198 A History of Judaism
were Jewish or Christian. But for most Christians the break with Juda-
ism had begun in the time of Paul, with the growth of a gentile Church
which saw itself as the true Israel in contrast to the Jews of the old cov-
enant. Ultimately, the cause of the split lay less in any perceived
incompatibility of Christian theology within the variegated religious
landscape of contemporary Judaism than in the self- definition of Chris-
tians, for whom the urgings of Paul to see their faith in Christ as novel
and all- encompassing were reinforced by the tendency of the wider
Roman world to treat Christianity as the religion of gentiles who had
forsaken their ancestral gods rather than as a branch of Judaism.^58