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First, imagine two distinct views of humankind (or two distinct anthropologies).

View 1: You Already Hold Your Treasure In Your Hand

Humanity already possesses its highest value - it's 'treasure' - and moral failure consists in squandering the treasure you're born with.

View 2: Universal Depravity -- You Need Salvation (in Another World)

Humanity begins in a fundamentally defective state, such that one's redemption demands the grace of some supernatural entity, to be meted out in the world to come (not here below).

View 1 is not egalitarian. We are not born equal. There is no guarantee that we end up in the same place when our time is up. Locally, your inheritance is from your parents. Globally, you inherit the treasure of your ancestors: historically, biologically, and culturally. Morality is local: your virtue is determined relative to what you preserve or squander of the treasure (metaphorically) you are handed.

View 2 is egalitarian. We are born equally in sin, which is now a global concept. This view is universalizing because God does not care about the distinctions we find relevant here below. Earthly factors do not matter; you are storing up treasures in heaven, or securing a place in hell, neither of which is determined on the basis of your fidelity to ancestry or history, but only to the savior God.

View 1 and View 2 are incompatible.

Guess which view is Jewish? Neither.

Guess which view is Christian? View 2.

Classical Judaism does not affirm an ontology of inherited moral ruin or metaphysical depravity. In the moral psychology of the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinic tradition, human beings are created good, in the image of God, and endowed with competing inclinations, i.e., the yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-ra. Moral failure is real, but it is episodic, not constitutive of human nature. Sin is something one does, not something one is born into. Repentance restores right relation with God without requiring post-mortem ontological repair, and the Law presupposes moral competence, rather than incompetence in need of divine assistance. One saves oneself by turning to God and repenting. Judaism therefore aligns more closely with View 1: humanity possesses genuine value from the start, even if it can be misused or betrayed. It is also parochial via its view of divine covenant. It is a religion for a particular ethnic group, so it is not egalitarian, at either the earthly or the next-worldly level.

If View 2 is not Jewish, then where does it come from? How does this become the Christian view?

The answer is that it does not exist as a settled doctrine prior to Christianity, but it also does not simply arise from nothing. Instead, it emerges through a convergence of pressures that crystallize most decisively in Pauline Christianity. Second Temple apocalypticism contributes a heightened sense of cosmic conflict and paranoia, Hellenistic (Roman and Greek) philosophy contributes a vocabulary of inner division and weakness of will (a moral psychology of constant inner struggle), and Genesis (the Adamic concept) supplies symbolic raw material. But none of these entail inherited guilt, universal moral handicap, or the necessity of a redemptive savior God. Those features appear only when these elements are synthesized in a new explanatory framework.

That synthesis occurs in the theology of Paul, who makes three decisive moves. First, he universalizes sin as a condition rather than a pattern of acts, reinterpreting Adam as the metaphysical hinge of human history. Second, he declares the Law impotent in principle to produce righteousness, not merely difficult to fulfill. Third, he reverses the order of moral achievement by insisting that transformation by grace must come before obedience. Together, these moves yield the core of View 2: humanity does not merely squander an already-possessed good; it lacks what it needs until it is redeemed.

This is uniquely Christian.

Why was this universalizing framework accepted, as opposed to the normal process of group identity formation through scapegoating other human groups?

The simpler conclusion would have been thinking that Jesus's claims were falsified by his death at the hands of Rome. But Jesus's execution resulted in an explanatory crisis for his followers. The Pauline interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus, which is distinct from any other apostle, transforms its meaning. He universalizes resurrection. Paul links this to Adamic sin, detaching it from Jewish nationalism, and turning it into a cosmic solution to a cosmic problem.

The meta-ethical necessity of death now resonates with our lived experience of moral weakness and guilt: Jesus had to die because of our depravity. It also enables the inclusion of gentiles by positing a universal human problem, and supplies a psychologically and socially cohesive message of grace, ready to be poured out to anyone. Later figures such as Augustine did not invent this framework but intensified and systematized it, turning Paul's innovation into a doctrine of inherited guilt and universal moral depravity.

If not for Paul, the belief in Jesus's resurrection would probably have remained a backwater sectarian Jewish conviction aimed at vindicating their (otherwise failed) messiah. With Paul, it becomes the groundwork of View 2.

The Jewish Contribution that Makes Christianity Deadly

Jewish monolatry can be distinguished from Greco-Roman polytheism in terms of their disparate geopolitical situations. A diversity of Gods is possible when you are powerful. Exclusive worship of one deity reflects relative Jewish powerlessness and dependence; God as lawgiver makes the Jews into vassals, only with the promise that their God will eventually stamp out the gentiles. It also helps explain a unique property of Jewish religion that we do not see in the Greco-Roman world:

(i) normative authority is text-mediated
(ii) the presence of canonically bounded scripture treated as divinely authoritative
(iii) prophetic amendment and reinterpretation of 'legal' text as a religious act
(iv) the appeals to scripture as justification across institutions

This is not accidental. It's a result of the Jewish inability to establish empire, or monarchies that weren't impotent, or to keep lasting temples, or sovereignty generally. The scripture becomes a stable locus of divine presence and authority.

Contrast this with the Greco-Roman world: Homer does not function like the Torah; tragedy does not function like prophecy; and philosophy is not special revelation. Religion is civic, pluralistic, customary, and instrumental.

Jewish prophecy is permanently objectified into a canonical text that governs the history and norms of an entire people. . .it establishes a chain from prophecy to canon to identity. Nothing similar in Mediterranean world parallels this. It results in a particular sort of package: exclusive deity, morality as law, and collective identity.

Christianity inherits this aspect of Judaism.

Thesis

Christianity, under the pressure of Jesus’ death and resurrection belief, reworks the Jewish package by introducing a new diagnosis of the human condition (View 2) that renders supernatural rescue necessary rather than optional assistance with a project we could plausibly undertake without help from the gods. The result is a religion that is Jewish in its scriptural logic and radically non-Jewish in terms of its cosmic universalization of the human condition in relation to God.

Christianity gives you the same identity-forming principles as Judaism, while discarding everything about Judaism that made it work well for the Jewish people. In other words, it gives you the same ossification of authority with none of the in-group benefits.

It results in adoption of View 2, rather than View 1. There is nothing to squander if you've inherited nothing of worth on this earth, and if the narrow object of your hope cannot be better or different than what is offered to every other person on earth.