Judaism

Judaism is the religion and corporate way of life of the Jewish people, centered on the covenant between God and Israel, on the Torah as the instruction that shapes that covenant, and on descent traced to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, expressed in commandments, worship, calendar, and communal identity. The English word comes through Latin from the Greek Ioudaismos, "the Judean way of life" — an established linguistic fact — a term used in Scripture in Galatians 1:13–14 for the Jewish manner of life Paul says he once violently persecuted.

The Gospel of Matthew shows that way of life concretely. The text says John the Baptist demands "fruit worthy of repentance" and rejects the assumption that descent from Abraham is enough on its own, adding that God is able to raise up children to Abraham "from these stones" (Matthew 3:8–9). The text presents Jesus as affirming the abiding authority of the law down to "one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke" (Matthew 5:18) and the seriousness of doing and teaching even "one of these least commandments" (Matthew 5:19). Its world is one of vows made to the Lord (Matthew 5:33), of gifts brought to the altar (Matthew 5:24), of courts of judgment (Matthew 5:22), and of the commandments as the assumed framework within which moral questions are argued. Historically, the Judaism of that period was not monolithic: Second Temple Judaism included priestly, Pharisaic, Sadducean, and apocalyptic groups, diaspora synagogues, and Greek-speaking communities across the Mediterranean world.

Historically, the relationship between Matthew's Gospel and Judaism is a matter of continuing scholarly debate. The text everywhere has Jesus speaking as a Jew to Jews, contesting interpretations of the law ("you have heard that it was said… but I tell you," Matthew 5:33, 5:39, 5:44) rather than rejecting it; one way to read the sharp polemic of Matthew 3:9 and 5:22 is as an argument inside Judaism over covenant faithfulness rather than as a verdict against it. Historians generally place the parting of the Jesus movement from the wider Jewish community over the later first and second centuries, as a gradual and uneven process.

Christian traditions read this material very differently, and no single reading is simply "the" Christian view. One long-standing tradition read the Sermon on the Mount's contrasts as setting grace over against the law and the church over against the synagogue, a supersessionist reading now widely repudiated in mainstream Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox statements. Many modern Christian interpreters read Jesus' teaching as an intra-Jewish debate about how the commandments are to be kept, and Messianic Jewish and Jewish-Christian readers understand themselves as continuing within Judaism's covenant rather than replacing it. Rabbinic Judaism, for its part, holds the Torah to be the eternal and irrevocable gift of God to Israel, and does not accept that it has been superseded.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.