When the Jews continued to reject Jesus despite the fact that he was one of them, and despite the scope of his work, he told them that the covenant God had made with them was to be rescinded in the face of their stubbornness and hard-headedness:
“Therefore I say unto you, the Kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruit thereof’ (Mattew 21:43)
The followers of Jesus eagerly latched onto this, seeing themselves as the new “Chosen People” of God.
Christianity Continues To Digress From the Straight Path
By the fourth cehtury, however, Christianity was well established as a religion: doctrines were formalized, as was a Canon of Scripture.
As seen earlier, the true teachings of Jesus were all but forgotten by Christians in favor of the teachings by Paul of Tarsus. Pagan beliefs and traditions were brought into Christianity by Paul in order to win converts among the pagan Gentiles of his time; all Christian doctrines have their roots in paganism. As more and more pagans converted to Christianity, this meant that more and more pagan beliefs found their way into Christianity.
Pagan holidays were “made over” into Christian holidays:
the birthday of Mithras on December 25 became ‘the birthday of Jesus
(with the help.of pagan rituals from the Roman festival of Saturnalia thrown in for good measure); the festival for the dead became All Saints’ Day; the day set aside to celebrate the resurrection of the god Attis became the day set aside to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus (with various pagan fertility rites thrown in for good measure here, too). The Jewish Sabbath, set by God on the seventh day of the week in the Mosaic Law, was changed by Christianity to the first day of the week. Sunday was figured to be the day in which Jesus rose from the dead, but it also must be kept in mind that, first and foremost, Sunday was the Mithtaic “Day of the Conquering Sun”. Christian ideas on sexuality and marriage were heavily influenced by pagan traditions found in Neoplatonism, Stoicism and Gnosticism. All these religions thought sex to be an evil force, with monasticism and chastity being virtues to strive for; Christianity heartilly embraced such ideas, thus putting mankind and the family unit in a unnatural state that had never been decreed by God.