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The Roots Of Judaism And Christianity Essay (стр. 2 из 2)

countries, but these agreements were not consistently upheld with regard to

Jewish minorities, and colonization in Palestine expanded considerably. In the

Balfour Declaration of 1917, Great Britain announced its support for a Jewish

national home; this purpose, approved by the Allied governments, was embodied in

the mandate for Palestine that Britain assumed after the war. British agents had

secretly made contradictory promises to Arab leaders, however, and growing Arab

nationalism expressed itself in anti- Jewish riots in Palestine in 1920-21 and

1929. In the latter year leading non-Zionist Jews, convinced that Palestine

alone offered hope for impoverished and oppressed millions (since Western

nations had rigidly restricted immigration), joined with the Zionists to form

the Jewish Agency to assist and direct Jewish settlement and development in

Palestine.

The Communist Revolution of 1917 did not end the sufferings of the Jewish

population in Russia. Much of the fighting in the Civil War of 1918-20 took

place in the Ukraine, where the White Russian armies conducted savage pogroms in

which thousands of Jews were massacred. Although discriminatory decrees were

abolished and anti-Semitism was banned as counterrevolutionary under the Soviet

system, Judaism suffered the same disabilities as other religious groups. After

the fall of Leon Trotsky, the old anti-Semitism was revived as a government

policy.

In Germany the Weimar Republic for the first time abolished all official

discrimination against Jews. The republic was unpopular, however, and anti-

Semitism was popular. Calculated use of anti-Semitism as an instrument was a

major factor in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, whereupon the German

Jews were immediately disfranchised, robbed of possessions, deprived of

employment, barred from the schools, and subjected to physical violence and

constant humiliation. Once World War II occupied the attention of the

democracies, Hitler and his supporters attempted “the final solution,” the

complete extermination of the Jews. About 6 million Jews –almost a third of

their total number–were massacred, starved, or systematically gassed in

concentration camps. In addition to destroying so many individual lives, the

Holocaust eradicated the communities of Central and Eastern Europe, which had

been the chief centers of learning and piety for nearly a thousand years.

The Western democracies all but closed their doors to refugees. Britain

meanwhile had gradually abandoned the Balfour Declaration, reducing the number

of Jews admitted to Palestine in order to placate the Arabs. After repeated

outbreaks of violence, investigations, and abortive British plans, Britain

announced that it was giving up the mandate, and the United Nations adopted a

resolution calling for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas.

On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed. Since then Israel has

fought five wars against Arab coalitions to establish and preserve its

independence. A peace treaty (Mar. 26, 1979) between Israel and Egypt was not

accepted by the other Arab states.

Although the USSR voted for the UN partition resolution in 1947, it later

became markedly anti-Israel in its policies. A resurgence of Jewish self-

consciousness, however, occurred within Soviet Jewry despite deprivation of

religious education and other discriminations. Over the years a number of Soviet

Jews emigrated to Israel and the United States, although official restrictions

caused a decline in emigration in the 1980s until 1987, when new legislation

provided a liberal emigration policy.

Since World War II the Jews of the United States have achieved a degree of

acceptance without parallel in Jewish history, and Jews play a significant role

in intellectual and cultural life. The elimination of social barriers has led to

a high rate of mixed marriage. During the same period there has been a growth in

synagogue affiliation and support for Israel.

Recent estimates put the total number of Jews at about 17.5 million, of

whom almost 7 million reside in the United States, more than 2 million in the

republics of the former USSR, and over 4.3 million in Israel. France, Great

Britain, and Argentina also have significant Jewish populations. The once-

substantial communities in North Africa and the Middle East have been reduced to

small fragments. Most of these Oriental Jews have settled in Israel. Thousands

of Ethiopian Jews, for example, were airlifted to Israel in 1984-85 and 1991.

Israel’s Jewish population increased significantly in the early 1990s, when it

received hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the disintegrating Soviet

Union.

(ii) Christianity:

Christianity is the religion of about a billion people whose belief system

centers on the person and teachings of Jesus Christ. To Christians, Jesus of

Nazareth was and is the Messiah or Christ promised by God in the prophecies of

the Old Testament; by his life, death, and resurrection he freed those who

believe in him from their sinful state and made them recipients of God’s saving

grace. Many also await the second coming of christ, which they believe will

complete God’s plan of salvation. The Christian Bible, or Holy Scripture,

includes the Old Testament and also the New Testament, a collection of early

Christian writings proclaiming Jesus as lord and savior. Arising in the Jewish

milieu of 1st-century Palestine, Christianity quickly spread through the

Mediterranean world and in the 4th century became the official religion of the

Roman Empire.

Christians have tended to separate into rival groups, but the main body of

the Christian church was united under the Roman emperors. During the Middle Ages,

when all of Europe became Christianized, this main church was divided into a

Latin (Western European) and a Greek (Byzantine or Orthodox) branch. The Western

church was in turn divided by the Reformation of the 16th century into the Roman

Catholic church and a large number of smaller Protestant churches: Lutheran,

Reformed (Calvinist), Anglican, and sectarian. These divisions have continued

and multiplied, but in the 20th century many Christians joined in the ecumenical

movement to work for church unity. This resulted in the formation of the world

council of churches. Christianity, a strongly proselytizing religion, exists in

all parts of the world.

Certain basic doctrines drawn from Scripture (especially from the Gospels

and the letters of Saint Paul), interpreted by the fathers of the church and the

first four ecumenical councils, historically have been accepted by all three of

the major traditions. According to this body of teaching, the original human

beings rebelled against God, and from that time until the coming of Christ the

world was ruled by sin. The hope of a final reconciliation was kept alive by

God’s covenant with the Jews, the chosen people from whom the savior sprang.

This savior, Jesus Christ, partly vanquished sin and Satan. Jesus, born of the

Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, preached the coming of God’s

Kingdom but was rejected by the Jewish leaders, who delivered him to the Romans

to be crucified. On the third day after his death God raised him up again. He

appeared to his disciples, commanding them to spread the good news of salvation

from sin and death to all people. This, according to Christian belief, is the

mission of Christ’s church.

Christians are monotheists (believers in one God). The early church,

however, developed the characteristic Christian doctrine of the Trinity, in

which God is thought of as Creator (Father), Redeemer (Son), and Sustainer (Holy

Spirit), but one God in essence.

Christianity inherited and modified the Jewish belief that the world would

be transformed by the coming of the Reign of God. The Christians held that the

bodies of those who had died would rise again, reanimated, and that the

righteous would be triumphant, the wicked punished. This belief, along with

Jesus’ promise of “eternal life,” developed into a doctrine of eternal rewards

(heaven) and punishments (hell) after death. A source of doctrinal uncertainty

was whether salvation depended on God’s election in advance of a believer’s

faith, or even in a decision of God before the disobedience and fall of the

first man and woman.

Although Christians today tend to emphasize what unites them rather than

what divides them, substantial differences in faith exist among the various

churches. Those in the Protestant tradition insist on Scripture as the sole

source of God’s revelation. The Roman Catholics and Orthodox give greater

importance to the tradition of the church in defining the content of faith,

believing it to be divinely guided in its understanding of scriptural revelation.

They stress the role of ecumenical councils in the formulation of doctrine, and

in Roman Catholicism the pope, or bishop of Rome, is regarded as the final

authority in matters of belief.

Christian societies have exhibited great variety in ethos, from mutual love,

acceptance, and pacifism on the one hand, to strict authoritarianism and

forcible repression of dissent on the other. Justification for all of these has

been found in various passages in the Bible. A prominent feature of the Roman

Catholic and Orthodox churches is Monasticism. Christians also vary widely in

worship. Early Christian worship centered on two principal rites or sacraments:

Baptism, a ceremonial washing that initiated converts into the church; and the

eucharist, a sacred meal preceded by prayers, chants, and Scripture readings, in

which the participants were mysteriously united with Christ. As time went on,

the Eucharist, or Mass, became surrounded by an increasingly elaborate ritual in

the Latin, the Greek, and other Eastern churches, and in the Middle Ages

Christians came to venerate saints–especially the Virgin Mary–and holy images.

In the West, seven sacraments were recognized. The Protestant reformers retained

2 sacraments–baptism and the Eucharist–rejecting the others, along with

devotion to saints and images, as unscriptural. They simplified worship and

emphasized preaching. Since the 19th century there has been a certain amount of

reconvergence in worship among ecumenically minded Protestants and Roman

Catholics, with each side adopting some of the other’s practices. For example,

the Catholic Mass is now in the vernacular. Among other groups in both

traditions, however, the divergence remains great. In most Christian churches

Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection, is observed as a time of rest and

worship. The resurrection is more particularly commemorated at Easter, a

festival in the early spring. Another major Christian festival is Christmas,

which commemorates the birth of Jesus.

The age of Christian antiquity extends from the beginning of the Christian

era (dated from the approximate time of Jesus’ birth) through the fall of the

western half of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

After Jesus was crucified, his followers, strengthened by the conviction

that he had risen from the dead and that they were filled with the power of the

Holy Spirit, formed the first Christian community in Jerusalem. By the middle of

the 1st century, missionaries were spreading the new religion among the peoples

of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. Chief among these was Saint Paul,

who laid the foundations of Christian theology and played a key role in the

transformation of Christianity from a Jewish sect to a world religion. The

original Christians, being Jews, observed the dietary and ritualistic laws of

the Torah and required non-Jewish converts to do the same. Paul and others

favored eliminating obligation, thus making Christianity more attractive to

Gentiles. The separation from Judaism was completed by the destruction of the

church of Jerusalem by the Romans during the Jewish Revolt of AD 66-70.

After that Christianity took on a predominantly Gentile character and began

to develop in a number of different forms. At first the Christian community

looked forward to the imminent return of Christ in glory and the establishment

of the Kingdom. This hope carried on in the 2d century by Montanism, an ascetic

movement emphasizing the action of the Holy Spirit. Gnosticism, which rose to

prominence about the same time, also stressed the Spirit, but it disparaged the

Old Testament and interpreted the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in a

spiritual sense. The main body of the church condemned these movements as

heretical and, when the Second Coming failed to occur, organized itself as a

permanent institution under the leadership of its bishops. Because of their

refusal to recognize the divinity of the Roman emperor or pay homage to any god

except their own, the Christians were subjected to a number of persecutions by

the Roman authorities. The most savage of these were the one under Emperor

Decius (249-51) and that instigated by Diocletian (303-13). Many Christians

welcomed martyrdom as an opportunity to share in the sufferings of Christ, and

Christianity continued to grow despite all attempts to suppress it. Out of the

experience of persecution a controversy grew over whether those who had denied

their faith under press