>>20360096Ignorant normie.
The first followers of Jesus were essentially all ethnically Jewish or Jewish proselytes. Jesus was Jewish, preached to the Jewish people, and called from them his first followers. According to McGrath, Jewish Christians, as faithful religious Jews, "regarded their movement as an affirmation of every aspect of contemporary Judaism, with the addition of one extra belief – that Jesus was the Messiah."
Italy's Jews came directly from the Holy Land before the Diaspora, first arriving in Rome in the second century BC as esteemed envoys (hoping to establish business ties) and then, after Rome invaded Judaea in the first century AD, as POWs sold into slavery. These first Jews lived, like other foreigners, outside the city — across the river, in Trastevere.
"The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. One knows how numerous this clique is, how they stick together and what power they exercise through their unions. They are a nation of rascals and deceivers," - Marcus Tullius Cicero c. 106 BC - 43 BC
“Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put a certain Andreas at their head, and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would eat the flesh of their victims, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood and wear their skins for clothing; many they sawed in two, from the head downwards; others they gave to wild beasts, and still others they forced to fight as gladiators.” - Cassius Dio
Tacitus and Suetonius portray Poppaea the wife of Nero as an ambitious and ruthless schemer. The Jewish historian Josephus paints a different picture. He calls Poppaea a worshipper of the God of Israel and writes that she urged Nero to show compassion to the Jewish people.
