angels, demons, and the afterlife that were not central to Judaism, and not held by all Jewish people in Jesus’ day.Christianity also contrasted with Judaism with its preoccupation with the afterlife.For the Jews, the focus is on the present. Virtue is measured by practical goodness. Children are the ultimate value. Life is the focus.Obedient Jews were promised that they would be blessed “in basket and in store”. They expected and prayed to the Deity to see length of days and enjoy the here-and-now blessing of G-d.To the Jews, death is a waiting time, when good and bad are alike in oblivion. They both “rest with their ancestors” in Sheol — until all generations hope to be reunited with their loved ones in the realm of Messiah right here on earth.The vision of the prophets saw blessings that begin with Israel expanding, to include a restoration of all the earth. Jewish national hopes did not involve domination as much as equality with and leadership among the other nations of earth — including their kindred nations who also came from Abrahamic stock: Moab and Ammon, the sons of Lot; the many sons of Ishmael and Esau, and the children of Keturah, too. The rival tribes were always implacable, always in competition — and destined to learn, in time, how to live together in peace.Long ago, the Jewish prophets promised that Israel would one day be blessed along with their ancient enemies, Egypt and Assyria.AND WHAT ABOUT “HEAVEN”?Christianity talked a lot about a realm scarcely considered in Judaism — “heaven.” The life of Christians was presented as a gauntlet of challenges, a narrow way to life in celestial regions.Where Judaism emphasized the practical means of living well in this world and age, nascent Christianity focused on other-worldly, next-age issues — “the government of the world when the times are ripe for it.” (That is how Weymouth renders Ephesians 1:10)Like its Abrahamic root-religion, early Christianity was universalistic and positive-spirited.According to the New Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (1912), over the first five hundred years of Christian history there are records of at least six theological schools: Four of these schools were Universalist (one each in Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, and Edessa–Nisibis), one taught conditional immortality (in Ephesus), and the last taught eternal hell (in Carthage or Rome). [23]To the Christian founders, the favor of God now might not be visible; spiritual blessings might include joy or sorrow, deliverance or incarceration, liberty or death. The chief metaphor of life as a Jesus-follower became the cross; the golden crown of life which accompanied that cross was a “next life”, not “this-life” promise.Early Christianity was not the pain-for-its-own-sake fetish that it later became — but there was a sober willingness to carry whatever cross was necessary to accomplish peaceable and sweetly-reasonable goals.In Paul’s case, he seemed to view as necessary cross-bearing, the pain he suffered at the hands of his Jewish rivals, and he antagonized and radicalized Jewish legalists of his day, provoking them to rivalry against the upstart faith he preached.And yet he remained inclusive and hopeful for the future of all the Jewish people — writing not only that they could reattach themselves to the spiritual Abrahamic root through conversion, but that they enjoy their own unique destiny which will come to fruition after the parenthesis of the Christian call.The “blindness in part” that Paul ascribed to Judaism, was not their fault. He placed the responsibility for it upon the same God who first marked them for leadership in a historic calling. And Paul was clear that when the Christian call is completed, the Jews will be regathered and the original plan completed. He called that time “life from the dead”, and assures us that all Jews are beloved, and recipients of salvation.I say this not as a reassurance to Jews, who would naturally not view any “New Testament” writings as weighty — but as a warning to Christians that we need to abandon our practice of trying to “save” the Jews.THE LEGITIMACY OF JEWISH “UNBELIEF”The contrasts between the first-century Jewish world view and the other-worldly view that was growing in Christianity were huge.As the competition between Christians and Jews intensified, it was only natural that the two camps would become radicalized and distant from each other.The ancient antisemitism of Greek culture only added to this divide, until by the second century Christians (who were almost all non-Jewish by then) tended to look down on the majority of Jews. And that has always been a mistake.The Jews of Jesus’ day simply weren’t ready to buy the “suffering servant” mentality of Jesus and his followers. The prophet predicted exactly that reaction. And Jesus was clear that his teachings were calibrated to limit the number of followers who would “believe” in him. His actions were not aimed at secular rulership — and that is exactly what the Tanach taught Jews to be expecting.CHRISTIANITY CHANGED DIRECTIONS — TWICEOn top of the radically different approaches of Jesus and Moses, the early followers of Jesus quickly diverged into two styles of cultural identity.Beginning with Peter and accelerating under Paul, many early Christians focused their attention on the changes in culture and speaking they would have to make for their message to become accessible to non-Jewish converts.Meanwhile under the contrasting leadership style of James the brother of Jesus, the Jerusalem church chose a course more comfortable to Jews.The eventual Apostle to the Gentiles could not have been a more divisive figure for first-century Jews: Saul of Tarsus. Here was a zealot who started as a Pharisee and became the most famous Christian after Jesus — and a decisive, divisive wedge between the two factions.After his dramatic conversion, Saul changed his name to Paul and resurfaced as a provocateur of Jews and Greeks alike.At first he hesitated to directly challenge Jewish ceremonial traditions, but across a span of three decades he upset all that had defined Jewish identity: circumcision, Jewish food laws, the temple sacrifices, the priesthood, even the relevance of their holy city itself. By the time Rome was fed up with Jerusalem, Paul had driven the breeding grounds of Christianity to Ephesus, Corinth, Macedonia, Rome — and agitated Jews in all those places to oppose the new religion.Where Judaism required Jerusalem as its center and soul, Christianity had no ties to any place on earth. Where Judaism had distinctive markings of ethnicity and culture, the Christianity of Paul claimed no geopolitical, gender, or economic distinctions — all races, sexes, and classes are, at least theoretically, “one” through invisible ties.And then history dealt Judaism the ultimate insult — its city was destroyed, its religious institutions were smashed, and its people were scattered throughout the world. With the cruel aggravation for which Rome was famous, the children of Israel entered national Diaspora.THE CHURCH ABANDONED ITS JEWISH ROOTSHere’s where the story gets interesting.In the years following the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity began to feel its oats. With its Jewish founders dead, in their place arose a generation of leaders who were not merely non-Jewish, but became other-worldly, future-oriented, multi-cultural. And more than that: the new generation of leaders became Anti-Jewish.For example, on the southern shores of the Black Sea a young patrician sea captain grew up — Marcion of Sinope. He hated Judaism, and used his wealth and access to promote selections from Paul’s writings while attacking the Jewish roots of Christianity. To Marcion, Jahweh of the Old Testament was not God at all, but a false Jewish invention. From Wikipedia:Marcion declared that Christianity was in complete discontinuity with Judaism and entirely opposed to the Tanakh. Marcion did not claim that the Jewish scriptures were false. Instead, he asserted that they were to be read in an absolutely literal manner, thereby developing an understanding that Yahweh was not the same god spoken of by Jesus.Marcion’s radical anti-Jewish stance was branded as heresy, but it infected the entire leadership of the church with anti-Semitism. His greatest critics were themselves virulently anti-Jewish — and so the debate shifted to one-upsmanship on the claims each made about Jesus. In the end Marcion was rejected, and his ideas suppressed, not so much because of their anti-Semitism, but because he denied the emerging claims that Jesus had no beginning, was not simply human — indeed that Jesus was God.And so the result after 150 years of heated debate was an anti-Jewish Christianity that was even more unpalatable to Jews, and would have been unrecognizable to the Apostles.CHRISTIANITY BECAME BABYLONWhat follows in history, from Nicaea to the nineteenth century, should be embarrassing to every well-informed Christian.Christianity became Babylon. It held the Jewish people captive, and mistreated them. It also persecuted authentic disciples of Jesus, and almost ground them to powder.The corruption and violence of “Christendom” cannot be overstated. Hmmm … “Christendom”— that’s right, it called itself Christ’s Kingdom, and crowned its popes with a three-tiered crown asserting his power in heaven, on earth and over the underworld that existed only in their imagination.Most of the legion of evils we see in the world today can be traced to the false ideas, the shocking pride, the systematic cruelty, and the geopolitical exploitation, that ruled the world from Europe. In spite of the liberty and self-determination which some protesting Christians sought for their own specific sects, the disgusting aroma of authoritarian pride infected the American experiment as well.Christianity gave us white supremacy. It shackled Africa, and spread the most oppressive form of slavery ever conceived to the “New World” — which was only new to the Christians who had the audacity to claim it as their own by divine right.Ignorance as a tool of oppression by the learned, laissez-faire capitalism as a tool of greed, military might as a tool of global colonialism, environmental degradation as a tool of empire. All of it reached its flower and zenith of power under geopolitical Christianity. Mystic Babylon did not invent these evils but it perfected them as the tools of an integrated religious and political empire.By common consent, we call the high-water mark of Christian empire “the Dark Ages.”Sewage ran in the streets. Men bought and sold the souls of men by making outlandish claims about their “faith” — backed up, of course, with torture and violence.Jews were hounded day and night for the sin of “deicide” — killing God. They were outlawed from every honorable profession, allowed only to make loans and collect taxes. And these professions caused the common people who had to pay those taxes to resent the Jews — when it was the rich Christian nobles who were the real cause of their systemic poverty.And yet, because of the enlightenment of their sacred texts, the Jews who cowered in ghettos avoided many of the diseases that raged around them. Which led to wholesale slaughter of many Jewish communities during the bubonic plague because of the bogus charge that they had “poisoned the wells”.SO WHERE WAS GOD?Yet the Jews survived. Christianity has finally seen its day of reckoning, and the last century has seen the systematic dismantling of the world empires of every Christian nation. And at the same time, the Jewish people have repopulated their ancient lands, in spite of the opposition of the historically Christian colonial powers, including England, Russia, France and Germany.I would argue that the destruction and restoration of Israel is the strongest proof in the world that the God of the Bible is true.It was the Bible which centuries before had predicted precisely how, why, and when this overturning would take place.And the Bible also predicted how, why, and when Israel would be snatched from oblivion, regathered from 100 countries of the world, reborn as a nation, a “burdensome stone” for the united nations of earth, a miracle of water flowing in the desert, and in the end a blessing to every person on the globe. That’s not in the scope of this article but there is so much that needs to be said about the eternality of the Jewish people.ANOTHER LOOK AT JUDEO-CHRISTIAN RIVALRYPaul did the most to separate the two flavors of first-century Judaism into two entirely separate religions. But he was careful to state that this separation is not permanent. The two religions are simply two distinct manifestations of the love and power of God. Two creative ways of blessing the entire world through the faith and fiber of Abraham.And I would argue that there’s even a third way God will bless the world through the children of Abraham — the surprisingly positive impact that will one day flow from and to the Arab/Palestinian Muslim wing of Abraham’s family.During the century that Christianity emerged alongside Judaism, the struggles became violent because the goals and methods of the two sects were so radically different. At first Christians did all the suffering — both from angry Jews and angry pagans. But after the Apostles died a new generation of Christian leaders began to change the nature of the new religion.No one can govern with the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. Random miracles are not an economic program or health care system. “Resist not evil” cannot bring righteousness to civi society. Paying taxes by looking for coins in a fish’s mouth will not keep the tax collectors away!Paul and the other early Christian leaders seemed to be extremist zealots to the rulers of the day. Most accounts say that every one of the original twelve apostles except John (with Paul replacing Judas) were martyred. Nine were crucified, two were beheaded in Roman prisons, and only John died of old age while in exile on the Island of Patmos.And Paul did not shrink back from the conflict. He leaned into it. He said, “I magnify my office”. Clearly, he saw his role as provoking Judaism to rivalry against the upstart cult of Jesus, and to “harvest” a few more Jews into the Christian camp along the way. He saw himself as a wedge between the two world-views.The spiritual fathers of orthodox Judaism today were what the Biblical writers called Pharisees. While they were harsh toward Jesus and his disciples, they adopted a conciliatory tone in the face of potential annihilation by the Romans. And so when the Roman armies were on the verge of sacking Jerusalem, they negotiated an enclave where a rabbinic school could be established — minus the claims of Jewish autonomy in matters of governance. The Story of Judaism, an excellent summary of Jewish history by Bernard Bamberger, states that the pragmatism of those leaders was pivotal: “they saved their religion, but their polity they could not save.”Having begun life as a Pharisee, Saul/Paul zealously obeyed what he considered to be the command in Deuteronomy 13 to punish false prophets. When he switched sides his new friends understandably distrusted him. His old friends hated him for the betrayal he had committed, and the existential threat to Jewish traditions which he represented.Paul was crystal clear in seeing that Judaism and Christianity are designed to fulfill two parts of the promise to Abraham — an earthly piece and a heavenly or celestial piece. Going all the way back to Genesis, the promise was that the children of Abraham who would bless the entire world of mankind would be as numberless as “the stars of heaven” AND “the sand on the seashore.”*THE DUALITY OF REDEMPTIVE VISIONSNote that in the Genesis accounts of the Abrahamic promise two metaphors are used — and throughout the Bible there is a subtle hidden duality in the promises of future blessings. There are two candlesticks, two witnesses, and two olive trees in the Revelation 11 picture of the future; two olive trees in Zechariah’s vision.Solomon’s temple, which pictures the completed work of human redemption, had two massive bronze pillars — bronze being the picture not of divinity but of human perfection. The two pillars are named Boaz and Jachin. Boaz means “strength” and “sharpness of mind”. Jachin means “establishment from antiquity” or “to bring something into being with the consequence that its existence is a certainty,” I think this shows that there is both a selected group of “strong (of character and mind)” Gentiles on one hand, and the Jewish people on the other. The two are separate, distinct, and legitimate fruits of Divine grace. The Jews were always chosen for this role from antiquity; the Gentile heirs of salvation were individually chosen from among all the myriad vicissitudes of life. Each became a bronze pillar of God’s temple, the place that symbolizes God’s eternal determination to dwell with the human race in the future.So I would urge Christians and Jews who appreciate Jesus to let the distinctive nature of the Jewish ethos be. Do not try to link Jews to the false and discredited notions of geopolitical Christianity. Let our Jewish brethren alone. They are showing the world how to fashion a society that solves problems, provides equity, feeds its citizens, secures pure water, grows enough food, leads scientific exploration.How has the traditional Christian church done in any of those areas?The only real flower of Christian history can be seen in the ethical attainments of the insignificant disciples of Jesus. The few who avoided conflict, greed, violence and pride. And I guarantee you that no true Christian disciple EVER persecuted a Jew without repenting of it.Such authentically nice Christians are mostly lost to history but in the coming new order of things they will appear as the other pillar of the Temple. Then, and not until then, a new kind of harmony will emerge.