.........There is no Jew, there is no gentile - or do you disagree with that?”.....
Jews and Gentiles are separate in the sense of birth,.. they are the same in the sense of inheritance in Christ..... though Jews were first in this sense, all those walls come down at the point of receiving Christ.
In Christ,there is no Jew, there is no Gentile, there are only those that have been redeemed! .. if you belong to Christ, then you are Abrahams seed and heirs according to the promise...being clothed with Christ they share his position as Sons of God.
.....You state....The book of the Apocalypse is written to the christ-believing Jewish sect.
The book of Revelation opens with seven letters to seven churches..... ...they were literal churches at the time John wrote and as we know from Penticost there were more than just Jews as ‘his servants’...........Acts tells us the 3,000 people converted on the Day of Pentecost were “from every nation under Heaven,” .... Later Peter told people “The Holy Spirit came on [the Gentiles in Caesarea] as He had come on us at the beginning.... So needless saying the seven churches were Jews and Gentile believers, thus Revelations was written to ‘all’ believers.. the body of Christ.
....You also stated....”The rapture is not even written about in scripture.”...
What is called the rapture is the removal of the believers upwards, the church meets Jesus in the air... is when the living saints are transformed to be immortal like Christ.
If you do not believe in the rapture then how can you believe in the resurrection because they are both joined together as the same event, nearly simultaneously???....and this has to do with the transformation of both Jews and Gentiles, all in Christ, who are to be transformed, both the living and the dead..... The debate can be when it occurs but not that it does not occur.
1 Thess. 4 tells us... For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.....Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.
..... We who are in Christ, keeping the faith are all going to participate in it no matter when it occurs. The idea is to be ready!
The other Jewish sects pre-2nd temple destruction were Sadducees and Essenes (who were so closely tied to the temple that with its destruction they too were destroyed) and others
The book of the Apocalypse begins with a writing to the complete church - the 7 number is very significant, you see it repeated throughout the book of the apocalypse, signifying completeness.
Right until the destruction of the 2nd temple, the Christ-movement is seen by outsiders and by themselves as a sect of Judaism.
only post the destruction of the temple is it clearly a separate religion.