Judaism Then and Now: Recovering the Judaism Jesus Lived

The atrocities of October 7 did not only unleash a geopolitical crisis; they cracked open something older, deeper, and more poisonous, the reservoir of theological confusion that has accompanied Judaism for nearly two millennia. Within hours of Hamas’ attack on Israel, voices resurfaced with familiar claims: that Judaism is a fraud, that “the Jews” of today are not the Jews of Scripture, that modern Rabbinic Judaism is a post-biblical invention created only to reject Christ, that the God of the Old Testament is a vengeful tribal deity replaced by a universal God in the New, and Jesus himself was not Jewish, or that he rebelled against the Judaism of his time and founded an entirely new religion.[1]

None of this is new. Christianity’s long struggle to define itself, its identity, its authority, its relationship to Israel, produced centuries of interpretations, misreadings, and polemics about the very thing Jesus himself lived and breathed: Judaism. Large segments of Christian tradition inherited anti-Jewish assumptions without ever meeting an actual Jew. What many Christians learned about Judaism came not from Jewish sources or Jewish voices, but from the rhetorical needs of the early church as it forged a distinct self-understanding. Over time, this produced a portrait of Judaism that bore only a faint resemblance to the religious world in which Jesus prayed, argued, celebrated festivals, interpreted Scripture, and taught his followers.[2]

Today, those long-standing misunderstandings have been weaponized in service of political agendas. The debates surrounding Israel after October 7 draw from centuries of theological habits, some subtle, others blatant, that portray Judaism as obsolete, legalistic, spiritually empty, or even demonic. In the modern information ecosystem, these claims flow freely and with astonishing confidence, repeated by individuals who have never seriously engaged Jewish texts or Jewish history. Most people, including many Christians, have never been taught what Judaism actually is, what Jesus practiced, or how Rabbinic Judaism developed after the destruction of the Second Temple.

This study aims to address that crisis by clarifying what Judaism looked like in the late Second Temple period; how Jesus lived, practiced, and interpreted that Judaism; and why Rabbinic Judaism emerged. The goal of this study is to place Jesus back within his own religious world and to trace the authentic development of Judaism from antiquity to its Rabbinic form. By doing so, the paper seeks to replace caricature with history, polemic with clarity, and confusion with a more accurate account of one of the most consequential religious evolutions in human history.