Paul uses the word
pistis and close variants throughout his epistles. It is usually rendered into English as “faith,” yet “
faithfulness” is a more accurate translation, which in a manner akin to the Hebre
’emunah is suggestive of loyalty and trust, which include appropriate moral conduct. So this is not 'faith' in a sense dissaociated from moral works. As one Pauline scholar, Mark D. Nanos explains:
"Where Paul contrasts faithfulness to deeds, he is actually contrasting two different propositions for two different groups (non-Jews or Jews), and thus two different ways of being faithful (by non-Jews, apart from circumcision and thus not under Mosaic covenant obligations because they do not become Jews/Israelites; by Jews, including circumcision and concomitant Mosaic covenant obligations)...
Thus, Judaism, Paul believed, should announce that it was time for the nations to turn to Israel’s God, the one and only God, through Jesus. The Gentiles do not become Israel when that day arrives; rather, they must remain members of the other nations, just as was expected (see Isa 2.2–4; chs 65–66). But they do become fellow members of the Jewish way of life, that is, of the Jewish communities and their religious practice of Judaism. Jews remain Jews in that day, which was so fundamentally obvious for Paul and his contemporaries that it was not even a topic of his discussions; it was simply assumed.
It is evident in the logic of his instructions to non-Jews, e.g., in 1 Cor 7.17–24, when he says his “rule” in all his assemblies is for everyone to remain in the state one was in when called, the circumcised in a circumcised state, and the foreskinned in foreskinned state, but in whichever state one is in, it is essential that one “obey the commandments of God.” When this instruction is coupled with Paul’s attestation (Gal 5.3) that anyone in a circumcised state is obliged to observe the whole Torah, it is evident that Paul presumes all Jewish Christ-followers would remain faithful to their Jewish covenant identity by the observance of Torah."
This 'other dimension' to Paul's worldview, is preserved most clearly in two anecdotes recorded in the
Acts of the Apostles. The first, involving the instance where St. Paul
circumcises Timothy:
"Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him; and he took him and had him circumcised because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek." (Acts 16:3)
Now, under an overly-restrictive interpretation of the phrase: "
I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all" (
Galatians 5:2), Paul would in this circumstance be acting contrary to his own conscientious principles. However, of course, Paul was referring only to goyim believers in
Galatians 5:2, to whom circumcision would be of no avail since they are not under the Mosaic covenant. Elsewhere, he states contrarily, with reference to Jewish believers: "
Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much, in every way." (
Romans 3:1-2)
And in Timothy's case, he evidently concluded that it
would be of value to circumcise this uncircumcised 'Greek-raised' young man, because he had a Jewish mother and Paul therefore felt obliged to show other Jews that he was Torah-observant.
We can see this spelt out quite clearly in the subtext of Acts
chapter 21, where Paul comes before James - Jesus's 'brother' and the titular head of the Jerusalem church, then the mother church of the Christian movement in the pre-destruction of the Second Temple era - and James informs him that pernicious rumours had been spread abroad that he was encouraging Jews to cease obeying Torah.
To 'quash' the rumours -
which James takes to be false, clearly stated in the text - he and the other 'elders' instruct Paul to undergo a ritual purification rite to prove his faithfulness to the mitzvot in public and Paul humbly obliges (deferring to James's authority):
"When we arrived in Jerusalem, the brothers welcomed us warmly. 18 The next day Paul went with us to visit James; and all the elders were present. 19 After greeting them, he related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. 20 When they heard it, they praised God.
Then they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews, and they are all zealous for the Torah. 21 They have been told about you that you teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. 22 What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. 23 So do what we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow.
24 Join these men, go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the Torah. 25 But as for the Gentiles who have become believers, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled* and from fornication.” 26 Then Paul took the men, and the next day, having purified himself, he entered the temple with them, making public the completion of the days of purification when the sacrifice would be made for each of them."
(Acts 21:17-26)
Note that every Jewish Christian is described here by the Jerusalem elders as strictly Torah observant ("zealous" for the Torah) and Paul complies with the order to demonstrate that he too is still a Torah-observant Jew, even performing a sacrifice in the Temple.
So, really, we equally cannot accuse Paul of being the 'founder' of Christianity as a distinct religion either
facepalm: ikr?), although he's a much better candidate than Jesus.
Early Jewish Christianity strikes me as somewhat akin to the modern Chabad movement in Judaism, inasmuch as, like the Lubavitcher Rebbe (who died in 1994 after inspiring unfulfiled Messianic expectations in his followers, some of whom refused to accept that he'd truly 'died' but continued believing in his Messianic status and that he'd come back, somehow, to complete it) but with a key difference: Chabad had been extraordinarily successful in its outreach to other Jews, whereas Christianity proved particularly appealing to Greeks and Romans interested in the Jewish scriptures, which set Christianity - ultimately - on quite a different trajectory towards its eventual domination of the ancient Roman world as an entirely distinct religion.
So where does 'Christianity' really begin as something utterly distinct from a Jewish matrix?
One of the most interesting episodes of this "border-setting" - at the end point of the centuries-long process - comes to us from the church father St. Jerome (345-420), in which he condemns a group of Jewish Christians named '
Nazarenes' (the lasting remnants of the originally Jewish Christianity) still extant in the fourth century and attests that the Rabbis - 'Pharisees' as he calls them - also regarded them as
minim (heretics):
CHURCH FATHERS: Letter 75 (Augustine) or 112 (Jerome)
What shall I say of the Ebionites who pretend to be Christians? To-day there still exists among the Jews in all the synagogues of the East a heresy which is called that of the Minæans [Minim], and which is still condemned by the Pharisees; [its followers] are ordinarily called 'Nasarenes'; they believe that Christ, the son of God...to be the one who suffered under Pontius Pilate and ascended to heaven, and in whom we also believe. But while they pretend to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither.
St. Epiphanius (320 - 403) had written about them at the same time:
They disagree with Jews because they have come to faith in Christ; but since they are still fettered by the Law – circumcision, the Sabbath, and the rest – they are not in accord with the Christians.
— Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 29.7.4
The basic answer is the Catholic Church Fathers and Jewish Rabbis. They 'set' the parameters and defined Christian versus Jewish orthodoxy respectively, aided by the fact that Jewish Christians were rapidly depleting (though still active in certain synagogues as mentioned above, viewed as
minim or heretics by other Jews) in numbers by the fourth century when Christianity rose to become the state creed of the Roman Empire.
From St. Justin Martyr in the second century to St. Jerome in the fourth, these pioneering theologians outlined an emphatically
Gentile Christianity conveyed to pagans using philosophical and ontological language categories derived from Greek philosophy. Thus you have the teasing out of the fundamental dogmas of the Nicene creed: most famously, the Trinity which is sharply distinct from Jewish unitarianism (though both are forms of monotheism, One Divine Being).
The answer to your question is thus in 'there' somewhere - but I can't tell you definitively!
