Judaism and Christianity: Why Did They Split? (And How Rome Rewrote the Story)

The question nobody wants to ask

Here’s the first bomb of the day: Jesus was never a Christian.

Read that again. Slowly.

The man you pray to on Sundays, whose words you memorized in Sunday school, to whom you sing praises every week… never identified as a Christian. Never founded a church. Never changed Saturday to Sunday. Never celebrated Christmas or said you had to eat communion wafers.

So what the hell happened?

The answer is uncomfortable, historically documented, and will shake everything you were taught. But if you’ve made it this far, it’s because you already know something doesn’t add up. So take a deep breath and keep reading.

The thought experiment that changes everything

Let’s do a simple exercise. Imagine you have a time machine and travel to the year 80 CE—just a few decades after the crucifixion.

You walk into a meeting of Jesus’s first followers and ask:

“Excuse me, where’s the Christian church?”

Awkward silence. Confused faces.

“The what?”

They wouldn’t understand you. Because that word didn’t exist yet. What you’d find wouldn’t be a “church” with crosses and stained glass. It would be a synagogue. People keeping the Sabbath. Reading the Torah in Hebrew. Discussing a Jewish rabbi named Yeshua who, according to them, was the Messiah promised to Israel.

That’s it. That’s all.

There was no “Christianity.” There were Jews who believed the Messiah had already come, and Jews who didn’t. But they were all still Jews.

Jesus was born Jewish. Lived Jewish. Died Jewish. And so did his original followers.

So where did everything else come from?

Politics enters the game (or how fear rewrote faith)

To understand the great divorce between Judaism and Christianity, we need to talk about something churches prefer to omit: Roman imperial politics.

In the 1st and 2nd centuries, Jews rebelled against Rome in brutal wars. We’re talking about the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, razed cities, hundreds of thousands dead. For the average Roman citizen, being Jewish was equivalent to being a rebel, a terrorist, a danger to Caesar’s order.

Now think about this: you have a growing group of Gentiles (non-Jews) who start following the teachings of this crucified Jewish rabbi. They meet with Jews. They keep some of their customs. They speak of a “kingdom” that isn’t Rome’s.

How do you think the Empire saw them?

With suspicion. With threat.

The new non-Jewish believers realized something crucial: if they kept looking too Jewish, Rome would crush them. They needed to differentiate themselves. They needed to prove to Caesar that they weren’t those rebels from Judea. That they were something else. Something new. Something… acceptable.

And that’s when the rewriting of history began.

The great divorce: when survival replaced truth

This is where things get ugly.

Later leaders—men from the 2nd and 3rd centuries who never met Jesus—began a systematic process of “de-Judaization.” Not by divine revelation. Not because God commanded it. But by pure, hard-nosed political strategy.

The list of “convenient” changes:

1. They changed the holy day: From Shabbat (Saturday) to Sunday. Why? To differentiate from Jews and align with the day of the Sun, which Rome already venerated.
2. They changed the date of Passover: It was no longer celebrated on 14 Nisan (the biblical Jewish date). A new formula was created so it would never coincide with Jewish Passover. The message was clear: “We’re not like them.”
3. They invented Replacement Theology: “The Church is the new Israel. The Jews were rejected by God.” A convenient narrative to justify the separation.
4. They blamed the Jews for Jesus’s death: Although historically it was a Roman execution (crucifixion = Roman penalty), history was rewritten to exonerate Rome and place all the blame on the Jewish people.

Coincidence? No. Imperial propaganda.

Figures like Justin Martyr and Marcion weren’t seeking spiritual truth. They were building a religion that Rome could tolerate. And it worked. In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine officially adopted it.

But at what cost.

What we lost in the process (and why it matters now)

When we cut the Jewish roots of Jesus, we didn’t just lose historical context. We lost spiritual depth.

Dr. Mario Sabán, historian and specialist in Jewish thought, uses a brutal and perfect metaphor: the onion.

Our search for truth today is like peeling an onion. Each layer is an added tradition, an invented doctrine, a dogma imposed by councils that never knew the master. You remove the medieval layer. You remove the Reformation layer. You remove Rome’s layer. And yes, it hurts. You cry. Because they’re taking away everything you were told was “sacred.”

But only by removing those artificial layers do you reach the core: the original message of a Jewish rabbi who spoke of internal transformation, justice, radical love, and direct connection with the divine.

He wasn’t talking about creating an institutional religion. He was talking about living differently.

Paul: history’s biggest misunderstanding

Ah, Paul. Many people’s favorite villain. The “founder of Christianity.” The one who “betrayed Jesus.”

False.

Paul (Saul of Tarsus) was Jewish and died Jewish. He went to synagogues. He was received by rabbis. If he’d been preaching an anti-Jewish religion, they would have kicked him out from day one. But they didn’t.

Why? Because his struggle wasn’t theological, it was legal and practical:

How do we include Gentiles (non-Jews) in the promises of Israel without forcing them to keep the entire Torah (all 613 commandments)?

That was the discussion. Not “let’s leave Judaism and make something new.” But “how do we open the door without breaking down the house?”

But centuries later, they took Paul’s letters—written for specific communities in specific contexts—and turned them into a universal anti-Jewish theology that he never had in mind.

They used him. They misinterpreted him. And today he still bears the blame for something he didn’t do.

The uncomfortable question you have to ask yourself

Let’s do another thought experiment, but this one more personal.

If Jesus—Yeshua ben Yosef, the Jewish rabbi from Nazareth—walked into your church today, saw the images, heard the doctrines, saw that you celebrate feasts he never knew, that you eat things he didn’t eat, that you keep a day he didn’t keep…

Would he feel at home?

Or would he think he walked into the wrong place?

And the heavier question:

Is your faith based on what the Master said, or on what the system told you he said?

Conclusion: Truth doesn’t need an empire

We’re not here to destroy your faith. We’re here to liberate it.

Because the great irony of all this is that in the attempt to make Jesus’s message “universal” and “acceptable” to Rome, we emptied it of its original power. We created a religion about Jesus, but ignored the religion of Jesus.

The religious system you inherited isn’t the one he preached in the hills of Galilee. It’s the one Rome approved to maintain social order.

And understanding this isn’t betrayal. It’s honesty.

Truth doesn’t need imperial structures. It doesn’t need dogmas of fear. It doesn’t need us to burn history for the narrative to work.

Truth stands on its own.

So today I leave you with this:

It’s time to deprogram ourselves.

It’s time to remove the layers. To ask the uncomfortable questions. To return to the core.

Because if Jesus wasn’t a Christian… what are we really following?

Sources and further study:

• Seminar by Dr. Mario Sabán: “Jesus before Christianity”
• Documented history of the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople
• Studies on Second Temple Judaism
• Pauline letters in historical and cultural context

Desprogramados: Because truth doesn’t need permission to make you uncomfortable.