Why did Jesus say you had to believe in him, instead of saying you have to do good, to go to Heaven?

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This aspect is the fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity.

The Jewish religion had always been organized by the covenants that God’s chosen people make with God. The covenants specify a code of behavior and prescribed ways of approaching God.

This worked throughout prehistory largely because there weren’t Romans. Conquering kingdoms, like the Egyptians and Babylonians, were way over there and it was easy for Israel to retain its customs, traditions, and leadership system. Israel’s price for breaking their covenant with God was that they’d be delivered into the hands of “Babylon,” Babylon being the symbolic representation of all the heathen empires that surround Israel.

All of the books of the Torah weave these tales of human iniquity, of their turning to, and away, from God as mythicized retellings of history.

It’s hard for us to imagine today, with our secular lifestyles, just how strong their beliefs were, these ancient Hebrews. They didn’t just believe in these things, they lived them. They really felt that if they didn’t sacrifice the required 50 goats every single day at the glorious Second Temple, that they were in grave imminent danger of foreign conquest.

Jesus came around shortly before the sacking of the Second Temple, by the Romans. This was a time of great change for these Jews. They’d vacillated between self and foreign rule for a few hundred years since the demise of the Davidic line of kings. King Herod’s loyalty was to the Romans and not to the Jews.

Once the Temple was sacked, it became impossible for Jews to maintain their old covenant. Jesus was but one of scores of prophets who worked to set God’s chosen people on a new path, a new way with which to walk with God and curry divine favor.

When the dust settled, there were two new ways of being Jewish. Jesus’s re-envisioning of the covenant, along with modern Messianic Judaism centered on the Talmud. Jesus succeeded for a number of reasons, but mostly due to practicality. It didn’t call upon Jews to violently fight the foreign rulers, and was in line with previous Jewish understandings of how to live under foreign rule.

How did one find themselves and their relationship with God if they couldn’t continue the old ways? What constitutes “doing good?” If you go read Leviticus you see examples of just the sort of thing you’re asking for if you want the locus of spiritual purity to be behavior. Behavioral morality is, well, temporal. Leviticus said you could own slaves, slavery was ubiquitous in that world.

The only way you can continue to know what is good and moral in a changing world is to get that goodness and morality directly from God. Scripture becomes obsolete eventually. Jesus encouraged each Christian to form a personal relationship with the divinity present in all of us. That personal relationship, personified by Jesus himself, is to guide what Christians do in their lives.

It was such a powerful idea that it overtook Europe.