It’s impossible to appreciate this unless you compare it with, lehavdil, the other nations. It’s only because you don’t know what’s doing in the other religions that you think, “Maybe they too are stubborn and cling to their principles.” There isn’t a religion in the world that has persisted, that hasn’t changed from century to century.
People don’t know that. People ask, “What about Christianity? It’s not as old as Judaism, but they’re just as loyal.” The truth is Christianity died out long ago.
You know at the beginning, ‘that man’ – with quotation marks – spoke only to Jews. During his lifetime he refused to deal with gentiles; anyone who wished to be a follower of his, needed to be circumcised and converted. He didn’t have any such, but had they volunteered to join him, he would have required full conversion. He would have been more careful with conversion than the Mizrachi leaders of the State of Israel are today. You couldn’t make a one-two-three conversion with Yishu because he didn’t know these things yet. It didn’t enter his mind! Yishu wouldn’t have accepted a follower who had signed a paper. He was a Jew! You had to be a Jew! There’s no question!
Yes, he had his eccentricities. He wasn’t a normal person. He was a megalomaniac. He was an am ha’aretz. He was full of envy. He was a mevazeh talmidei chachomim. He was an outcast, a mamzer. Some more adjectives too. But whatever he was, he was a Jew and he wouldn’t have countenanced anything but Judaism. With all of his ignorance! With all of his hypocrisy! Only Judaism. If Oso Ha’ish, if that man, could get out of his grave, he wouldn’t even think of talking to the Pope in Rome. “An arel? A mechallel Shabbos? I should talk to him?” He wouldn’t condescend to talk to the Greek Patriarch. He was a Jew.
The Saint Who Wasn’t
Only after he died, there came along a fellow who was later crowned with the name Saint Paul. The title ‘saint’ fits him like a pair of pants on a horse.
Here’s what he says in his own words. “When I spoke to Jews, I behaved like a Jew. When I spoke to gentiles, I behaved like a gentile. I was to all men, what they wanted to see in me, in order to better win them over.” In other words, he was fraud number one.
He came into the synagogue and he said, “I’m a real Jew, nothing but a Jew.” He didn’t say, “I am now working against Judaism” – because he was; from now on, he was building up something entirely different. He was preaching that in order to be a true Israelite, you don’t need any Judaism.
Cutting the Circumcision
You don’t have to circumcise, he said. And he brought a very ‘scholarly’ proof. Listen to the proof that circumcision is not necessary. He says, “Our father, Abraham, at the beginning he wasn’t circumcised and Hashem spoke to him then, didn’t He? So you see it’s not necessary to be circumcised.”
He forgot one little fact – that Hashem told him, “Go and circumcise yourself.” But that’s his whole argument. In that New Testament, that’s the whole argument on which they base the fact that it’s not necessary to circumcise. And to him gentiles were just as good as Jews. It was something new! And so, Paul took Oso Ha’Ish and he played him up. He cashed in on him and he built a whole new religion on that.
So what do we see here? That in a short period, the old Christianity had disappeared and now something new arose; an entirely new religion.
So how long did Christianity really live? Christianity lived only a few years. And when did it die? It died as soon as Paul came on the scene. That’s important. Paul’s Christianity is not an old religion. It’s new.
Calendar Confusion
“Alright,” you’ll say, “it’s new, but from Paul until now it’s a long time already. At least since then it’s been a stubborn religion.”
But you have to know that Paul insisted that they go to church every Shabbos. Every Shabbos, you had to go to church and if you didn’t go, Paul promised you a lot of hellfire in the other world. And for 300 years, all of Paul’s successors insisted on that.
What happened? At the council of Nicaea, they decided to change from Saturday to Sunday. Now Paul himself would have exploded against this but Saturday looked too Jewish, so they did a switch there too.
You can be sure that when they abolished Saturday the original Christians turned – I won’t say in their graves; but in their places wherever they are, they turned. Because they kept Saturday, the old ones.
Stubborn Jews
Now imagine if Jews suddenly came and changed from Shabbos to Sunday, chas v’shalom. Could anybody say, “It’s the same religion”? So when Christianity changed from Shabbos to Sunday the old Christianity died out and a new Christianity was born.
So what do we see? Is that a religion? It’s a joke, a system of convenience that’s changed at will. It’s nothing but accommodation, suiting themselves to the circumstances. When there’s enough pressure on the Pope, he convenes a college of cardinals and they make a new dispensation; they do whatever they want. The whole religion is nothing but putty in their hands. There’s nothing az about a people who can make such changes. It’s only the Jew; he’s az, he’s bold. A Jew would never countenance such things. Not only he wouldn’t countenance it – he’d give up his life for it. That’s the Yisroel is strong among the nations!
