Children of Abraham?

Abraham is big these days. My wife recently published a scholarly monograph on Abraham traditions in early Judaism. The three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often referred to collectively as the Abrahamic religions, since their adherents count Abraham as their spiritual forebear. But what if there is more to this connection than is currently supposed? Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, responding to David Klinghoffer’s Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, raises an intriguing possibility:

Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire (for some reason, Klinghoffer says five million). That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including today’s State of Israel, while those in the diaspora were very much part of the establishment in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople. At one point Klinghoffer acknowledges that, during the life of Jesus, only a minuscule minority of Jews either accepted or rejected Jesus, for the simple reason that most Jews had not heard of him. Some scholars have noted that, by the fourth or fifth century, there were only a few hundred thousand, at most a million, people who identified themselves as Jews. What happened to the millions of others? The most likely answer, it is suggested, is that they became Christians.

If Neuhaus is correct, and given the apparent implications of statistical genealogy, there would seem to be a good possibility that most Christians -- at least those in the middle east and in the west with longstanding christian roots -- are, quite literally and biologically, children of Abraham. One can only imagine what impact this knowledge might have on Jewish-Christian relations.


Mother of God Church

Later: Here are population statistics from Jeff Malka's Sephardic Genealogical Resources:

Jews in Roman Empire:

25% of Roman population in Eastern Mediterranean

10% of entire Roman Empire

48 C.E. Roman census: 7 million Jews (mostly in Judea, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Babylon, Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia) for an estimated total of 8 million world wide.

Malka's total population figures differ with Neuhaus' sources by one million, but both appear to agree that Jews constituted one-tenth of the Roman Empire's population, which I admit comes as a surprise to me. That Jews made up fully one-quarter of the population in the eastern Empire is even more remarkable. Of course, Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia were not part of the Empire, and "Babylon" (Mesopotamia) was only briefly within its boundaries.