Christian–Jewish Relations

Abstract

AbstractThe Christian polemic against Judaism that scars the history of western civilization runs so deep that it is hard to imagine that the people known as the first “Christians” knew themselves only as Jews. The disciples of Jesus Christ were, in fact, one of many different groups within 1st century Judaism. The success of Paul's mission to the Gentiles, the dispensation from circumcision and observance of dietary law accorded Gentile converts, the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70ce, and the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135ceall contributed to the development of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism as two distinct communities emergent from the complex matrix of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. The dominant approach in contemporary scholarship posits a dual “parting of the ways” of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, but no single interpretive paradigm can account for all the complexities of the actual historical record, and the parting took place at different times in different locales, and boundaries were sometimes quite ambiguous.