Christendom

Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome. He went to visit them and, because he practiced the same trade, stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. Every sabbath, he entered into discussions in the synagogue, attempting to convince both Jews and Greeks. 

When Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul began to occupy himself totally with preaching the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. When they opposed him and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your heads! I am clear of responsibility. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” 

So he left there and went to a house belonging to a man named Titus Justus, a worshiper of God; his house was next to a synagogue. Crispus, the synagogue official, came to believe in the Lord along with his entire household, and many of the Corinthians who heard believed and were baptized. (Acts 18:1-8)

Luke, the author of Acts, continues to spread disinformation.  “Your blood be on your heads!” is his nasty remark to the Jews.  “Christ was Jesus,” he proclaimed, but the Jews opposed and reviled him.  Of course, they would.   They didn’t believe Jesus was the Christ and the savior of the Jewish people.  

According to David Klinghoffer in his 2005 book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: “What Jews in fact have disputed with Jesus’ followers from the very beginning is not the circumstances of his death, but the question of his messiahship.  It would not be accurate to say that the Jews who were alive in 28 CE actively and altogether rejected him.  The vast majority had never heard of him.  But it is also true that they did not accept whatever claim he made (or was made on his behalf) to being the promised Messiah.  Later generations made a more conscious decision to reject Christian doctrine – though of course there were plenty of individual Jews who did accept that doctrine and became sincere Christians.”

Klinghoffer also stated, “Had the Jews not rejected Jesus, had Paul not turned the church leadership to a new course, the nascent faith would in all likelihood have perished along with all the other heterodox Jewish sects that disappeared after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, leaving only ‘rabbinic’ Judaism – the traditional Judaism of today.  There would be no Christianity, no Christian Europe, and no Western civilization as we know it.”

Luke wrote that Paul said: “Your blood be on your heads.”  Frankly, for early (and later) Christians, blood was on their hands.  Consider the many Christian pogroms of Jews.  We Christians have a sordid history of persecution of Jews to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for rejecting Jesus as their savior, as Klinghoffer concludes.  That rejection led to Christendom.

Deacon David Pierce