Tuesday:

> The Jews rejected his teachings and Peter had a vision telling him to teach the Gentiles as well after Jesus' own ppl rejected him.

We have to remember that Christianity did not exist at the time of Jesus. Jesus never set out to reform or modify Judaism. Neither did the Jews accept or reject his teachings. In reality Jesus belonged to a minority of Jews who was dissatisfied with the way the powerful Pharisees in Jerusalem were running things. People from Galilee saw their greed for wealth and power as opposed to what God had intended for human beings to do on this earth. John the Baptist was also from that same stream of thought.

At the time there were many religious "dissidents", most of them living near the shores of the Dead Sea, away from Roman rule. The Pharisees and Herod had completely surrendered to the Romans. Some people chose armed struggle, others chose a spiritual form of rebellion. Those who sought a spiritual path to liberation started questioning the old ways. This is how baptism arose as a way to clean a person from their sins.

When Jesus had his ministry, he was not the great originator of a new religion as we see him today. He was merely a carpenter's son trying his best to teach people a different way in a world full of greed and violence. Jesus lived and died without immediate impact. His teachings remained only among his apostles and relatively few followers. In that sense Jews neither accepted or rejected him, because for the majority of the population he would have been one more spiritual rebel trying to change the world.

It was St. Paul who worked hard to change things. St. Paul himself had been converted from a Jew and Roman into a follower of Jesus. Prior to his conversion Paul the Apostle persecuted the early Christians, probably along with other dissidents of Pharisee spiritual rule. St. Paul saw the strength of Jesus' message, and set out to spread it along with his apostles. Jesus teachings did not find much resonance among Jews, but they found resonance among Greeks. It is at that point that Christianity accepted Gentiles into the fold, because Paul himself was a gentile Roman. It is also why the New Testament was written predominantly in Greek and not Aramaic.

In reality the distinction between Judaism and Christianity arose slowly over two hundred years after the death of Christ. Christians took many of the old rituals of Judaism and transformed them into symbolic rituals. Circumcision was replaced with baptism. The ritual sacrifice of lambs was replaced with the Eucharist. Many of these conversions had an origin in alternate rituals in old Judaism, but they did not gain their deep spiritual significance until the apostles spread the word of Jesus.

I wouldn't say Jews rejected Jesus. Rather, Jews had no chance to hear his message considering the brutality of Roman rule and the ultimate expelling of Jews from their homeland. Jews survived as a distinct culture and religion by handing onto their old ways as best as they could. The more they were prosecuted, the harder they fought to retain their religion culture and values. It comes as no surprise that they refused conversion to Christianity and Islam in spite of 2000 years of discrimination and prosecution.