rise to Judaism and Christianity as two distinct religions.^4 If it is
now uncontroversial to assert that figures such as Jesus and Paul
were Jews, then it has become equally common to acknowledge
that this was also true for a sizeable number of early Christians.
Debates about the relationship between nascent Christianity and
Jewish traditions recur throughout the New Testament. Although
it must be the case on purely demographic grounds that gentiles
(that is, pagans) came to make up a greater proportion and ulti-
mately a majority of converts (see pp. 116–17), the issue of
Christianity’s relationship with Judaism did not disappear.
Eusebius’ account of the cleavage between Judaism and
Christianity was by no means the first Christian literary treatment
of the theme. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho and Tertullian’s
Against the Jewswere specifically concerned with the issue, but
it was also present in a wide range of early Christian literature,
including accounts of martyrdom, such as the Acts of Polycarp,
and liturgical works, like Melito of Sardis’ On the Pasch. In many
of these works, the portrait of the Jews is unflattering: in the Acts
of Polycarp, for example, Jews are prominent in the crowd that
bays for the martyr’s blood. Yet there is a danger of mistaking
the image in these literary texts of vigorous hostility between
Jews and Christians as an accurate representation of how life was
actually lived. As one scholar of the topic has put it: ‘Literature,
especially ideological and doctrinal, tends to stress differentiation,
whereas social and religious experience tends to be more untidy’
(Lieu 1996: 278).
Later in this chapter, when we consider why people converted
to Christianity, we will see just how indistinct the boundaries
between paganism, Judaism, and Christianity could be. At this
juncture, I want to limit the question to Jewish and Christian iden-
tity. In some respects, Jews and Christians had much in common.
Both Jews and Christians laid claim to the same scriptures and,
with them, similar traditions; arising out of this, both assumed that
their own group was the verus Israel(the true Israel), the true
people of God. In the face of this shared heritage, Christian writers,
especially bishops, asserted the superiority of Christianity’s claims.CONTEXTS FOR THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY
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