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"You pose very interesting and complex questions.
Since I was born Jewish, and married a Catholic, and am relatively open-minded about religion and the NT and OT, I'm ready for your long version, at your convenience."

I hate to be Socrates and start answering with questions, but let me ask another one.
You were "born Jewish". Now, do you identify being "born Jewish" with Judaism, the religion, or with being ethnically Jewish? You'll probably answer "Both", but that only forces the next question, and it is important: is an atheist a Jew in your mind.

If you renounced Judaism and asserted that you completely disbelieved in God, would you completely cease to be a Jew?
Yes or no.

If the Lubavitcher Rebbe had come out of a long period of prayer and declared Jesus as his Lord and Savior, would he have ceased to be a Jew, according to you.

The answer is important, because Judaism is a religion, but it has attached to it a strong culture. There are Jews who call themselves Jews and think of themselves as Jews, but who are openly expressive atheist. And then there are Jews for whom actual belief in the actual religion is what makes a Jew, although I don't think any of them completely reject the cultural link and blood tie. They might think of the Rebbe (in my hypothetical) as having gone off his rocker, but they would not think that he wasn't Jewish. Even the most religiously centered Jew recognizes an ethnic, cultural component to his religion. To be Jewish is perhaps to have a religion, but it's also to be part of an ethnicity. The ethnicity and culture were FORMED, over the course of 3000-4000 years, by the religion, and the religious practices were the cultural practices that made the Jews distinct. But today, Judaism is an ethnicity, but it is also a self-aware culture.

Thus, even the most devout Jew, while he has contempt for the atheist Jew or the Jew who has converted, still thinks of that person as a lost Jew, and not a Gentile. He's a seduced Jew, but he's still a Jew in some sense.

Christians, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, Mormon and Jehovah's Witness, would probably all tell you that Christianity was different. Christianity, they would say with greater or lesser degrees of strength, is a belief system, not an ethnicity. (Of course Muslims don't view it this way. They think of Westerners as Christians, but we have enough on our plate talking about Christians so we don't need to talk about Islam here.)

Practically all Christians would aver that if you don't believe a certain set of things (those things vary depend on the sect) you're not a Christian at all. Christianity is not a matter of birth, like Judaism is, but belief.

Now, all Christians believe that philosophically, but it is not really true. Catholicism and Orthodoxy (which actually between them comprise 90% of the world's Christians) are religions so ancient that, like Judaism, they really are cultures. Actually, if you trace history carefully enough, you'll discover that the whole transformation of the West, and the East, from what were once the Roman and Hellenic worlds came about through the prism of the Catholic Church (pre-Schism, Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholics all considered their church to be one Catholic and Apostolic Church).

If one looks hard at history, one actually discovers that Orthodox and Catholic Christianity (united until the 1000s as original Catholicism, although each having its regional practices, East and West, which continue to this day) and Rabbinnical Judaism all date from the First Century AD. The origin or Catholic Christianity (Orthodox and Catholic) lies in unbroken chain from the life of Jesus and the Apostles to today. The origin of Rabbinnical Judaism lies in the destruction of the Temple and the end of the Jewish priesthood with the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans in 69 AD.
So, at least as far as the structure of religions go, Rabbinnical Judaism and Catholicism/Orthodoxy are all children of the First Century.

If one digs deeper into the cultural aspects of Judaism, one discovers that an awful lot of what is considered truly ethnically Jewish in America and the West is really the Ashkenaz culture of the stetl. It's really a Germanic/Slavic culture melded into Jewish families and religion.

Now, this is just as true of Orthodoxy, which is the Hellenic Greek culture of the ancient East melded into Christian religion, and Catholicism, which is the Latin Roman culture of the ancient West melded into the same Christian religion.

Doctrinally, the differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism can be reduced to a couple of sentences, and serious theologians of both camps, including Popes and Patriarchs, think that there is no fatal theological difference separating the true. But the "feel" of these Churches is very, very different. If you go to some of their services and contemplate the history, the liturgy, what traditionally was done and still is, you will discover that the closest thing to the truth is that the Orthodox are Greek or Russian Catholics, and the Catholics are Latin Orthodox. And it was really always that way from the beginning. Theology united those disparate peoples for over a millennium, and still does, really (although the most theologically bigoted might yell at you that it's not so!), but culture, including the "phromena" of the two Churches...this is what separates them.

For the most part, Catholics and Orthodox respect each other. Religiously, they each know that the other is basically catholic (in the old sense of the word) and Christian. They do not accuse each other of heresy (at least not anymore). There is theological disagreement, but you'll never hear Catholics or the Orthodox suggesting that the other is anything but Christian in the true sense.
Listen closely, and you will hear the Catholics saying "Come back to Rome", and you will hear the Orthodox saying "Come back to the original Church", and each will actually be right within his cultural context.

The Orthodox will acknowledge their Greekness and Russianness (or other Eastern ethnic group) quite explicitly. For a long time, to be Greek was to be Orthodox, and to be Orthodox was to be Greek or Russian. There is a close parallel with "Jewishness" here.

In the West, Latin Rome was so universal that it essentially MADE the West, and to be a Christian was to be a Catholic and live in "Christendom". The culture and the religion were inseparably intertwined.

But because of the proselytizing and universalist nature of the Christian religion, the cultural aspect - especially in the West with its huge bands of unassimilated tribes in the early centuries (and still today the polyglot of cultures is the hallmark of Europe) -was not as strong as the religious philosophy aspect.

Orthodoxy is very close to Judaism both in geographical origin and in the interweave between culture and religion.
Catholicism is close to Orthodoxy, but when Catholicism was getting its start the only civilized culture in Europe was decayed Rome, and it was really the Catholic Church that civilized the West, gave it literacy and law, etc., beyond the boundaries of France, Italy and Spain anyway.

So the philosophical religion aspect was stronger in the West, and cultures were brought into the Church yet untamed, but changed into Westerners by the Catholic Church. It's not quite the same obvious tie between religion and culture as exists with the Orthodox or especially the Jews. Indeed, were one to speak of himself as ethnically "Catholic", it would be idiosyncratic. But it would not be untrue.

For Judaism is imparted by birth, but Catholicism and Orthodoxy come very close to that through the practice of infant baptism. When one thinks of Catholics, it is appropriate to think of Italian mamas and Irish ladies with their hair shawls. It's appropriate to think of Spanish Conquistadores, and Frankish Crusaders, and all of that. There is a religion, and the religion is the culture. Not so pervasively as the Jews or Orthodox, but still there. Countries have patron saints. Joan of Arc is believed to have heard voices through which God saved the Kingdom of France (from the no-less-Catholic English).
The cultural element of Catholicism is not explicitly stated, and would be objectionable philosophically to some, but it is nevertheless real.

And so in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, you have two closely akin ancient religions that are chiefly passed along by birth and culturally through growing up in families that are that. If one had to point out the theological emphases, I might say that Orthodoxy is the Christianity of Easter, while Roman Catholicism is the Christianity of Christmas. I don't think that too many Catholics or Orthodox would disagree with me too strongly on that.

This makes them radically different, culturally speaking, from Protestantism.

Now, a political reality intrudes: the Protestant Churches, the original ones, all broke off from the Catholic Church in the 1500s, and they did so in the context of considerable war and violence in all directions.

So, just as Jews have an historical memory of persecution by Christians, and therefore a particular aversion to Christianity arising from that, the history of civil war among Western Christians has left a bitterness between Protestants and Catholics that does not exist in anything like the same intensity between Catholics and the Orthodox (although the Orthodox do remember, resentfully, the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in the early 1200s).

Culturally, the ancient Roman Empire is almost entirely Catholic, and the Germanic part of Europe is divided between Catholics, in the southern part, and Protestants in the northern. The past century has added the phenomenon of a large number - perhaps the majority - of secularists and atheists more concentrated in the Germanic countries, and more concentrated in the Protestant half.

We've already seen that Catholicism is a culture, a quasi ethnicity in addition to being a religion. Tradition is as important to Catholics as it is to Jews.

Protestantism completely rejects that.
Indeed, it cites passages from the Bible - written in the context of the early Christians' persecution at the hands of the Jews of the time - that excoriate tradition as often leading men astray. Jesus, of course, was talking about the Pharisees, but those same words were picked up by the Protestants and aimed directly at Catholicism itself, that vast culture and tradition-based edifice, back in the Reformation.

Now, Protestantism started out as a philosophical movement par excellence. Of course it ended up fragmented, in Europe, into ethnic state Churches, but no value is placed on ethnic traditions at all in the Protestant concept (although nationalism is encouraged...or was anyway...by the state churches of old). There are many broad bands of Protestantism, ranging from traditionalist Anglican, which is practically Catholic in most of its practices (and calls itself catholic) to the modern evangelicals. What they have in common is a rejection of the traditional aspects of Catholicism in particular (Orthodoxy is even more traditional, but there is no history of warfare and feud between the Orthodox and the Protestants, therefore you won't find Protestants asserting the Orthodox are not "Christian", although Orthodox practice includes all of the traditions of the "Whore of Babylon" that some Protestant firebrands have attacked over the course of history - and moreso.

The Protestant Catholic divide works on a lot of levels: philosophical, theological and ethnic. Protestantism very much philosophically downplays the ethnic traditional element (with exceptions), and the most evangelical modern Protestants see in Catholic traditions and practices that vary from their own things (such as statuary, the veneration of saints, prayers to the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope, confession, the unmarried priesthood, and all the rules) as being Pharisaic or positively idolatrous.

And THOSE are the people who would say that Catholics are not Christians at all, because their practices are idolatrous (in their eyes).

There's more, but I'm sure you've had enough for now.