Early Judaism and Early Christianity
Daniel C. Harlow
Today it is a commonplace to acknowledge that Jesus and his first followers
were Jews thoroughly embedded in the Judaism of their day. But this has
not always been the case. Well into the twentieth century, New Testament
scholarship tended if not to separate Jesus from his Jewish milieu then at
least to view him as transcending its “legalism” and “ritualism.” Only in
the post–Holocaust era have Christian scholars overcome the negative car-
icature of ancient Judaism and reckoned with the essential Jewishness of
Jesus. The group he inspired began as a movement within Second Temple
Judaism, so for much of the first centuryc.e., the term “Christianity” is in-
appropriate if taken to suggest a non-Jewish religion. The term itself (Gr.
Christianismos) was invented in-house in the early second century (Igna-
tius,Rom.3:3;Magn.10:3;Phld.6:1;Mart. Pol.10:1), while the epithet
“Christian”(Christianos)was coined by outsiders several decades before
(Acts 11:26, 28; 1 Pet. 4:16). Initially, though, even “Christian” did not desig-
nate adherents of a non-Jewish faith but followers or partisans ofChristos
the Jew.
Our main sources for the early Jesus movement are the New Testa-
ment writings, which were composed over the course of about seventy
years, from roughly 50 to 120c.e.These documents provide valuable his-
torical evidence not only for Jesus and his first followers but also for the
wider Jewish world they inhabited. Apart from the ancient Jewish histo-
rian Flavius Josephus, the apostle Paul — the earliest and major writer of
the New Testament — is the only (former) Pharisee to have left behind a
literary legacy. The Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are a
mine of information about first-century Palestinian Judaism: they men-
tion such figures as Herod the Great and his son Antipas, the tetrarch of391EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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