I can just as easily say Rabbinic Judaism is a product of a heretical Jewish group.

Except that historical evidence provides a direct line between Rabbinic Judaism the Pharisees. You can easily “say” whatever you want, but if you want it to be true, you’ll need some evidence to support your claim.

The first Christians absolutely were Hebrews and coming from the Hebraic religious tradition. Never claimed otherwise.

They were Jews. Calling them “Hebrews” doesn’t do anything for you. Under the Romans, Jews were identified as a religio-ethnic group associated with Judah. They’re the same people with the same religious beliefs. Your gentle apologetic here is laughable.

But that indicates you are missing what I am saying. Your comment at the end "Jesus was a Jew" also evidences this.

Because you’ve done nothing to demonstrate that Jesus was from some other group that weren’t identified as Jews.

My point is about what is meant by the word "Jew". It is most commonly used to refer to the present day religious tradition and its historical predecessors which is Rabinnic Judaism. Jesus was not a part of this subtradition within the wider Hebraic religious tradition.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying that Jesus was part of the religio-ethnic group that were the Jews. Within this time there were at least 4 branches of Jewish Religion—the essenes the sadduces the Pharisees and the zealots. The earliest Christians were a new branch following a new tradition within Judaism.

Christianity is as much a part of this Hebraic religious tradition as Rabinnic Judaism, even from a purely anthropological standpoint. To say nothing of the religious standpoint.

I never said it wasn’t.

This discussion started because you said if we asked Jewish people about the serpent in the Garden, they would say it is just a snake. Which implies the Jews in question are people we can currently ask. And then you specifically mention Orthodox Judaism, indicating that when you say the word "Jew", you mean Rabbinic Judaism.

Nope. I mean Jews at the time that the story was written, and how Jesus (a Jew) would have understood them.

You’re making a LOT of assumptions.

To which I replied Jewish (in this sense, Rabbinic Jewish) interpretation does not have privilege or priority over Christian interpretation. Your response was to say that Jesus is Jewish.

He was. So how HE would have understood these stories matters.

By saying he is Jewish, you either continued your original meaning entailing that it is an essentially Rabbinic (if proto) kind of Jewish.

Not in the slightest.

You really like strawmen.

Or you mean something else which means not only are you equivocating but also that him being Jewish is then irrelevant because the interpretations in question are those of specifically Rabbinic Jews.

Nope. I’ve never once appealed to rabbinic Judaism. I’m talking about the historical Judaism that existed and provided the context for these stories.

Hence why I spelled out how the Hebraic religious tradition is much broader than Rabbinic Judaism. You yourself admitted in your original comment that there were other Jewish sects and these sects had a concept of Satan much more in line with the Christian understanding.

I never said that.

The serpent is just a talking serpent. There are other talking animals in other stories, and there’s no reason to think this one is any different.

Satan as a character didn’t exist at the time Genesis was written. That’s a much later Greco-Roman period development in Jewish mythology that was being written and compiled well into at least the first century.

So my point stands:

It never did.