the limits of variety 197
and Christianity, but he was denounced by his fellow Christians and
eventually excommunicated. For Christians who aligned themselves
against Marcion over the following centuries, a total disjunction of
their faith from Judaism was impossible so long as they continued to
appeal to their own interpretations of biblical prophecies found in the
Septuagint.
But the need of scripture- based Christians to relate their new creed
to Judaism was not balanced by any religious requirement for Jews to
relate themselves to Pauline Christianity. Not even the name Paul is
to be found in any surviving Jewish writings from late antiquity.
Unlike Jesus, against whom the rabbis, as we have seen, devised a coded
polemic, Paul and later Christians were apparently simply ignored.
Within the broad church of Judaism in the first century ce it was pos-
sible to combine different interpretations of the Mosaic law with a
variety of enthusiasms for supererogatory piety without any conflict.
Thus Rabban Gamaliel, the teacher of Paul before Paul became a fol-
lower of Jesus, was both a Pharisee and a rabbinic sage. It was possible
to be either a Pharisee or a Sadducee or a rabbinic sage and also to be a
haver or nazirite. It was possible in principle to interpret the Torah alle-
gorically as Philo did and to belong to any of the three philosophies of
Judaism singled out by Josephus and discussed in Chapter 6.
All the more curious, then, is the eventual parting of the ways between
Christianity and Judaism which marked the limits of variety within
Judaism. Defining and dating the parting has proved contentious, since
Judaism and Christianity have continued to share the common heritage
of the Hebrew Bible down to the present. As we have seen, the only
element of early Christianity which seems to have been without parallel
elsewhere in first- century Judaism was the founding of a new religious
movement in the name of a leader after his death.
Much of the disagreement about the nature and date of the split
between Christianity and Judaism derives from difference of perspec-
tive. Someone considered Jewish by a Christian might not consider
himself or herself Jewish. He or she might or might not be considered a
Jew by non- Christian Jews. Contact and conflict between members of
distinct groups, and their sharing of theological notions or liturgical
practices, might or might not imply a lack of clarity for the ancient par-
ticipants of each group about the differences between them.
Modern scholars sometimes find themselves at a loss to decide
whether surviving texts written even as late as the fourth century ce