COMMANDMENTS

In the law of Moses handed down in the Sinai desert, to the Jewish people who had escaped from Egypt, through the Torah...before 1000 years prior to Christ...there are 613 commandments. These commandments are comprised of 365 "thou shall nots" and 248 "thou shalls". The famous 10 commandments of Moses...adopted by the Christian movement at its inception in the 1st century AD...is a distillation of the 613 commandments of the law of Moses. The 10 commandments were chosen by the early Christians as representative of the "Old Covenant". Christ and his apostles and disciples...including Saint Paul who was born Jewish and became a Pharisee before converting to Christianity...blended these 10 commandments of Moses with the New Covenant of Christ taught as the "Beatitudes" in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew) or the Sermon on the plain (Luke). The Beatitudes were a series of about 10 statements that form the basis of Christianity. Because the Christian movement dispensed with about 600 of the 613 commandments of the law of Moses...including the requirements of male circumcision and the various dietary rules and customs and the other rules of Jewish history and tradition...it is not surprising that most of the Jewish people did not convert over to Christianity. Christianity was open first to the Jewish people and then it was opened to the Caucasians in Palestine who were not Jewish...and as it prospered in the Mediterranean theatre it was opened to North Africans and later spread throughout the World. Because it was "open" to any race or ethnicity and because of the strong appeal of the Beatitudes and the promise of an afterlife, Christianity blossomed after the 1st century AD and overtook the Roman Empire after about 300 AD. Judaism remained a relatively small enterprise, in any case, because one has to be born Jewish (like Hindus in Hinduism) and it is not open to conversion from any other race or ethnic population. In the 21st century today, there are over 2 billion Christians and only about 15 million Jewish people.