Split of Christianity and Judaism
[9][10] 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.
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."
[11] Daniel Boyarin describes a traditional (and in his view, errant) understanding of Judeo-Christian origins in 1999's Dying For God: Not long ago, everyone knew that Judaism came before Christianity.
"[12] 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 becoming separated like two branching roadways "never to cross or converge again".
[2] 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.
[2] 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.
[2] Philip S. Alexander posited a Venn diagram to compare to the process of Christianity's differentiation from Judaism, with the two religions beginning as two overlapping circles, which gradually moved apart until they were entirely separated.
Both Dunn and Daniel Boyarin have used body of water metaphors: Dunn described Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity as two currents that eventually carved separate channels from the stream of ancient Judaism, and Boyarin described Early Christianity as one of many first-century Jewish movements that flowed out from one source, like ripples on a pond's surface.
[2] Metaphors of family and kinship "dominated" nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic discussion of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and are still used in contemporary scholarship.
[2] Boyarin identified the mother-daughter metaphor, which he attributes to Jacob Lauterbach, as "a typical example of how the myth [of Judaism and Christianity as 'self-identical religious organisms'] works".
Segal's metaphor compares the two religions to the biblical twins Jacob and Esau, "Rebecca's children", in acknowledgment of their "mother": Second Temple Judaism.
[12] Boyarin suggested that kinship metaphors should be abandoned altogether, because they erroneously imply a separation of first-century Judaism and Christianity as organic, definite entities.
[12] He proposed "a model of shared and crisscrossing lines of history and religious development", describing Judaism and Christianity in late Antiquity as two points on a continuum, with Marcionites and non-Christ-following Jews at each end, respectively.
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.
"[22] Most of Jesus's teachings were intelligible and acceptable in terms of Second Temple Judaism; what set Christians apart from Jews was their faith in Christ as the resurrected messiah.
Some scholars have argued that the idea of two messiahs, one suffering and the second fulfilling the traditional messianic role, was normative to ancient Judaism, predating Jesus.
Paul says that James, Peter and John[35] will minister to the "circumcised" (in general Jews and Jewish Proselytes) in Jerusalem, while Paul and his fellows will minister to the "uncircumcised" (in general Gentiles) (Galatians 2:9),[36][note 3] The First Jewish-Roman war, and the destruction of the Temple, was a main event in the development of both early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.
Many historians argue that the gospels took their final form after the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Temple, although some scholars put the authorship of Mark in the 60s; this could help one understand their context.
[38][39][40][41] Strack theorizes that the growth of a Christian canon (the New Testament) was a factor that influenced the rabbis to record the oral law in writing.
