described in the New Testament, often include several pages, or
even a chapter or two, on what is usually called the ‘Jewish back-
ground’ or ‘context’.^2 In many respects this topic is relatively
uncontroversial. Jesus himself was a Jew and so were his disci-
ples. The apostle Paul was a Jew as well as a Roman citizen, and
he made statements proclaiming his Jewishness, such as that he
was ‘circumcised on the eighth day [after his birth], of the people
of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews’
(Philippians3.5). Both Jesus, as he is represented in the gospels,
and Paul constantly harked back to the Jewish scriptures that
Christians call the Old Testament. One of the central debates
found in the New Testament concerns whether the Christian
message should be preached only to Jews or could be taught also
to non-Jews (see chapter 3). This closeness of emerging Chris-
tianity to Judaism probably accounts for the fact that, at first, the
Roman authorities had difficulty in distinguishing Christians from
Jews (see chapter 6). Hence it is a feature of some classic modern
scholarship on Christian origins in the New Testament to stress
this element, as in Geza Vermes’ book Jesus the Jew(1981), or
E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism(1977).
And yet, however uncontroversial such assertions might
seem in our own age, they would not have enjoyed universal
assent from earlier generations of scholars writing about Christian
origins. It is easy enough to imagine what would have happened
if anyone had suggested to Eusebius of Caesarea that Jesus
was a Jew. The founding father of ecclesiastical historiography –
who asserted, after all, that the Hebrew patriarchs were effectively
Christians in everything but name (see p. 38) – would probably
have suffered an attack of apoplexy. For Eusebius, and even more
recent generations of Christian scholars, Judaism has seemed to
represent a version of God’s relationship with humankind that was
manifestly inferior to that enshrined in Christianity. A residual
hostility to Jews and Judaism (anti-Semitism) has long exercised
a dangerous influence over the history of scholarship on Christian
origins (Fiorenza 2000: 115–44).
It would be rash, however, to assume that, just because
we are not anti-Semites (or Eusebius) and can acknowledge that
CONTEXTS FOR THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY1
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