What makes judaism different than christianity

Consequently, we mention only a few basic differences in how these three religions interpret Old Testament texts. Though all three hold some views of the ancestor Abraham in common, they also interpret texts about him differently. For Christians, Jesus and all who believe in him also are descendants of Abraham. When it comes to reading the Old Testament, a Christian reading necessarily requires the lens of Christology, whether implicitly or explicitly. And yet, the Old Testament must be viewed in continuity with the New Testament, since both are of the Word.

Judaism, on the other hand, does not share the belief in the Incarnate Word. The Old Testament is read not with Christ in mind, but as the earliest inspired documents of their religious community through which they can see and better understand their present existence as a people. Finally, an Islamic reading of the Old Testament would be very different from both a Christian and Jewish reading. Islam thought of the Old Testament as becoming somehow defective. Therefore, any reading of the Old Testament would be a Koranic reading since Muslims believe the Koran is the true word of God that actually supplants the Old Testament.

Put another way, if a contradiction existed between the Old Testament and the Koran, the teaching of the Koran would be adhered to while that of Old Testament would be rejected. The person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of his passion, death and resurrection are viewed differently by all three religions.

Like the God of Moses, Allah was a lawmaker. The Quran provided often varied guidance to the believing community in matters of marriage and family law, women, inheritance, food and drink, worship and purity, warfare, punishments for adultery and false accusations of adultery, alcohol and theft. In short, it provided the foundation of what was later to be much elaborated in sharia law.

Muslims, Christians and Jews do all worship the same complex God. Yet, in spite of this, all believe that their religion contains the full and final revelation of the same God. Here is the origin of their unity. Here also lies the cause of their division. For this belief in the truth of one religion and the falsity of the others leads to inevitable conflict between the believer and the unbeliever, the chosen and the rejected, the saved and the damned.

Here lie the seeds of intolerance and violence. So the God of Muhammad, like the God of Jesus and Moses, divides as much as he unites, a cause of strife both between and within these religions. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Wikimedia images. Almond , The University of Queensland. He initiated the reading of the Hebrew Bible in terms of a universal human disaster, followed by a rescue mission focused in Jesus.

This interpretation then became standard in the Church throughout the early centuries, and has remained so to this day. For Jews, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE—an event that forced a reorientation of the way the religion was observed—the rabbinic tradition increasingly saw the Bible as a closed corpus that could be used as a guide for living in the present, rather than as orientated to the future of the world.

Mainstream Judaism has continued to read the text as torah —guidance for living a Jewish life—though there have been, and are, groups that still look for a coming divine intervention in world affairs.

We could portray the relation of the Bible and the faiths that claim it as their basis by a diagram of intersecting circles. Both Judaism and Christianity overlap significantly with their Bibles, and are not thinkable without them. Yet from the Bible one could not read off either faith as we in fact encounter them.

Nor could one predict the contents of the Bible from either faith. And, conversely, there are central features in the New Testament that do not appear in the creeds. It is not that the Bible and the creeds contradict each other, simply that they have different emphases. Similarly in Judaism, central features such as dietary or purity laws are by no means absent from the Hebrew Bible, but they have nothing like the prominence there that they enjoy in Judaism today.

Nevertheless, both faiths find it hard to believe that the Bible does not in some way have a point-by-point correspondence with their religion. The Hebrew Bible consists of a collection of the highly variegated national literature of ancient Israel, written and compiled, probably, between the eighth and second centuries BCE. There is no way that such a collection could be identical with Judaism as a worldwide religion that has flourished and developed throughout subsequent centuries, and is still developing today.