Growing up Christian, I believed the Jewish religion taught basically all the same things I believed about heaven, hell, and a guy named The Devil who wanted to take us to the latter, and the Jewish people had been waiting for The Messiah specifically to save them from this.

This made it easy to believe that the Jewish people had missed the boat... that they were stuck waiting for The Son of God to come and save them from The Devil so they could get into heaven instead of going to hell, because that had already happened.

And to be clear, I was not an evangelical. I was not part of a church or family that was super focused on what other religions were doing and how to get them on board with what we were doing. I say this not to excuse those beliefs, but to show they're throughout Christianity.

As an adult, I have learned/am still learning that the basic ideas presented to me of ~*shared Judeo-Christian beliefs*~ are simply not true in so many ways.

The question of if Jesus was the Jewish messiah isn't even "Was he the right guy?" but "Is this even the right thing?"

And it becomes clear that Christian ideas about messiah grew (and this is not the sole factor but certainly an early one) out of people, many outsiders, trying to make sense of a man who clearly wasn't the messiah that had been expected but whom they really needed to believe was.

You know the trope of getting to the end of the treasure hunt and there's no gold or diamonds to they decide the real treasure was the friends they made along the way?

I consider myself Christian in so far as I am religious and I grew up in a Christian society, in what for my early childhood was a Christian (specifically Catholic) household, and my ideas about spirituality and faith are shaped by all of that.

For all that, I have never in my adult life been 100% convinced that there was such a historical person as Jesus of Nazareth and I am perpetually disappointed how many self-described skeptical atheists immediately concede that there was.

(But hegemony being what it is I get it.)

Christianity is not a continuation of Judaism, much less the completion or perfection of it. It's a different thing that grew out of telephone games, cold political calculation, misunderstandings, ad hoc hypotheses, and syncretism as much as it grew out of Jewish roots.

Christ is savior... but the fate he came to save us from was invented largely to explain why he was here and what he did that was so impressive. Like Arthur Conan Doyle inventing the master criminal Moriarty in the last ever (ha-ha) Holmes story to give him a more impressive end.

Just as nobody was reading Sherlock Holmes to find out how he was ever going to beat that wily Professor Moriarty, nobody was waiting for the savior to defeat The Devil and empty hell of tormented souls.

I don't think we have to abandon Christianity but faith that depends on Christian myth-making about Judaism is a house built on a foundation of sand. And also leads to (or leads back around to) really anti-Semitic places.

One of the big fundamental shifts in Christian history came when it went from being a minority religion oppressed by the state to being the religion of the state, a religion of empire.

Modern Christianity tries to have that both ways, when it suits it.

I don't know what Christianity without imperialism looks like because I've never seen it.

But I believe it starts with an end to evangelism as we know it.