Early Christians Debate Jewish Observance
Scholars debate the nature of Jewish law and its role in the first centuries after Jesus’ crucifixion because the texts of this early period reflect conflicting perspectives, complexity, interpretive flexibility, and changing attitudes. In the Second Temple period and even later, Jewish groups, including Jewish Christians, continued to define the nature of various observances and what they entailed, and Christ followers debated the extent to which the Torah remained obligatory after the crucifixion, and for whom. What role did these observances play with respect to one’s identification with a particular community and the traditions it deemed authoritative?
Among the questions that ignited debate was whether gentiles were required to undergo circumcision and so become subject to the law in order to adopt Jesus as their Messiah (Acts 15) and thereby enter the kingdom of heaven. For example, the “apostles and the elders” in Jerusalem argued that circumcision was necessary to become a Christ follower, but Paul dissented and taught that gentiles ought not undergo circumcision but rather that they become beneficiaries of the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 15 and 17) through their faith in Jesus and not through being obligated to keep the law (Romans and Galatians). The author of Colossians, writing a generation or more after Paul, is adamant that ritual observances—including festivals and Sabbaths—are of this world, while believers in Christ belong to the next.
In the second century, more vehement polemical tracts began to circulate, including the apologetic Epistle to Diognetus and Justin Martyr’s polemic Dialogue with Trypho. These writings argue that the prophecies contained in the Hebrew Bible are fulfilled by Christ. The third-century church father Origen explains that Mosaic law foreshadows the good things to come that Jesus could not yet explain to his apostles, all of whom were raised in the law, from which they could not separate themselves. Origen further explains that the “Old Testament” is only old for those “who want to understand it in a fleshly way,” presumably in reference to Jews who continue to practice the law. He advocates a spiritual understanding, the result of which is that it is always new.