Christianity as a Separate Religion

That's a pretty complex question, in an historical sense, although it may not seem so at first. The entire issue is obscured by the so-called scripture of christianity. Much of what Yeshua (Jesus) preached was clearly in line with what we know of the Essenes, based on the writing of Flavius Josephus. (Born Yosef ben Matityahu, he was a "romanized" Jewish scholar and historian. Christians also call him a hagiographer, based on a very dubious passage about Jesus. It is almost surely an interpolation--something put into a copy of the text after the fact--but that is not a matter for your question.) The insistence upon the law attributed to this Yeshua, and his spiritualist insistence on the "Kingdom of God" being within each person are very typical of the Essenes. (The Essenes are another ambiguous subject, with some few scholars even claiming that they never existed. However, a brief mention of them by the Roman scholar Pliny, in the first century, makes such a claim dubious. Pliny's account is almost certainly a genuine document, although the contents are questionable as a description of a Jewish sect.)

In fact, in the wake of the Greco-Macedonian conquest under Alexander III of Macedon, known as Alexander the Great, what we call the middle east was a Hellenic society. It was a society whose ruling classes and prominent citizens were of Macedonian or Greek descent, or of indigenous descent who had been Hellenized--made Greek like. The influence was far greater than the Roman overlay. The course of what we call Christianity was formed by that Hellenic society during the first century of the common era. Saul of Tarsus, also called St. Paul, was the most vigorous of those spreading the so-called gospel. It was in the interest of his efforts to make the religion appealing to the Hellenistic culture of the region, and he did so at every opportunity. The first church council of which we have a (dubious) record is the one in which, although other policies were discussed, the requirement to undergo circumcision was removed. That would have otherwise been a truly difficult requirement to overcome to those preaching to the Hellenistic society.

The history of the first century Hellenistic world and of the formation of Christianity is hopelessly mired in corruption of documents by early Christian writers, and even by corruptions introduced possibly as late as the 14th and 15th centuries of the common era. Documents from the Roman period which show no evidence of having been corrupted by outside agents, however, show that the Romans in the first century made no distinction between Jews and Christians. This is suggestive of the notion that there was originally no very sharp distinctions between the two confessional communities. My personal opinion is that it took centuries of resolute action by early church leaders and writers to expunge the "Jewishness" from Christianity.

Setanta-

Thank you.

I am impressed by your knowledge. I wonder if you are a biblical scholar.

What was the name of the first church council at which the requirement to undergo circumcision was removed?

No, I am not a biblical scholar. I have been a student of Roman history since I was a boy, and Christianity impinges on that.

The church council that was held at Jerusalem circa 50 CE was the council which addressed the issue of circumcision.

Setanta-

Thank you.

I guess it did not have a name.

It's called the Council of Jerusalem. It was in fact a simple meeting between Paul, Peter, James and a few others. The Act of the Apostoles have a mention of it, according to which the decision was that Gentile Christians did not have to observe the Mosaic Law of the Jews, BUT Jewish followers of Jesus were still required to follow the Law. So for a while, there were both Gentile and Jewish Christians. The most prominent leader of Jewish Christians was James, brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem Church.

Then came two Roman-Jewish wars (67-70 or thereabout, then the Bar Kochba revolt in 132–135), which the Romans won, leading to the slaughter of several million Jews in Palestine and Egypt, and mass migration of the few remaining Jews out of Palestine, by decree of Hadrian if memory serves. These events terminated the Jerusalem church and led to the demise of Jewish Christianity. The two religions have been neatly separated ever since.

Olivier5-

Thank you.

Welcome.

There was no destruction of "millions" of Jews during Hadrian's reign. The total figure was perhaps more than one and a half million. That was as the result of two very bitterly fought rebellions, something the Romans did not tolerate in any population. After the last rebellion, Jews were forbidden entry into Jerusalem. It was the Roman decision to re-name Jerusalem which lead to the last rebellion. Many historians had identified those Jews who had been sold into slavery as having been "destroyed." Louis Feldman (who died last year) was the recognized expert on the Hellenic world, more particularly on Flavius Josephus and most particularly on the Jewish wars--both the known history of the wars and the book of the same name by Josephus. After contemporary scholars cast doubt on the figures of millions of Jews destroyed, even Professor Feldman reviewed the sources, and came to the conclusion that the figure of more than six million Jews was ridiculously high, as there were probably only that many Jews in all of the empire. Modern scholars had pointed out that the figures for the Jewish population of Palestine (the Roman name of the province was Syria-Palestina) were grossly exaggerated because such a high proportion of the numbers previously cited include Roman citizens, most Jews were not Roman citizens, and that clearly the previously accepted population numbers were unreliable.

EDIT: Machiavelli's great opus was the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius. (The English call Titus Livius Livy.) The work tells us as much about Renaissance Italy as it does ancient Rome, but he makes clear the policies which made the Roman empire great. People who rebelled were given the opportunity to surrender. If they did not take that opportunity, the penalties grew more severe with each escalation of violence. Those who resisted to the uttermost, and who survived were routinely sold into slavery. By comparison to Carthage, the fate of the Jews was somewhat better (not that slavery can be better than anything, except perhaps death). The Romans leveled Carthage, having already killed everyone they found within the walls. The population of the surrounding countryside was sold into slavery, and then the land was plowed and sown with salt. Corinth, in the province of Isthmus in Greece, had aided the Carthaginians. The Romans destroyed the city of Corinth, literally leaving not a stone standing on another stone. They then used the material to pave a road across Isthmus and to build port facilities on either side. Corinth was unoccupied until the mid-first century of the common era, when it was revived as a "retirement community" for veterans of the legions of Iulius Caesar.

The Roman world was a harsh place, just as was the world it had conquered.

The entry about the re-occupation of the site of Corinth should have read: ". . . the mid first century before the common era."

The exact number of casualties is irrelevant to the question, and cannot be known precisely. The important point is that Judea was by and large destroyed, a very large number of its Jewish inhabitants killed, and the rest enslaved and/or expelled out of Judea. It was a total catastrophy for the Jews. This and the previous war sealed the fate of many Jewish institutions and sects, including the Essenes, the Saduceans, and the Jewish Christians. Thus erasing the overlap that had existed until then between Judaism and Christianity, and making those two religions clearly separated.

Judaism itself was profoundly altered, from so-called "2nd temple Judaism" to so-called "rabbinical Judaism".

Iudaea (the Roman name of the sub-province) was not destroyed. The Jewish population certainly suffered terrible losses, and many, many were enslaved. Palestine continued to be Palestine.

I am and always will be indifferent to the fate of any organized religion.

I find the history of religious and political ideas fascinating, for some reason.

You find the idea of arguing endlessly on-line fascinating, for some reason. You'll get no further mileage out of me.

Okay.