Why the Followers of Christ are not Jewish
There is always controversy in Religion. There are many different opinions around and I understand that many believe what they think is fact. Therefore, my explanation on this topic isn’t me telling you this is fact. This is just the best answer I found to explain the reason.
Yes, Jesus was Jewish and he practiced the religion until his death. What he preached was Judaism but he also called for change within the Jewish religion. His intention was to unite the people, not to create a new religion that divided the people. After Jesus died it was his followers that developed his teachings and there was, as we all know, resistance to Jesus and his teachings by the leaders of the Jewish faith.
Emperor Constantine also sought to promote the new following of Jesus to help unite the Roman Empire. Christianity spread rapidly because of his support and some elements of Pagan faiths were also included in the religion to help spread the unity further. At this point Christianity was already moving further away from it’s Jewish roots.
Decades after his death Jesus was deified and that was the ultimate breaking point of Christianity from Judaism. In the Jewish faith it is blasphemy to state that G-d ever takes human form and Jews were forbidden to worship any human. Therefore Jews cannot embrace Jesus.
Jesus could also not be the Jewish Messiah because he did not fulfill any of the Jewish Messianic prophecies in his lifetime. The Jewish Messiah has only one “normal” human lifetime in which to fulfill all the prophecies.
This may seem like it is the Jewish perspective of this topic but that is the only perspective that really matters. If the leaders of the Jewish religion decided to accept the teachings of Jesus and alter the religion then this whole thing would have been a different story. Christianity became it’s own religion because of the stance the Jewish religion took and thus there was no choice for the followers of Jesus to separate themselves from Judaism.