“Jewish-Christian” loosely to describe Christian writings that draw exten-
sively on Jewish scripture and tradition, regardless of whether their set-
tings reflect Jewish ethnicity or practice. Others restrict the designation to
groups such as the Ebionites and Nazoreans, marginal groups regarded as
heretical sects by church fathers like Eusebius and Epiphanius whose
members occupied a shrinking no-man’s-land between emergent ortho-
dox Christianity and ascendant rabbinic Judaism.
There can be no denying that the borderlines between Judaism and
Christianity were not clear-cut everywhere in the early centuries of the
Common Era, or that the separation between them was uneven and com-
plex. It was at leastpossibletolivebothasaJew—amemberofaJewish
synagogue — and as a believer in Christ until Theodosius I made Chris-
tianity the only religious option in the Roman Empire (380c.e.). Never-
theless, Christianity did separate from its Jewish matrix in substantive
ways already in the first century. Because early Christianity was character-
ized by considerable diversity, speaking constructively about the parting of
the ways requires precision about whether one has ethnic-demographic,
sociological-cultural, or theological-religious factors in view, and which
regions, settings, and times one is investigating. Some generalizations in
each of these three areas, however, are inevitable and even necessary.
(1) In sheer demographics, the Jesus movement was overwhelmingly
non-Jewish in its constituency by the end of the first century, and in that
sense was a largely Gentile religion. Since ethnic descent was a fundamen-
tal identity marker in early Judaism (except for proselytes), this datum is
significant.
(2) In terms of social identity, Pauline and other congregations of the
middle and later decades of the first century were separate from Jewish
synagogue communities. Although Jewish and Christian individuals con-
tinued to interact with one another for centuries, by the second half of the
first century Jews and Christians as social groups were going their separate
ways, organizing themselves around distinctive beliefs and practices. Then,
too, by the latter decades of the first century, the Romans seem to have be-
gun distinguishing Christians (Lat.Christiani) from Jews, as the Neronian
persecution in Rome in 64c.e.and the imposition of thefiscus Iudaicus
(“Jewish tax”) after the First Revolt suggest. This is undoubtedly the case
by the time of the Pliny-Trajan correspondence ca. 110c.e.(Epistles10.96,
97). Further, the evidence for contact between Jews and Christians in the
patristic period is almost exclusively literary, and most of it comes from
the Christian side. To be sure, church fathers like Justin, Origen, and416daniel c. harlowEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:19 PM