Ioudaioi ~ the JEWS
When did Israelites begin to be referred to as Jews?
This is not meant to be a detailed history of the Israelites and Jews. There are books and libraries on this subject. This is simply to give this subject context.
The term "Jew" is a shortened form of Ju-dah, from the tribe or kingdom of Judah, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, who was the son of Isaac, who in turn was the son of Abraham.
Before his name was Abraham, his name was Abram (meaning, "exalted father"), a Hebrew. When Abram was 99 years old God appeared to Abram and established a covenant with Abram around 2091 B.C. It was then God changed Abram's name to Abraham (meaning "father of many nations").
While the term "Israelites" were the broader group, the term "Jew" (Yehudi) originally referred to people from the southern Kingdom of Judah. Therefore, the identity of "Jews" evolved over centuries down to the time they were exiled in Babylon in 586 B.C., when they were known as Judeans or Jews after 538 B.C.
Even though Moses is central to Judaism, Moses was an Israelite and a Levite, not a Judean, although traditionally Moses has been referred to as a Jew when he received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, around 1446 BCE., about 50 years after Judah died in Egypt.
The more relevant question herein is, "When did the Israelites or Jews cease to exist?"
THE VEIL WAS RENT - BY GOD - MATTHEW 27:51
THE VEIL TORE FROM TOP (GOD) TO BOTTOM (MAN)
On Nisan 14 of the Jewish calendar at 3pm, the Temple in Jerusalem shook and the 4 inch thick curtain, 60 ft tall, composed of 72 cords each made of 24 threads of blue, scarlet and purple, which took 300 priests to hang, that separated the holy from the most holy was torn in two, from top to the bottom, not by human hands, but by God himself, giving all mankind the sign that God ending the old Mosaic Law covenant forever, once and for all time. God Himself cause the nation of Israel to cease as His people, as a chosen race forever.
The Levitical priesthood ended, the old sacrificial order was dissolved, and as foretold by all of God's holy prophets, it ended when the reality arrived at the crucifixion of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
While the veil was hanging in the temple, the old covenant still existed. However, when God ripped the veil, the curtain from top to bottom, it was God who ended the Jewish era forever.
Nowhere in scripture is there so much as a single verse that says Jews are still God's chosen people today. No man can reunite what God has rejected and cast out since Christ's crucifixion. Therefore, there is no such thing as "Judeo or Judaean-Christians" now or forever more. This is not only a misnomer, but a blatant heresy against Christ's own pronouncement in Matthew 23:38.
When God ended the old Mosaic Law covenant with Israel, this made way for the new covenant God promised through Abraham to bless all nations on earth when the Messiah arrived. His happened when Jesus offered up His earthly life at Calvary in the crucifixion. Jesus became the new eternal high priest, the eternal sacrificial lamb for forgiveness of all sin, when He offered up His very flesh and bless in the eucharist offered at every Catholic Mass.
Matthew 27:50-51, “And Jesus again, crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent.”
Mark 15: 37-38, “And Jesus, having cried out with a loud voice, gave up the ghost, and the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom.”
Luke 23:44-45, “The sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst. At the precise moment, the true high priest (Jesus) offers the true and final sacrifice.”
Hebrews 8.13 St., Paul says, “The old covenant is declared obsolete by God himself in the very act of instituting the new.”
Hebrews 9:8, “The veil (curtain) was itself a divine sign of incompleteness. Its tearing is therefore a divine sign of completion.”
Hebrews 10.9 says, “He takes away the first (Mosaic Law), that he may establish the second (the new covenant in Christ).”
John 19:30, "It is consummated (finished)."; moments before His death on the cross.
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Hebrews 12.27, “The removing of the things movable, that those things may remain which are immovable.” God removes the former, so that the latter may stand forever.
Hebrews 10.19-20, “Having therefore, brethren, a confidence in the entering into the holies by the blood of Christ, a new and living way which he has dedicated for us through the veil, that is to say ‘his flesh’. The veil is the flesh of Christ.”
When his flesh was torn on the cross, the veil was torn in the temple. One divine act, two locations simultaneously. And having been torn once, definitively and finally, the old covenant ceased to exist. God the Father ordained this before the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.
Doctors of the Church corroborated apostolic teachings:
St. Thomas Aquinas makes the argument explicit; “The tear running from the top downward signifies that the power came from heaven above by God, not by man reaching up.
St. John Chrysostom describes the whole cluster of signs, darkness, veil, earthquake, open tombs, as signs of anger, expressing God's indignation at the apostate Jews against Jesus.
St. Justin Martyr, in his dialogue with Trypho, establishes the foundational principle.
The Mosaic law was always a shadow, never substance. When the substance arrived in Jesus, the shadow dissolved, as scaffolding is removed when the building stands complete.
Tertullian, in an answer to the Jews, reads the torn veil as the visible declaration that the old sacrificial order had reached its appointed end.
St. Cyprian, in his three books of the Testimonies against the Jews, makes the same argument from Scripture. The temple is not destroyed by Rome; it was abandoned by God.
The Roman General Titus merely demolishes the vacant shell of the temple 40 years after the veil or curtain was ripped and torn by God Himself, the day Jesus was crucified.
St. John Chrysostom, in his homily 88 on Matthew, commenting directly on the veil, he gives us the text every Catholic student of this event should know by heart.
This cry rented the veil, and opened the tombs, and made the house desolate.
God did this not to offer insult to the temple but declaring them to be unworthy even of His presence any longer. God did this before when He delivered apostate Israel to the Babylon in 605 B.C.
Jesus Himself pronounced the sentence in Matthew 23:38, “Behold, your house is desolate.”
He even sentenced them to hell for what they did. (Matthew 23:33)
St. John Chrysostom adds, “... the old order is definitively ended.”
St. Ephraim the Syrian, employs the imagery of bridal repudiation for the synagogue's rejection of Christ. The Old Covenant people, as a bride who has spurned her bridegroom.
The curtain of the bridal chamber opened and abandoned at the death of the bridegroom.“
St. Augustine teaches that the tearing signified the revelation of the mystery previously hidden, the mystery of Christ's body as the true sanctuary, and the end of the temple's mediatorial function.
Pope St. Leo the Great, with papal authority, states it with precision, “The animal sacrifices derive their entire meaning from their prefigurement of Christ's sacrifice.”
Once the reality has come, the figures are dissolved. The veil's tearing announced this dissolution within the old sanctuary itself.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, first part of the second part, question 103, article 4, Aquinas distinguishes the ceremonial precepts of the old law became dead at the death of Christ. Their purpose accomplished, their type fulfilled. They became deadly, or mortally sinful to observe, after the gospel was sufficiently promulgated because to continue them would be to deny the fulfillment they were always meant to prefigure.”
Dead at the cross, deadly after the preaching of the church. The torn veil is the sign of the first. The spread of the church to all nations is the completion of the second.
Matthew 24;2, (Jesus), “I say to you, there shall not be left here a stone upon a stone that shall not be destroyed.” The veil was torn at Calvary.
John2:19, (Jesus), “Destroy this temple (His body), and in three days I will raise it up (resurrection).”
The new temple is Christ's body and blood. His eternal high priesthood consecrating bishops and ordaining priests in every nation and people around the world for 2,000 years.
The Holy of Holies is no longer guarded by a curtain keeping others out. It is now offered to all baptized Catholics through the sacraments of the new covenant.
The torn veil ended judgement. Rather, it opened a way to enter the Mass of Christ.
Again, when God ripped the veil, the curtain from top to bottom, it was He who ended the Jewish era forever. Therefore, there is no such thing as "Judaean-Christian" now or ever.
The Catholic Church is the new "Quahal", the new "Israel of God" on earth since Pentecost 33 A.D.