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Relations between Judaism and Christianity began with theological opposition and criticism. Jesus, who came from among the Jews and whose audience was also Jews, characterized them as spiritually blind, formalistic and hypocritical. The Jews, in turn, accused Jesus of disregarding some of the observances of the Mosaic law, such as the Sabbath, purity and fasting; engaging in dialogue with people who were considered sinners by the Jews; claiming that he collaborated with the devil and demons; failing to perform miracles and behaving in ways incompatible with Jewish religious tradition; and betraying Caesar’s authority by claiming to be the Messiah.
Jesus, on the other hand, criticized the Jewish clergy most severely, accusing them of turning the house of God, a place of prayer and worship, into a “den of thieves.” (Matthew 21:13) The Jews, too, wanted to erase them from history by struggling against other sects that had emerged from within their own ranks, and for this purpose, they tried to make the Rabbinic interpretation of Judaism the only valid interpretation. In the synagogues, they cursed all religious communities, especially Jesus and his followers, who were outside this religious interpretation.
In the historical process, Christianity, which was shaped on the axis of the messages of Jesus Christ and the activities of his apostles, accepted Judaism as the theological other and oppressed Jews in the geographies it dominated. This traditional attitude of Christians against Jews for two thousand years was formalized with a decision announced by the Catholic Church. According to these decisions taken by the Second Vatican Council, the Jews killed God by killing Jesus and are God-killers, God’s chosen people are now the Church and therefore Christians, and the Old Testament is an allegorical forerunner of the New Testament, the Bible. Furthermore, the council decided that “since the church of Jesus Christ is the New People of God, the Old People of God must mingle with it and disappear into it: for the promises of God in the Old Testament have been fulfilled in the person of Jesus.” With this decision, the Jewish foundations of Christianity are emphasized, but there is also the will to dissolve Judaism within the existing Christianity.
Christianity, which had a temple in common with the Jews at the time of its emergence, maintained its attachment to the same temple and accepted it as the place where Jesus would come again before the apocalypse. However, Paul, who is considered to be the architect of Christianity after Jesus Christ, pioneered the development of Christianity as a completely independent religion, which started out intertwined with Judaism and looked like a sect of Judaism. Paul realized one of the first theological divergences by transforming the understanding of “king-Messiah” in Judaism into the belief in “Lord Jesus Christ” and ensured that Christianity was shaped as a different religion. Because although there were some Jews who initially saw Jesus as the expected Messiah, mainstream Judaism did not accept him on the grounds that he did not have the characteristics of the expected Messiah because he was far from establishing an earthly power with his messages. One of the most important aspects that Paul distinguished Christianity from Judaism is that he was engaged in the activity of communicating the message of Jesus Christ to other people of non-Jewish origin. Thus, Christianity found the opportunity to spread to different geographies by separating from the Jews living in and around Jerusalem and thus from the Temple, but it did not forget the physical break with the Temple and kept the hope of returning there one day alive. Despite their rapid growth, they were only able to build their own churches during the reign of Emperor Constantine (272-337 A.D.) due to the oppression of the Jews. With the official support of the Roman state, the Christians gained the right to own private property and build their own churches. With this political support, Christians determined their holy books, formed their theology, and abandoned the beliefs and practices of the Jewish tradition in favor of their own unique worship.
The church fathers focused on some issues that clarified the theological distinction in their justification of Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism. For example, in determining the identity, nature and position of Jesus Christ in the trinitarian faith, which the Jews persistently denied, it was interpreted that the God of the Jewish holy book Tanakh and the God of Jesus Christ were the same God. The Tanakh is called the Old Testament and the sacred texts of the Christians are accepted as the New Testament, and they have stated that both together constitute their own holy books.
The belief in the Messiah, which is one of the basic religious principles of Judaism, has kept alive the hope of salvation of Jewish communities scattered in different parts of the world as a result of the oppression they were subjected to during the Roman period. Mainstream Judaism, which did not accept the appearance of Jesus as a savior and characterized him as a false messiah, did not give up the belief in a “savior messiah”. The figure of the expected savior Messiah was believed to be represented by different personalities at different times throughout Jewish history. For example, Bar Kohba, who initiated the revolt movement against Rome, was declared the expected Messiah by the Jewish religious leader of the period and stated that some of the messages of the Torah pointed to him. The success of Bar Kohba’s movement lasted for three years and when he was killed by the Romans, the Jews were greatly disappointed because the Messiah, who was considered immortal, died like a mortal and failed to establish Jewish sovereignty on earth. Three centuries after Bar Kohba, a man named Moshe from among the Jews living on the island of Crete declared that he was the expected Messiah and tried to rekindle the ashen hopes around the Messianic faith. He claimed that he bore the same name as Moses and that he would lead the Jews to Palestine by splitting the Mediterranean Sea, just as Moses had saved the Israelites by leading them through the Red Sea, but he was soon exposed as a false messiah. In the following centuries, many people emerged claiming to be the messiah and tried to gather the Jewish community around him. Finally, in the 17th century, Sabetay Sevi, an Ottoman citizen, proclaimed his messiahship in Izmir and traveled to Palestine and Egypt, gaining followers. However, he was complained by the official Jewish circles of the period on the grounds that he was causing sedition, and when the Ottoman state sought his testimony, he declared that he had converted to Islam.
Until the 19th century, the idea of the messiah, the savior expected in Jewish circles, went beyond being a charismatic leader-centered belief and transferred its mission to Zionism, which emerged as an organized ideology. The understanding of messianism, which transformed from a charismatic leader to an organizational-institutional structure, evolved through the Zionist ideology and made a radical reform in the messianic belief. Zionism assumed the guardianship of the messiah and aspired to the task of settling the Jews in the “promised land” and giving them dominion over the earth. In this case, the salvation mission that Jews expected from a charismatic leader became embodied in the spiritual personality of Zionism. Since 1948, the state of Israel has tried to legitimize its policies of occupation of Palestinian territories and genocide and ethnic cleansing against them through this messianic understanding.
Zionism, which both creates a favorable ground for the Messianic expectations of evangelicals and keeps the Jewish expectation of a savior messiah alive, fulfills the role assigned to it in a way that makes Iblis jealous. While trying to play the roles of Trojan horse and Messiah’s proxy at the same time, it is being dragged into the vortex of the ancient contradiction of “chosenness-cursedness”. There is no answer yet to the question of where and how this Trojan horse, which is attempting a coup d’état by rebelling against the conscience of humanity and universal legal values, will be stopped.