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Defining Christianity
If, as we have seen, the Pharisees and the Talmud forever defined Judaism, then most certainly the writings of the post-Apostolic Christian church leaders help us in understanding the relationship of the early Christian faith to both paganism and Judaism.
Justin Martyr (c100-165 A.D.) was indeed the earliest and most significant of these post-Apostolic church apologists. Following in the theological footsteps of Paul, who taught that the Gospel was the fulfilment of Moses and the Prophets, Justin argued that the Gospel was in the mind of God from the beginning and it was given to Abraham and the righteous Patriarches long before Judaism existed. This is in keeping with the Gospel teaching that the Hebrew Scriptures find their ‘flowering’ in the life, purpose, and accomplishments of Jesus the Christ.
Hence, the Christian faithful have traditionally understood the Old Testament through the New Testament.
In his Dialogue with Trypho Justin seeks to persuade a Jew of the truth of Christianity. Unlike the other apologists, he focuses mainly on the nature and meaning of Christ. Christ was the Logos who inspired the Greek philosophers and is present in all men as the Logos spermatikos (seminal reason or word). Through Him, the best of the philosophers were able to produce significant works of theology and philosophy. Their ideas could serve as beacons of truth just as much as could the inspired writings of the Old Testament Hebrews. Those who lived according to the Logos, even before Christ, were Christians. In the Old Testament it was the Logos who was revealed as God, because the transcendent Heavenly Father could not thus speak to man.
Justin wrote in Apology:
“We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word [or reason – of whom all mankind partakes. Those who lived reasonably [with the Word – are Christians, even though they have been called atheists. For example: among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus and men like them; among the barbarians [non-Greeks – , Abraham…and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious.”
Christianity, seen through Justin Martyr’s writings, takes on a ‘cosmic’ breadth:
“I both boast and strive with all my strength to be found a Christian…Whatever things were rightly said by any man, belong to us Christians. For next to God we worship and love the Word, who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since He also became man for our sakes, that by sharing in our sufferings He might also bring us healing. For all those writers were able to see reality darkly, through the seed of the implanted Word within them.” (2 Apology).
Jesus Christ had come, argued Justin, to restore true religion and to denounce the hypocrisy of the religion of Judea. For that crime Jesus had been crucified. Consequently, Christianity is not a form of Judaism or simply Jewish prophecies fulfilled but ‘the true philosophy’.
Justin’s Christianity was eventually reducible to three major principles: (1) worship of God, mostly through private prayer and communication of being; (2) belief in an after-life with rewards and punishments for one’s actions in this world; and (3) the importance of leading a virtuous life in imitation of Christ and in obedience to His commandments.
The Romans killed Justin for his religion. He was ever known as Justin Martyr, and not as St. Justin. His works defined Christianity as a culminating religion and a “universal” faith incorporating the essential and perennial truth of the pre-Christian religious tradition. Christianity was the restatement of a very old doctrine encompassing the Old Testament and the grand verities of the ancients. Two centuries later Augustine again clarified the Christian faith in these terms when he wrote:
“That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.”
Justin not only showed that Christ is the culmination and completion of all the partial knowledge of truth in Greek philosophy, He is also the culmination of the history of ancient Israel. According to Justin Jesus Christ is Israel and because of Him the church now bears the name of Israel.
This is to say, therefore, that the central message of the Old Testament has been fulfilled in the New Testament. It must be understood that this was the position of Christendom for at least 1900 years. It was the position, not only of Justin Martyr, but of such Stalwart saints as Irenaeus and Hippolytus; a position embraced by Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two towering figures of the Protestant Reformation.
Here we have not only a clear separation of Christianity and Judaism, but a direct challenge to Judaism’s core dogma of a Chosen Nation. A point which has not been lost by Jewish writers.
We read in Zionist author Uri Zimmer’s Torah-Judaism and the State of Israel: “The Jewish people, Rabbi Judah Halevy (the famous medieval poet and philosopher) explains in his ‘Kuzari’, constitutes a separate entity, a species unique in Creation, differing from nations in the same manner as man differs from the beast or the beast from the plant…although Jews are physically similar to all other men, yet they are endowed with a ’second soul’ that renders them a separate species.”
If Jews are God’s Chosen, why do the have God and prayer banned from all schools and colleges?
The question is, who is causing all the trouble? Why is our economy collapsing? Why are we fighting so many wars? Who are the REAL terrorists? Who’s behind the abortion slaughter? Who’s behind the nationalizing of American business? Who owns the federal reserve Bank (it is a privet bank)? Why do we pay interest on our own money?
http://sfabn.com/html2/jm0027e.htm – Click here for more details