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Originally Posted by The Bear
It’s a good point that you raise, and a constant source of irritation especially to the more Fundamentalist Christians (who odd though it may seem are actually NOT fundamentalist Christians) to raise their hackles by pointing out that so much in the KJV Bible and its predecessors and derivatives that all share the common ancestry of the Conference of Nicea, that the thing that THEY call Christianity should really be called “Paulianity”! It really gets their goat!
As for it being incorrect to consider Christianity the natural successor to Judaism, I’m not convinced. The Jewish people at the time of the birth of Jesus were facing a civilisation in which the place of the Pharisees in the practice of Judaism was overpowering the basis of Judaism itself. In essence the lawyers had taken over.
Jesus was one of many who were opposing this and pressing for a return to the spirit of the religion and not the letter which is what was being twisted.
In so doing he was both pushing the clock back but at the same time moving the religion forward to recognise and accommodate the changes that had taken place in society whereby fighting for survival was not the thing it once had been and establishing morality based on stable and expanding civilisation was the pressing need.
On that basis I argue that Christianity was the natural successor to Judaism and time would appear to support that view.
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Well the sources for the real Jesus are few or nil and although there is probably a real person(s) behind the stories there were many different takes and what became Xtianity took many centuries to really come together and when it did it was very different philosophically to Judaism. The Jewish idea of the messiah is not very much like the xtian idea of Christ.
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The thing that Rome distorted and used as a means of power and control did.
Christianity did not.
I contend that the Roman Catholic Church makes use of Christianity but is inherently and by definition NOT Christian in substance.
In Christian belief there’s no “submission” involved, simply acceptance of Jesus having been sent by God to take on the sins of men for all time if they will accept him as their saviour, and trying to in all things follow the examples he made and taught.
True Christianity has no place for confessions, no place for priests, no place for excommunications, Christianity in its pure form does not even ask that people should get it right, simply that they should recognise what right is based on the life of Jesus and do the best that they cam as often as they can.
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Well some early forms of Xtianity such as the gnostic xtians believed in reincarnation and this belief seems to have been popular among xtians until past 400 AD when the idea of heaven and hell became much more common. But conventional xtianity has long held that you if you don't believe in Jesus you will go to hell and that is as much a call to submission as Islam.
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Islam is different. If you don’t submit to what you’re told, if you break the law, you’re toast. Much as is the case with so many churches based on Christianity but with far more deadly consequences.
In its pure form Christianity is about as good a morality as could be.
In its pure form Islam is as oppressive and warped as an ideology could be.
Fortunately not all Muslims follow Islam to the letter, though they should under the direction of the Koran.
Unfortunately not all Christians follow the pure form of Christianity but follow various Churches that use Christianity as the basis of what they then adorn with their own peculiarities.
Pure Christianity? A good place to start to look is in the beliefs of the Brethren or other very “low” churches. Probably the last place to look in my opinion is Roman Catholicism.
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I quite likes the Catholic churchs like the Roman, Orthodox and Church of England. For all their faults they are less fanatical and more inspiring to me than the puritanical protestant churchs.
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For myself I’m a confirmed atheist. 
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I lean deist or mystical myself.