@Harel13 Great question!
Christians have different views on
covenantal nomism, as well as on the interrelationship between adherence to the commandments of the Torah and divine grace. From the first generation of the church until today, it has been hotly contested by theologians.
So, you've opened up a right can of worms.
@Rival is right in saying that the apostles and all of the earliest disciples were Torah-observant. She's a bit too harsh on Pauline thought - though - and takes too much for granted the traditional Protestant commentaries on his letters, IMHO, whereas modern secular scholars adhere to the "
New Perspective on Paul", which brings much more nuance into his teaching. The majority of scholars no longer believe that he had a serious ideological breach with James over Torah-observance for Gentiles, because James himself believed that only the Noahide laws applied to them and was not a 'Judaizer' like the faction Paul was combating (who believed Gentile Christians should be circumcised and subject to the full shabang in terms of Torah-observance).
Initially, in the immediate aftermath of Jesus's death, there was no dissension about keeping the Mitzvot (and this includes from St. Paul, when he first joined, as demonstrated from
Acts) because everyone in the early church - for the first decade or so - was ethnically Jewish.
Thus, kashrut and tefillin and the Jewish holy days - Pesach, Pentecost, Sukkot and the Festival of Dedication (Hanukkah) etc. - were just part and parcel of their national life, heritage and cultural identity as Judean Jews; just like it was for all their neighbours.
What reason did they have to cease abiding by the covenant that God had, allegedly, bequeathed to their nation in ancient times?
There was no written New Testament at that primitive point in time - no canon gospels, no apostolic epistles - which meant that the liturgical life of these first Christians was hardly any different from other Jews of the time in a synagogue setting (i.e. they read the Tanakh and interpreted it according to their own novel theology, in light of Jesus's teachings, ministry, death on the cross and (as they believed) resurrection and glorification in heaven). The only distinction was that the Christians, because of their marginal and persecuted status, had to gather more often in house-churches for safety reasons.
The Temple had not yet been demolished by the Romans, which meant that the ritual life and priestly code in Leviticus was still in operation. The first disciples were thus habitual 'temple-goers': "
And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts" (
Acts 2:46).
So, even St. Paul offered sacrifices according to the Book of Acts, whenever he went up to the Temple to pray.
Dom Bernard Orchard,
A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (1953) comments with great insight on this passage and St. Paul’s views:
21 St Paul’s Attitude to the Law — In view of the false accusations against him St Paul was bold indeed to come to Jerusalem....
As long as Jewish Christians acknowledged that salvation came through faith in Christ, he had never forbidden them to observe the Law. It became for them something in the nature of a work of supererogation. The breach with the Synagogue was gradual. It is generally held that after A.D. 70 it was complete, and that then all participation in Jewish rites became unlawful.
Thus when St Paul now acceded to the request of St James the Just [head of the Jerusalem church], he did not go against his principles. He was hardly the man to do that. He acknowledged a relative value in the Law, and he seems generally to have observed it himself; cf. 16:3; 18:18. He claimed to be a strict Pharisee, 23:6; 26:4–5.
He protested that he had not offended in anything against the Law or the temple, in which he had come ‘to adore’, 24:11; 25:8; 28:17. These things were not incompatible with the preaching of the new faith. They prepared the way for it, and found in it their fulfilment, 24:14; 26:22–23, cf. Rom 9–11, 1 Cor 7:18–20.
In essence there wasn't, as of yet, two distinct religions "
Judaism" and "
Christianity" but rather yet another novel mutation within the multiplicity of ideas that we lump together as 'Second Temple Judaism', which already included within its ambit many Hellenistic Jewish sects and philosophies. Jewish Christianity, initially, was just another variation.
Phrased differently, their understanding at that stage of what the "
New Covenant" of Jesus meant for the "
Old Covenant" was not, yet, supersecessionary in nature.
Jesus had given them a New Covenant with renewed ethical stipulations, his own interpretation of
halakhah (which, you could describe as fairly liberal and progressive on points - as in the relative value of ritual purity, he prioritised inner purity (i.e. mysticism, really) over the outward practices - and conservative on others), a new theology that was close to Pharisaic Judaism but included some novel concepts and at least two 'additional' rites that had not been in the Torah: the baptism ritual of St. John the Baptist (for new converts to the movement)
and the Eucharistic meal, which functioned as a Messianic banquet in which the sacrifice of Jesus for humanity was commemorated and the community engaged in fellowship (a "
love-feast").
So, how do we get from there to - well - modern Christianity? What was it about this new Jewish movement that had within it the 'seeds' of something radical and subversive of other Judaisms of the time - indeed of Torah itself - and pointed towards a new horizon?
I'll handle that in my next post (later on).
For now, a short summary: it consisted in two radical concepts, I think, in particular (although there a few others as well)-
1.
The deification of Jesus as the incarnation of a pre-existent agent of creation that had co-existed with Adonai from all eternity and through whom Adonai had created the universe (this was pre-pauline). Even by Judaism of the time, this was really, really, really weird (but its emergence had proto-Jewish roots in the Book of Enoch and other apocalyptic Jewish literature outside the Tanakh, such that it wasn't entirely novel for the Second Temple era).
2.
Inner purity
What Jesus did do was leave an 'explosive' saying attested independently by Mark, Luke and Paul in his letter to the Romans, which Paul - according to some Christian theologians but in reality it's far less clear- apparently readily cited and used to effectively render the entirety of the cultic laws of the Torah a matter of conscientious determination decades after Jesus's death (even though Jesus certainly didn't do this himself).
In
Mark 7:14, 18-23 Jesus says, “
There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile...Nothing that enters a man from the outside can defile him, because it does not enter his heart, but it goes into the stomach and then is eliminated.”...What comes out of a man, that is what defiles him. For from within the hearts of men come evil thoughts...All these evils come from within, and these are what defile a man".
Luke's gospel and St. Paul (decades before Mark) attested to different, independent variations of this same teaching (making it one of the most authoritative and ancient Jesus sayings by multiple attestation):
"
Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? Instead, give for alms those things that are within; and see! everything will be clean for you" (Luke 14:39-41)
“
I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean" (
Romans 14:14)
I think these are the two areas, theologically, where Christianity
began but did not quite (until the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70) depart rather radically from the mainstream of Judaism before it to become an entirely distinct faith with a more supersecessionist (whether weak or strong) understanding of the relationship between the two covenants.
