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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DonAdam" data-source="post: 1554380" data-attributes="member: 2446">A historical note that may or may not be helpful:I assume, from your posts, that you're talking about "Catholic" in the sense of denying the validity of other beliefs (like pagan beliefs) and claiming to subsume, inherit, or replace another set of beliefs (like Judaism). This gives you a twofold relationship between this new faith and other faiths; some it rejects, some it adopts and transforms.The important point here that has not been mentioned is that this replacement activity was not one-way. The majority of first century Christians were Jews, and did not stop being Jews until after the destruction of the Temple and then the Jewish council of Jamnia, when the Christians were booted out of the synagogues* (the gospel of John, many scholars postulate, was written in this context, hence the repeated use of the "cast out of the synagogue" phrase and the use of the term "the Jews."). Most scholars read Jamnia as an attempt by first century Jews to solve a sort of "identity crisis" of their religion after the destruction of the Temple, hence the desire to finally separate themselves from Christians.*I don't think it was a formal booting out, but my memory is fuzzy. It might have had something to do with reading some anathema-like statement about Christians in the synagogues, which obviously the Christians could not participate in.Though Christianity was distinct from regular Jewish belief before Jamnia, it was only afterwards that it became totally separate. It was not until the second century that the Marcionites would come along, claiming that the God of the Old Testament was evil and that the New Testament was about a new God.Hope that's helpful.</blockquote>

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