How Jesus Became Christian [Paperback]

Like many of us, Barrie Wilson wants to know "How did the Jewish Jesus of history become the Gentile Christ of faith? How did early Christianity become a separate religion from Judaism? What really accounts for Christian anti-Semitism?" He seeks answers partly by comparing different accounts within the scriptures -- Paul's own accounts compared with Luke's version of the same events in Acts, or Jesus' teaching about the Jewish law compared to Paul's. The results are fascinating, and come close to demolishing any justification for a wall between Christianity and Jesus' own Jewish faith.

Where Jesus pushed the spirit of the Torah beyond external deeds to deal with the inner conflicts behind deeds, later Christians presented Christ as invalidating the Old Testament law. Where Jesus urged "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 5:19), Paul, with his independent revelation argued that the entire law of Moses was needless. Since Abraham had faith before the law appeared, everything which happened since (until Jesus) was irrelevant. Now, Paul claimed, anyone who continued to observe the Jewish law was "under a curse", and "No one will be justified by the works of the law" (Gal. 2:16). At least, as Wilson points out, Paul did not try to cite Jesus himself as the source of this teaching.

The book holds much more, but let me quote one among several conclusions: "What we have today in Christianity is largely Paulinity, a religion about the Gentile Christ that covers over the message of the Jewish Jesus of history. Second, it involved a hostile differentiation, with scathing attacks by the Proto-Orthodox on anything Jewish. Third, the cover up resulted in the entrenchment of anti-Semitism, directed against Judaism and the Jewish people" (p. 255)

In looking over Wilson's research, there's just one factor I'd like to add in explaining the hostile division of Gentile Christianity from Jesus' Jewish faith. That is the factor of war. Where Jewish nationalists rose in revolt against Roman colonial rule (twice, in the 70s and 130s AD), Gentile converts sought to prove their loyalty to Rome by distancing themselves from the rebels. While Rome crucified the Jewish nation, many Gentile Christians tried to deny they ever knew the accused.

--author of Correcting Jesus

This book helped to expand my understanding of the story of Jesus and all its unanswered questions. Barrie Wilson makes reading the story (or history) of Jesus extremly accessible and easy to understand. I have always been curious about the story of the historical Jesus... what was he like? how did he live? Wilson's research and presentation of the material is 'eye opening' and witty.

If you're looking for a book that will help you unravell the stories, mysteries and controversies of Jesus' life this book is the place to begin. It is an easy introduction to Jesus's life and history. I recommended it to anyone who is interested in expanding their knowledge of Jesus and his movement.

I have long believed that Christianity should never have developed into a religion on its own. It began as a small sect within Judaism and as Wilson calls the Jesus Movement, took on a life of its own after the destruction of the temple.

I also knew that Paul, in his travels west, severed the links between Christianity and Judaism. I also knew that the Church was formed in the 4th century and that the New Testament was a highly edited work. By severing the link between Jesus and his Jewish teachings----as Wilson points out, Jesus always taught observance of Torah---Paul's Christianity becomes a religion based on faith, and not on a way of life.

One of the most important aspects of this book for me is Wilson's notion of what it means to have faith. For Old Testament Judaism faith meant being faithful. Wilson asks to what? And the answer is to Torah--to the rules of life set down there. But if one has no such set of beliefs to adhere to, then the religion just has a kind of personal faith. The upshot of this is a religion which yields no specific guidance on how to live. And that is no basis for religion.

What Wilson does in the main part of the book is to show how Paul actually developed a whole new religion that had little to do with Jesus, but rather with the concept of the Messiah or the Christ. And this concept is more Hellenic than Jewish. Thus Paulist Christianity is actually a Greek religion. which is why so many Greeks became Christian.

And, perhaps the crowning achievement of the book is how Wilson shows how the Book of Acts used historical inaccuracies to connect Paul's religion to the Jesus Movement, thereby creating what Wilson calls the Cover-Up.