jewish-christian gospels and syriac gospel traditions also discusses the application of the commandment from a clearly Jewish
point of view. The questions as such cannot be labeled either Christian
or Jewish but the way they are discussed reveals the Jewish viewpoint of
the editor.
The passage profiles a community with a clearly Jewish self-under-
standing, living as a part of a larger Jewish community or on relatively
peaceful terms with it. Nothing suggests that the group might be small
and that the members themselves might all be poor. It draws on Jewish
tradition and represents Jesus as a teacher who discusses the application
of Jewish law.
...Conclusion: Where Did the Men Come From?On the whole, the tradition history of the passage testifies to a sort of
re-judaization of gospel traditions in the eastern parts of Christendom.
It shows that some time after Tatian there was a community of Jewish
Christians who continued to use and reinterpret gospel traditions for
their own purposes. In the light of this study, the early gospel traditions
about Jesus appear as a common stock of stories from which different
Jewish-Christian/Christian writers took material and to which they
contributed. This reminds us to keep our eyes open for the variety of
ways the traditions and communities evolved during the first centuries
ce. Jewish Christians did not live in a vacuum. There was probably more
interaction among Jewish, Christian and Jewish-Christian communities
during the first centuries than is often assumed.
Careful study of the literary history of Origen’s Latin passage shows
that a Jewish point of view in a passage is not necessarily an indication
of its early date. However, this observation should not lend Jewish Chris-
tianity the character of a secondary development or a series of unfor-
tunate lapses into uncritical interest in Jewish traditions and praxis by
Christian communities. Jewish-Christian groups of the first centuries
were different from the early Jerusalem community, but their genetic,
social and ideological distance from those early days in Jerusalem was
hardly any greater than that of any other Christian groups.