Christianity as a movement began within Second Temple Judaism, but the two gradually diverged over the first few centuries of the Christian Era, and the Christian movement perceived itself as a distinct religion from the Judaism by the fourth century. Historians continue to debate the dating of Christianity's emergence as a religion distinct from Judaism. Philip S. Alexander characterizes the question of when Christianity and Judaism parted company (often termed the "parting of the ways") as "one of those deceptively simple questions which should be approached with great care".Alexander, Philip S. "'The Parting of the Ways' from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism". James D. G. Dunn, ed. Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism 1992 (2nd: 1999: Wm. B. Eerdmans). p1 in the 1992 edition. According to historian Shaye J. D. Cohen, "the separation of Christianity from Judaism was a process, not an event", in which the Church became "more and more gentile, and less and less Jewish". Conversely, various historical events have been proposed as definitive points of separation. These including the Council of Jerusalem and the First Council of Nicaea.
Historiography of the split is complicated by a number of factors, including the diverse and syncretic range of religious thought and practice within Early Christianity and early Rabbinic Judaism (both of which were far less orthodox and theologically homogeneous in the first centuries of the Christian Era than they are today) and the coexistence of and interaction between Judaism, Jewish Christianity, and Gentile Christianity over a period of centuries at the beginning of Early Christianity.Philippe Bobichon,"L'enseignement juif, païen, hérétique et chrétien dans l'œuvre de Justin Martyr", Revue des Études Augustiniennes 45/2 (1999), pp. 233-259 online Scholars have found evidence of continuous interactions between Jewish-Christian and Rabbinic movements from the mid-to late second century CE to the fourth century CE. The first centuries of belief in Jesus have been described by historians as characterized by religious creativity and "chaos".
The two religions eventually established and distinguished their respective norms and doctrines, notably by increasingly diverging on key issues such as the status of "purity laws" and the validity of Judeo-Christian messianic beliefs.
Background and history
Christianity originated as a Jewish movement in Judaea during the 1st century AD, within the context of late Second Temple Judaism. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jews who understood his life, death and expected return through familiar Jewish apocalyptic and messianic frameworks. They remained embedded in Jewish religious life and did not initially conceive of themselves as departing from Israel or founding a new faith. Following their conviction that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they established a community in Jerusalem that awaited Jesus’s return and eschatological renewal, seeking to spread this message throughout Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Early Jewish Christianity maintained a high Christology alongside monotheism. This early community was led by the three Pillars of the Church, namely James the Just, Peter, and John. What eventually became of this earliest Christ-following community remains unclear; they were possibly displaced, relocated, or killed when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD.
Meanwhile, as the message about Jesus spread beyond Judea and Galilee into the broader Greco-Roman world, it increasingly attracted Gentile adherents, especially among "God-fearers": non-Jews who were attracted to Judaism and participated in synagogal worship without fully converting. This created a challenge for the movement's Jewish religious outlook, which insisted on close observance of the Jewish commandments. Against this backdrop, Paul the Apostle, a Jew of the Pharisaic school who had initially persecuted the Jesus movement, became one of its most influential missionaries following his conversion, focusing on spreading the message to non-Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean. Paul argued that Gentiles could participate in the promises of Israel through exclusive devotion to the God of Israel, faith in Christ, baptism, and participation in his death and resurrection, without full adherence to the Torah, including circumcision. This had a formative effect on the emerging Christian identity as separate from Judaism. Over time, such developments contributed to the gradual differentiation between the Jesus movement and other Jewish communities, a process that resulted in the emergence of Christianity as a separate religion.Wylen, Stephen M., The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction, Paulist Press (1995), , pp. 190–192; Dunn, James D.G., Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing (1999), , pp. 33–34.; Boatwright, Mary Taliaferro & Gargola, Daniel J & Talbert, Richard John Alexander, The Romans: From Village to Empire, Oxford University Press (2004), , p. 426.
Origins of Judaism
Hellenistic Judaism Shaye J.D. Cohen writes that "Even the most Hellenized of Jews, e.g. Philo of Alexandria, belonged to Jewish communities that were socially distinct from “the Greeks,” no matter how well these Jews spoke Greek, knew Greek literature, and assimilated Greek culture high and low."
Second Temple period There were numerous first-century Jewish sects interpreting the Torah (the Talmud refers to twenty-four such sects).
Jesus
Jewish Christianity
Most historians agree that Jesus or his followers established a new Jewish sect, one that attracted both Jewish and gentile converts. According to New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, a number of early Christianities existed in the first century CE, from which developed various Christian traditions and denominations, including proto-orthodoxy. According to theologian James D. G. Dunn, four types of early Christianity can be discerned: Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Christianity, Apocalyptic Christianity, and early Catholicism.
The first followers of Jesus were essentially all ethnically Jewish or Jewish proselytes. Jesus was Jewish, preached to the Jewish people, and called from them his first followers. According to McGrath, Jewish Christians, as faithful religious Jews, "regarded their movement as an affirmation of every aspect of contemporary Judaism, with the addition of one extra belief—that Jesus was the Messiah."
On the subject of the separation of early Christian belief from Judaism, Shaye J. D. Cohen writes that early Jewish believers in Christ "had a choice: they could join the emerging Christian communities which were being populated more and more by gentile Christians; or they could try to maintain their place within Jewish society, a stance that will become harder and harder to maintain as the decades go by; or, if they were uncomfortable among non-Jewish Christians and non-Christian Jews, they could try to maintain their own communities, separate from each of the others." He writes that the New Testament shows that, among Christ-believing Jews in the first century, the norm was to join the emerging gentile-populated Christian communities. But as these communities became more hostile to non-Christian Jews, the Christ-believing Jews were pushed to compromise either their Jewish identities or their belonging within the Christian communities.
By the second century, Romans regarded Christians and Jews as separate communities, persecuting Christians without targeting Jews. Second-century Christian writers regularly accused the Jews of collaborating with the Romans in their anti-Christian persecutions. Eusebius attests to a Christian converting to Judaism in order to escape Roman persecution. The opposite is true, too; when the Romans persecuted Jews, they ignored Christians.
Jews and Christians in Roman writings Almost all early pagan accounts of Christianity that mention Christians do not explicitly associate them with Jews. Tacitus (Annals, c. 116 CE) acknowledges that Christianity originated in Judaea but does not emphasize its Jewish roots. In Suetonius (The Twelve Caesars, c. 121 CE), there is no direct connection between the two groups; Jews are classified as a gens, while Christians are labeled a superstitio. By the early 2nd century, the distinction between Jews and Christians was evident outside of Judaea, where Christian communities, largely composed of Gentile converts influenced by the Pauline doctrines, did not adopt Jewish practices beyond monotheism and rejecting idolatry. Roman legal actions against Christians further confirm that authorities recognized them as separate from Jews.
Historiography Daniel Boyarin describes a traditional (and in his view, errant) understanding of Judeo-Christian origins in 1999's Dying For God:
He writes that this narrative, which he calls the "old paradigm", was propagated in "more or less the same" form by both Christian and Jewish scholars, with an understanding of pre-Christian Jews that anachronistically reduced their religious diversity into a single "Judaism". Israel Yuval described the paradigm as seeing early Christianity "only as influenced and not as influencing". In the late 20th century, scholars began to favor a more complex view of pre-Christian Judaism, and came to understand early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism as "sister religions that were crystallized in the same period and the same background of enslavement and destruction."
Parting of the ways The term parting of the ways refers to a historical concept figuring the emergence of Christianity's distinction from Judaism as a split in paths, with the two religions separating like two branching roadways "never to cross or converge again". While most uses of the metaphor consider Christianity and Judaism as two equally-important roadways, some use it to describe Judaism as the main "highway" from which Christianity forked. The metaphor may also refer to an interpersonal "parting", as in human relationships when two parties no longer see eye to eye and decide to "go their separate ways".
Reed and Becker describe a "master narrative" of Jewish and Christian history that is guided by the parting concept, which describes a first-century Judaism characterized by great diversity, with exchange between Christ-believing and non-Christ-believing Jews, that was fundamentally changed in the wake of the Second Temple's destruction and the later Bar Kokhba revolt of the Jews against Roman rule, after which Christianity and Judaism "definitively institutionalized their differences". The master narrative recognizes this period as the point from which Judaism's influence on Christianity was limited to the Jewish scriptures that the Church held as their Old Testament.
The parting of the ways is the most commonly used metaphor in contemporary scholarship on the topic of Christianity's historical distinction from Judaism, and the notion has been subject to a number of debates, criticisms, and metaphorical adaptations from scholars. Judith Lieu has argued for a "criss-crossing of muddy tracks which only the expert tracker, or poacher, can decipher" over the parting metaphor, while Daniel Boyarin describes a continuum along which one could travel rather than a divide or partition between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Scholarly works on the matter of the concept of the parting of the ways have been published under such titles as "The Ways That Never Parted", "The Ways That Often Parted", and "The Ways That Parted".
Reception and criticism