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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 3, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The basic confines of apostolic Christianity are old enough to be recorded in the New Testament- churches are organized by city, and the city’s church is headed by a bishop who ordains other ministers. Christians gather on Sunday and have Vice rules as well as mutual aid; they believe that Jesus Christ is a superior being who died and rose from the dead, and that this frees believers from hellfire and damnation, and that He was born of a virgin. They believe that God created in addition to the world also angels, and some of those angels went bad and seek to do us harm.

Old Testament Judaism was a priest-centered religion whose sacred rites were sacrifices. Religious authority was vested in a college of priests, and scholars played a secondary role. Rabbinic Judaism is a scholar-centric religion with very little role for priests and no sacrifices.

You are mixing basic religious dogmas (like "Jesus Christ is a superior being" etc.) with rites ("gather on Sunday", etc.) and with organizational structure ("churches are organized by city, and the city’s church is headed by a bishop"). The latter two of which is in no way shared by all Christian denominations (and we can have a long long talk about the first one but let's leave it aside for now). If you talk about basic dogmas, in Judaism they have not changed. If you talk about rites, they did change a lot (and continue to change - for example, there are prayers for state of Israel and for IDF, as you may imagine, they do not come from Mishnaic times), and so did Christian rites, and different Christian denominations have very different rites. If you talk about the organizational structure, it definitely changed a lot for Judaism - and is also diverse for Christians, some denominations don't have bishops at all, and for those that do, the roles vary greatly.

Thus, I think if we are allowed to say that the modern Christianity, in all its diversity, is the same religion that had been taught by Jesus and Paul, then we should be allowed to say the modern Judaism is the same religion that had been practiced by David and Solomon. And if we say those are different religions, then the question of "what is older" becomes rather arbitrary, because the whole definition of what is being compared eludes us.

Apostolic Christianity is meaningfully the same; it's totally fair- but not general practice- to make the claim that low church protestantism isn't. This is because it is recognizably within the same family as Orthodoxy and Catholicism, defined by trinitarianism, baptism, and a shared new testament canon. In contrast, the continuity of old testament Judaism is Samaritanism- which both calls itself, and is called by mainstream rabbinic Judaism, a different religion.