But when Judaism and Jews became discredited through loss of land and Temple and Jews were taxed for the privilege of remaining loyal to the former, these Jewish Christians began to drift away from a people who had lost power and status in the world, and threw in their lot with the controlling majority. Such is the way of the world. Furthermore, some of the Jewish country folk, losing faith in the validity of Judaism through the loss of its Temple, were attracted to Christianity with its new scheme of salvation, in which Jesus took the place which had been filled by the altar of sacrifice. In this way many of the Gentile proselytes to Judaism in Alexandria and Asia Minor went over to the new creed. So the loss of the Temple with its priestly service had much to do with the spread of Christianity. Although great bitterness at first existed between the two Christian sects, the pagan branch soon absorbed the small Jewish branch and all too soon the Christians "knew not Joseph." For the antagonism of Gentile against Jew was now transmitted to the new church and, sad to say, it became a more bitter persecutor of the people from which Jesus and Paul had sprung than most of the heathen nations had been. Old and New Testaments. New ceremonials grew up in the new faith. Passover was turned into the Easter sacrificial service. The unleavened bread and wine were supposed to be transformed in some mystic way into the flesh and blood of the Savior (as Jesus was styled). Many Roman rites and symbols were consciously or unconsciously taken up by the new creed in the first few centuries of its foundation; for it grew less and less Jewish as the years went on. Depreciation of Judaism became now the accustomed tactics of the Church Fathers, for Christianity's justification depended in some respects on the theory of Judaism's insufficiency. Jews were said to be blind and obstinate in still clinging to the Law, now that Jesus had come. This unfortunate spirit of antagonism to the parent faith pervades the Christian Scriptures and mars its ethical teachings. These Scriptures were known as the _New Testament_, to distinguish them from the Jewish Scriptures which were called the _Old Testament_; the theory being that the testament or _covenant_ between God and Israel, there recorded, was now obsolete and superseded by a "new" covenant in which, as already explained, belief in Jesus, the Messiah, took the place of obedience to the Law. Many passages from the Psalms and Prophets were retranslated to fit the impression that they had really foretold the coming of Jesus and the events of his life. The whole Hebrew Bible in fact was treated as but a preparation for Christianity's grand climax! Even the history of Israel was regarded as but an allegorical picture of the life of the man of Nazareth. Gnostics.