Dunn, James D., ed. 1992. Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135. Grand Rapids (MI): Eerdmans.

Second edition with new English translations. First edition: Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1992.

Contents: Preface VII-X; Philip S. Alexander: "The Parting of the Ways" from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism 1; Martin Goodman: Diaspora Reactions to the Destruction of the Temple 27; Martin Hengel: The Septuagint as a Collection of Writings Claimed by Christians: Justin and the Church Fathers before Origen 39; Hermann Lichtenberger: Syncretistic Features in Jewish and Jewish-Christian Baptism Movements 85; Graham N.Stanton: Matthew's Christology and the Parting of the Ways 99; J. Neville Birdsall: A note on the textual evidence for the omission of Matthew 9:34 117; John McHugh: "In Him was Life": John's Gospel and the Parting of the Ways 123; Peter Stuhlmacher: The Understanding of Christ in the Pauline School: A Sketch 159; Jaames D. G. Dunn: The Question of Anti-semitism in the New Testament Writings of the Period 177; Christopher Rowland: The Parting of the Ways: The Evidence of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic and Mystical Material 213; Andrew Chester: Thee Parting of the Ways: Eschatology and Messianic Hope 239; William Horbury: Jewish-Christian Relations in Barnabas and Justin Martyr 315; J. Neville Birdsall: Problems of the Clementine Literature 347; Concluding Summary and Postscript 363; List of Contributors 369; Indexes 371-404.
———. 2006. The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity. London: SCM Press.

Second edition; first edition 1991

"In the fifteen years since I wrote Partings, however, I have come to recognize that the process was still more complex than I first envisaged.

I accept Judith Lieu's critique that the imagery of 'ways' parting is too simple:(5) it can too easily imply two embryonic religions as two homogeneous (or even monolithic) entities each pursuing a single path, with developments in each case marching forward uniformly across the diverse contexts of the Mediterranean and Middle East;(6) whereas the sociological reality might be better depicted as 'a crisscrossing of muddy tracks'.(7) In some defence, it could be observed that the second plural in the title ('The Partings of the Ways') need (or should) not be taken to imply that there were only two ways in view, as though both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity each travelled a single well-defined path which diverged into two similarly single and well-defined paths.(8) To change the metaphor, there were various currents within the broader streams which became rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. But I still prefer the imagery of 'ways' or 'paths'.

The alternative of 'trajectories' which became popular in the 1970s(9) implies pre-determined 'flight-paths' for the entities in view. And 'stream' suffers somewhat from the same defect, as implying an irresistable force carving out its own channel. Whereas the imagery of 'ways' or 'paths' need not imply directness and can include a landscape of moor or hillside criss-crossed by several or many paths, whose directions are not always clear and which ramblers or fellwalkers may follow without a clear sense of where they are headed; the path actually travelled is always clearer looking back!(10)" (Preface to to Second Edition, pp. XII-XIII)

(6) The problem with the model of the "parting of the ways" is that . . . it operates essentially with the abstract or universal conception of each religion, Judaism and Christianity, when what we know about is the specific and local' (Lieu, 'Parting', p. 108/18). Other weaknesses are noted in Becker and Reed (eds), The Ways that Never Parted, pp. 19-22; but also strengths (pp. 15 - 16, 18 - 19)!

(7). Lieu, 'Parting', p. 119/29. Lieu returns to the theme in Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World, Oxford University 2004. Observing that debate on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism has largely failed to achieve a consensus as to how, when and why the two parted, she continues: 'There are two key reasons for this failure: first, because it is never clear whether the objects of that question are ideas, or people, or systems; and secondly, because much depends on whether the respondent is a hypothetical Jew, Christian, or pagan of the time, or is the contemporary scholar, or even the believer, both the latter having the benefits . . . of hindsight and of subsequent history' (p. 305, and further pp. 305-10). In correspondence Lieu adds the further complicating factor of 'the filter of literary genre'; I am grateful to Judith for commenting on a first draft of this new introduction.

(8) This is also the weakness of the various models diagramed by M. Goodman, 'Modeling the "Parting of the Ways"', in Becker and Reed (eds), The Ways that Never Parted, pp. 119 - 29 , which mostly have to rely on single, one-dimensional lines, when at least two-dimensional breadth is surely necessary to model complex social phenomena such as diverse religious movements.

(9) J . M. Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories through Earliest Christianity, Philadelphia: Fortress 1971.

(10) For other models see D. Boyarin, 'Semantic Differences; or, "Judaism"/"Christianity" ', in Becker and Reed (eds), The Ways that Never Parted, pp. 74-7: the familiar family tree, or, adapted to languages (the emergence of families of languages or dialects which continue to interact even when they have become largely distinct), or Boyarin's own 'wave-theory' ('innovations disseminate and interact like waves caused by stones thrown in a pond').
———. 2013. "From the Crucifixion to the End of the First Century." In Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two, edited by Shanks, Hershel, 27–53. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society.

"The issues posed by the imagery of “the parting of the ways” are further complicated by the fact that it is not clear, or at least cannot simply be assumed, how the Rabbinic Judaism that became the normative expression of Judaism between the second and fourth centuries (and later) relates to the diverse expressions of Second Temple Judaism. The rabbis can rightly be regarded as the direct heirs of the Pharisees, But are they the heirs of the other forms of Second Temple Judaism, of the other ways of being Jewish?(9) And is Christianity, which became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the direct (and only) heir of “the sect of the Nazarene,’ the people of “the way” (of Jesus)? Was there a direct, linear connection in each case? Was there one way in each case that led without side-roads and bypasses to the fourth-century outcome? Or did the ways wander hither and thither?(10) Did the ways fragment? How in any case do we relate Jewish-Christianity within the big picture?(11) And did other ways merge into the way(s) emerging from the first century?

The issue of Gnostic Christianity at once raises its head." (pp. 28-29)

(9) The fact that the post-biblical Jewish writings, including those by Philo and Josephus, were retained by Christians rather than the rabbis, and that several Jewish writings, like the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, became the basis of Christian writings should not be forgotten. See J.H. Charlesworth, “Christian and Jewish Self-Definition in Light of the Christian Additions to the Apocryphal Writings,’ in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 2, Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period, ed. E.P. Sanders (London: SCM, 1981), pp. 27-55; M.A. Knibb, “Christian Adoption and Transmission of Jewish-Pseudepigrapha: The Case of 1 Enoch,’ JSJ [Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period], 32 (2001), pp. 396-415.

(10) 7. Lieu, “The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 56 (1994), pp. 101-119, reprinted in Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2003), pp. 11-29; she prefers the imagery of “a criss-crossing of muddy tracks” (at p. 119 or p. 29).

(11) "See particularly E.K. Broadhead, Jewish Ways of Following Jesus, WUNT 266 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
———. 2015. Christianity in the Making: Volume. 3: Neither Jew nor Greek. A Contested Identity. Grand Rapids (MI): Eerdmans.

Part Twelve: Jewish Christianity and the Parting of the Ways: 46. The Parting of the Ways, pp. 598-672.

"Of course, by late antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages there were two distinct entities — Christianity and Judaism. So some sort of divi- sion(s), or split(s), or parting(s) had taken place by then.19 How to describe these divisions/splits/partings? In fact, no single imagery can adequately describe such a complex historical process or development.20 Probably the simplest imagery to use is the processes in which the parts of a garment pull apart over time, the threads which begin to break under the stresses of ‘wear and tear’, or the popping of rivets as heavy seas put unbearable strain on the metal plates of a ship, and so on. Such imagery is still inadequate, but a focus on the strains and tensions between Jews and believers-in-Jesus, including not least Jewish believers-in-Jesus, seems most likely to bring to light what became the irreconcilable features which brought about the emergence of two different (and opposed) identities. And since our knowledge of Pharisaic Judaism (30-70 ce) and of the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism (70-100 ce) in relation to followers of Jesus is so thin, when drawing from rabbinic sources, we will have to depend, more than is comfortable, almost exclusively on Christian sources."(pp. 601-602)
Edrei, Arye, and Mendels, Doron. 2013. "Social Organization and Parting in East and West." In Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two, edited by Shanks, Hershel, 269–279. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society.

"Many Church historians and Judaic scholars have attempted to account for the gap that progressively widened between Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries of the common era.(1) Here we present our initial thoughts on a catalyst for the widening gap between the two religions—the rabbinic aspiration to develop a system of civil law and an autonomous community structure, in contrast to no such aspiration among contemporaneous Christians. This had a significant influence on the schism between the two religions, or, as it is commonly known, the parting of the ways.’

While the rabbinic tradition sought to develop an isolated community with its own legal system, Christianity tended to rely on the legal system of the government within which the church functioned. Interestingly, Judaism was the only religion in the ancient world that developed a comprehensive system of civil law that overtly addressed secular and communal matters as part of its religious system. Christianity, for its own reasons, did not develop a “civil” law during its first centuries, but rather relied on Roman law. For this reason, Christianity was able to integrate more easily into the various elements of the Roman public sectors, such as the market, the army, and the public administration and, to a certain degree, gradually assimilated into them. Not only did the rabbis not forgo their law and its significance, but they strengthened its importance as a component of religious observance.

Our argument—essentially a matter of political science—is that the gap that existed between the Jewish and Christian approaches to legal sovereignty significantly influenced the schism between them." (pp. 269-270)
Edsall, Benjamin A. 2021. "Justin Martyr without the “Parting” or the “Ways”." In Jews and Christians – Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries CE? Reflections on the Gains and Losses of a Model, edited by Schröter, Jens, Edsall, Benjamin A. and Verheyden, Joseph, 249–272. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Abstract: "Although the model of the “separation of the wasy” has been established since 1961[*], it has recently come under considerable criticism. This article examines this model with a particular focus on Justin Martyr. It demonstrates that Justin's writings do not support the idea of a “separation” between Judaism and Christianity. Instead of talk of “separation,” one finds the concept of a continuity of the Christian faith with the true Israel, as well as references to an ongoing dialogue and fellowship between Jews and Christians."

"As I noted earlier, the claim that Jews and Christians (or, to a greater extent, that Judaism and Christianity) had parted ways involves a necessary level of abstraction from the particularities of individual Christian or Jewish communities, a certain essentializing of both groups that enables one to attribute agency to them. On all counts, the argument here has been that these claims do not hold up to scrutiny vis-à-vis the works of Justin Martyr. Rather than a “parting of the ways,” Justin describes neither a “parting” nor two “ways.” Instead, the ambiguity and messiness of his account bears witness to the ambiguous and messy reality of Jewish and Christian relations in his period.

(...)

That is to say, if some Jews and some Christians had parted ways, Justin shows that there had been no decisive break and, perhaps more interestingly, that he anticipated no such break to be necessary or inevitable in the future." (pp. 269-270, a note omitted)

[*] From the republicaton of J. Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (Cleveland, OH, and New York, NY: Soncino Press, 1934; repr., Cleveland, OH, and New York, NY: Meridian, 1961), 71-122.
Edwards, Robert Michael. 2012. "Jewish Christianity Revisited : The Jewish Christian Background of the First Apocalypse of James (NHC V, 3 ; AMC 2)." In La croisée des chemins revisitée : Quand l'"Eglise" et la "Synagogue" se sont-elles distinguées ?, edited by Mimouni, Simon Claude and Pouderon, Bernard, 321–337. Paris: Cerf.

NHC V, 3 = First Apocalypse of James; AMC = Al Minya Codex (Codex Tchacos).

Abstract: "Though offering a rich representation of religious syncretism in late antiquity, the First Apocalypse of James has been disregarded by scholars of Gnosticism since its discovery in 1945. Only recently, with the discovery of the Al Minya Codex and the second, more complete copy of James are we finally in a position to fully appreciate the complex interplay of religious traditions represented in the text. This paper will step outside of the comfort zone of gnostic scholarship and explore how the author of the First Apocalypse of James made use of Christian apocryphal and Jewish pseudepigraphal traditions. I will show how these traditions were combined to create a syncretic narrative that was then used in a Valentinian Christian context as late as the mid fourth century. Although this is only a small part of the picture, it will serve as a demonstration of the continued co-mingling of Christianity and Judaism well beyond the points of departure posited in recent scholarship."
Ehrensperger, Kathy. 2024. "Identity Transformation in Christ. Struggling with ‘Ἔργα νόμου’ in Paul." In Parting of the Ways: The Variegated Ways of Separations between Jews and Christians, edited by Tiwald, Markus and Öhler, Markus, 87–110. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.

Abstract: "Paul addresses non-Jews in his letters thus his emphasis that ἔργα νόμου do not lead to δίκαιοσύνη is meant to clarify something for them. The phrase might well resonate with significant aspects of their former lives as pagans, when they worshipped their gods by performing rituals as required by deities, in order to be right with them. However, to perform a ritual in order to win the favor of the God of Israel would be a misunderstanding of God’s call, as this would base the relationship on works rather than grace. Non-Jews are called to orient their lives in Christ on the law in response to God’s grace, not to win his favor. Thus, Paul’s stance against ἔργα νόμου tries to address an issue of cultural misunderstanding for non-Jews in Christ, but Jewish Torah observance is not in view here at all. Thus ἔργα νόμου hardly played the decisive role in the parting of the ways."
Ehrman, Bart. 2018. "Christian Persecutions and the Parting of the Ways." In The Ways That Often Parted: Essays in Honor of Joel Marcus, edited by Baron, Lori, Hicks-Keeton, Jill and Thiessen, Matthew, 283–307. Atlanta: SBL Press.

"Conclusions

The question of the parting of the ways is entangled and complex, and no one approach to the problem will untie all the knots. As I stated at the outset, the extremes in the discussion are represented, on one hand, by essentialists who claim that Judaism is one thing, Christianity is something else, and there was a definite point in time (or even a prolonged period) at which they separated. On the other hand, the somewhat more theoretically sophisticated opponents of this view—at the other extreme— claim, in one nuanced way or another, but equally problematically, that the ways never parted.

This disagreement will probably never subside. But one helpful approach to the question involves a consideration of pagan opposition to the Christian movement. Facets of this opposition reveal why both sides in the debate are in some sense right. Imperial opposition to the Christians, from its first recorded instance under Nero to its denouement under Diocletian and his successors, shows that Roman authorities and those who served under them had no difficulty differentiating between Christians and Jews. It would be perverse to argue that these authorities were exceptions to the rule in the empire, that their views were distinctive to themselves. Surely most people, most of the time, throughout the first three centuries, thought that Jews were not Christians and Christians were not Jews, even if there were individuals and groups here and there who insisted for themselves that they were both things at once.

(...)

In short, Christians may have wanted to claim to be the true Israel—and in fact did make that claim—but in the eyes of the Roman state, and probably the world at large, they were not Jews." (pp. 304-305)
Eliav, Yaron. 2005. "A New/Old Reading of the “Lithos Epi Lithon” Prophecy and the Role of the Temple Mount in the Jesus Movement." In The Beginnings of Christianity: A Collection of Articles, edited by Pastor, Jack and Mir, Menachem, 325–347. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press.

"In the following, I propose to demonstrate that various traditions incorporated into the New Testament contain the seeds of the “Temple Mount” image as an independent spatial entity, even if there is no explicit use of this collocation.

I also intend to show that this space, the surrounding precinct of the Temple (...) occupied a place in the consciousness of the early followers of Jesus before the destruction of the Temple and in the few generations thereafter, not merely as an adjunct, subordinate constituent of the Temple but as an independent entity. In dealing with the following passages, one must remember that in their current form they are dated to the generations following the Temple’s destruction, when these texts took on their final literary shape, but much of the material included in them originally belonged to the collection of traditions composed by the school of Jesus’ disciples and followers during the decades that preceded the destruction. For our purposes, it does not matter whether a particular idea came from Jesus himself or was developed by those who followed him." (p. 334)
Elkins, Kathleen Gallagher, and Bolin, Thomas M. 2020. "Boundaries, Intersections, and the Parting of Ways in the Letter of James." Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology no. 74:335–343.

Abstract: "The letter of James reveals long embedded anti-Semitic elements at work in the articulation of the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. However, careful examination of the text and the history of the early synagogue and church challenges us to rethink how (and whether) Judaism and Christianity have parted ways. James’s use of biblical traditions is not simply an embrace of torah piety or “works righteousness,” but rather a careful juxtaposition of wisdom and prophetic traditions aimed to call the letter’s first readers, and us, to move toward the margins of our ecclesial, academic, and wider communities."
Enslin, Morton S. 1961. "The Parting of the Ways." The Jewish Quarterly Review no. 51:177–197.

"To revert to an opening word and to change the figure of speech: Yes, the ways have parted; the child has left the mother's house. She left it with a very definite inheritance, of which-though in her younger days she may at times have been restive under its authority-she is very proud, and which she believes she is rich in possessing: a solid and wholesome core of ethics; a book from which she has learned much and to which, in her growth, she has added many new chapters of which she is also proud. Both mother and daughter are now pretty mature old ladies, rather set in some of their ways; confident in their conviction that no house, however spacious, is big enough for two families, but very happy-I hope in- creasingly happy in the thought that in a world which sorely needs a hospitable welcome and understanding help, they may, each in her own way, repay the debt they feel to the One whom they in gratitude recognize as the common Father of them both." (pp. 196-197)
Eschner, Christina. 2024. "Paul and the Galatians as “Children” of Abraham. The Continuity of Faith in Salvation History in Judaism and Christianity." In Parting of the Ways: The Variegated Ways of Separations between Jews and Christians, edited by Tiwald, Markus and Öhler, Markus, 111–136. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.

Abstract: "Many scholars argue that according to Paul, Christ had overcome and abolished the Law, so the “Parting of the Ways” already began with the apostle. They also interpret Gal 3–4 in this way. However, in this passage Paul is not concerned with the Law as such but with the soteriological role of the Law in particular. The central question is this: who belongs to the children of God and thus to those who gain righteousness and salvation? Paul rejects any relevance of the Law. Faith is the only criterion. This has always been true – also for Judaism. For Paul it is therefore faith that upholds the continuity between Judaism and Christianity in the history of salvation. Thus, with regard to the function of the Law, Paul deviates from the view that was widespread in ancient Judaism. Yet with respect to the actual practice of the Law, believers in Christ and Jews can be seen to coexist for a longer period of time."
Evans, Craig A. 1997. "Christianity and Judaism: Partings of the Ways." In Dictionary of the Later New Testament and It’s Development, edited by Martin, Ralph P. and Davids, Peter H., 159–170. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.

"In recent years the factors involved in the separation of Christianity from Judaism have stimuIated much discussion and are themselves a byproduct of a healthy Jewish-Christian diaIogue that has been under way for some time.

Review of these factors helps explain why Judaism and Christianity moved so far apart, even though both religions sprang from common roots, and helps in part to explain the origin of anti-Semitism. Critical study of these religions' common roots and the causes of their separation is important, and its continuation should be encouraged.

Christian and Jewish separation has often in recent years been referred to in terms of the "partings of the ways" (see Dunn 1992). This more or less neutral language may, however, mask aspects of the bitterly opposed perspectives of early Jews and Christians themselves (see Lieu). Some of these perspeclives will be considered below.

1. Jesus, the Apostles and the New Testament Writings

2. Christianity's Gentile Mission

3. The Divinization of Jesus

4. Historical Factors

5.Jewish and Christian Polemic" pp. 159-160)

References

J. D. G. Dunn, ed., Jeus and Christians: The Partings of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135 (WUNT 66; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr/Siebeck, 1992.

J. Lieu, " 'The Parting of the Ways': Theological Construct or Historical Reality?" Journal for the Study of the New Testament 156 (1994) 101-19.
Fiano, Emanuel. 2023. Three Powers in Heaven: The Emergence of Theology and the Parting of the Ways. New Haven: Yale University Press.

"In this book I pursue the subject of the parting of the ways under the rubric of intellectual culture, asking when Christianity and Judaism began to diverge qua intellectual traditions. I argue that the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century, which persisted within Christian-Jewish continuity from the viewpoint of beliefs about the divine, were uniquely crucial in the emergence of firmer demarcations between the two intellectual traditions. The Trinitarian controversies were the first war of words to unfold on a pan-Mediterranean stage. Thanks to their geographic scale, to the unprecedently thick web of literary exchanges in which they resulted, and above all to their novel embedment in the structures of the Roman Empire, these disputes had lasting effects on the religious landscape of late antiquity, and in particular on the shape of the Christian tradition. Ecclesiastical leaders’ deployment of new methods for knowledge production, across doctrinal boundaries, gave rise to a method of inquiry that may be termed “theology.” Through a selective sample of the writings they produced, I describe these shifts, which were central to Christianity’s coming into its own as an intellectual tradition. Moreover, I frame them as relevant to the parting of the ways by delineating a contrast between aspects of late ancient Christian and Jewish discourse." (Introduction, p. 3)
Fine, Steven. 2013. "The Complexities of Rejection and Attraction, Herein of Love and Hate." In Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two, edited by Shanks, Hershel, 237–253. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society.

"For much of the past century, scholars discussed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity during these early centuries as a “parting of the ways.”’ This approach suggests that beginning during the first century, Judaism and Christianity had become completely separate competing religions, in enmity with each other. The Christianization of the Roman Empire left Jews precariously open to the kinds of religious pressures, if not persecution, experienced by all the traditional religions of the Roman Empire—not to mention “heretical” Christians.

Recent decades, however, have seen an opposite trend in scholarship, a search for the ways that these communities did not part at all.

This approach asserts that Jewish and Christian communities remained intertwined for centuries, with deeply porous borders both dividing and connecting them.

(...)

Both of these approaches have considerable merit in sensitizing us to the complexities of the relationship in late antiquity—a period in which Christianity took off from Judaism and each developed out of the heritage of Second Temple period Judaism in distinct ways, followed by centuries of pressured existence for the Jewish minority under antagonistic orthodox Christian imperialism. Jews were transformed incrementally from a licit and, in the third, fourth and even fifth centuries, often highly desirable, religious community to (like polytheism and non-orthodox Christian communities) a pressured and sometimes persecuted “superstition.” At best, Jews came to be treated as a remnant of an earlier phase in God's plan under the triumphant Christian empire. It is no wonder, then, that Jewish literature expresses audible relief when the Sassanian Persians invaded Palestine in 614 C.E. When the Christians recovered their territory, renewed Byzantine persecution followed and gave way only with the Muslim conquest of Palestine in 636 C.E. From all indications, Jews received Mohammad’ legions as messianic redeemers. For most of the ensuing centuries, it was preferable for Jews to be second-class, sometimes despised and often humiliated, “people of the book” —dhimmis—under Muslim rule than to be harshly tolerated “Christ-killers” as they had been under the Christians." (pp. 238-239)
Flusser, David. 1983. "The Jewish Christian Schism (Part I)." Immanuel no. 16:32–49.

Reprinted in D. Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Chrisitanity, Jerusalem: The Magnes Press 1988, pp. 617-634.

"In order to deal with our subject, we must examine a number of other questions. Throughout human history, most new religions or religious communities have arisen from a previous religion or religious community, and a new faith often claimed that it was the fulfilment of the older faith and that it represented its true meaning. The fact that in such cases the former religious community, or the majority of its members, did not recognize its own faith in this new interpretation, and that the old community did not disappear within the new one, was quite independent of the truth of the old or the new faith. The claim of the latter and the reluctance of the former to accept this claim caused tensions and hatred. As far as I can see, Christian anti-Judaism is probably unparalleled in its vigour and consequences. The nature of these splits in the history of religion varies, and it is difficult to locate the exact moment when a given group ceases to be a sect and becomes a separate religious community or even a new religion.

(...)

In order to deal with our subject, we must examine a number of other questions. Throughout human history, most new religions or religious communities have arisen from a previous religion or religious community, and a new faith often claimed that it was the fulfilment of the older faith and that it represented its true meaning. The fact that in such cases the former religious community, or the majority of its members, did not recognize its own faith in this new interpretation, and that the old community did not disappear within the new one, was quite independent of the truth of the old or the new faith. The claim of the latter and the reluctance of the former to accept this claim caused tensions and hatred. As far as I can see, Christian anti-Judaism is probably unparalleled in its vigour and consequences.

(...)

I hope to show why I think that Christianity is more a Jewish possibility than Mormonism is a Christian way. One thing does seem to me to be clear, in any event: that the example of Mormonism demonstrates that, even if the elucidation of the historical background and the coincidence of circumstances may be useful for the understanding of the origin and development of a new religious concept, such research cannot explain the very essence of a new religious community, its impact, and the causes of its separation from the original community. These preliminary remarks are necessary, at least in order to explain the Jewish rabbinic view about the Church even in the early stages of Christianity. From the beginning, it was known both to Jews and to Christians that they believed in the same one God, and today both Jews and Christians are better able to appreciate the common Jewish values which Christianity inherited from her mother and which she developed in her own manner. (pp. 617-618)
———. 2005. "The Antichrist and “The House of Israel Alone"." In The Beginnings of Christianity: A Collection of Articles, edited by Pastor, Jack and Mir, Menachem, 349–357. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press.

"The very existence of a non-Christian Israel was a grave problem for Christianity from its beginnings. Even today it remains an unresolved issue for Christians, with which the various denominations are forced to contend.

There were many proposals for a suitable solution; none of them was the main impulse for Christian anti-Judaism, but the Christian “Jewish problem” was also able to give rise to happier hopes. One of them first appears early in the history of the Church, in the eschatological scheme in chapter 2 of the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. As most people are unaware of this work, I would like to bring it to the attention of the readers.

In recent years some progress has been made in the exegesis of the Apocalypse of Peter, especially in the interpretation of the parable of the fig tree and its explication in the second chapter. Great importance is to be ascribed to the reconstruction by J.V. Hills, and we will start from his translation of the pertinent passage.(1) I hope to contribute here to a fresh understanding of the text with the help of earlier Christian sources, and I shall also sketch the further development of its concepts in later ecclesiastical literature." (p. 349)

(1) J.V. Hills, “Parables, Pretenders and Prophecies,” RB [Revue Biblique], 98 (1991), pp. 560-573, esp. 571-572; D.D. Buchholz, Your Eyes Will Be Opened: A Study of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter, Atlanta, GA 1988; J.K. Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford 1993, pp. 593-615; C. Detlef and G. Miiller, “Offenbarung des Petrus,’ W. Schneemelcher (ed.), Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, Ui, Tiibingen 1989, pp. 562-578.
Förster, Hans. 2024. "Parted by Nature or by Translation? Translation Choices in the Vulgate New Testament as a Factor in Perceptions of the “Parting of the Ways”." In Parting of the Ways: The Variegated Ways of Separations between Jews and Christians, edited by Tiwald, Markus and Öhler, Markus, 305–322. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.

Abstract: "A parting of ways may be discovered in New Testament texts. It is far more pronounced in modern translations than in the equivalent Greek texts. This seems to be connected with translational choices introduced by the Vulgate and perpetuated by modern dictionaries. Paul, for example, appears to abolish Jewish dietary laws in Romans.

However, if an isomorphic participle is no longer translated as middle but rather as passive voice, he appears instead to be following contemporary Halakhic teaching concerning food laws. As a consequence, New Testament studies need to consider their approach to translation carefully: it appears there may have been a tendency towards being excessively interpretative."
Foster, Paul. 2024. "Ignatius of Antioch. Redefining Identities and Creating Irreversible Separation." In Parting of the Ways: The Variegated Ways of Separations between Jews and Christians, edited by Tiwald, Markus and Öhler, Markus, 241–268. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.

Abstract: "This chapter discusses Ignatius comments and rhetoric in relation to Judaism and Judaizing practices within communities to which he wrote. It is noted that the topic of “Judaism” is largely confined to two of his authentic letters – the Epistle to the Magnesians and the Epistle to the Philadelphians. The analysis suggests different issues in these two locations. In Magnesia a tendency to embrace Jewish practices in Philadelphia adopting Jewish hermeneutical approaches to scripture. For this reason, it is difficult to speak of a single unified set of opponents to whom Ignatius responds in regard to the adoption of Jewish practices or scriptural interpretations."
Fredriksen, Paula. 2007. "What "Parting of the Ways"? Jews, Gentiles, and the Ancient Mediterranean City." In The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Becker, Adam H. and Reed, Annette Yoshiko, 35–63. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

"The historical origins of the formal contra Iudaeos tradition seem to lie in the earlier half of the second century. Its matrix was the intra-Christian disputes of educated, formerly pagan intellectuals. In their effort to make sense of the premier literary medium of Christian revelation, the Septuagint, these Gentile contestants shaped the potent and long-lived hermeneutical idea of the "Jew" - fleshly, hard-hearted, philosophically dim, and violently anti-Christian. As a theological abstraction, this idea had great power, serving by means of the absolute contrast that it constructed between "Jews" and (true or correct) "Christians" to focus and define the desiderata of orthodox identity. This rhetoric of invidious contrast that cast Jews as the Christian anti-type par excellence accordingly came to shape many different sorts of protoorthodox and orthodox literature: apologies, sermons, heresiological tracts, scriptural florilegia, commentaries, histories and historical fictions, martyr stories, conciliar canons, and eventually, should we chose to look at them this way, the legal compendia of the later empire, the Codex Theodosianus and Justinianus. My question to this body of writing is simple: what relation does its rhetoric have to (social) reality?

I propose to proceed by looking at some of these writings within their native social and cultural urban setting. I organize my initial survey around three issues, often invoked as contributory to the formation of Christian anti-Judaism, that presuppose clear and principled distinctions, social and religious, between ancient Jews and their non-Jewish contemporaries: (1) pagan views on Jews and Judaism, (2) putative Jewish missions to Gentiles, and (3) pagan and Jewish persecution of (Gentile) Christians. My conclusion will argue what I hope my prior presentation will have demonstrated, namely, that to conceptualize relations between ancient Jews and Christians in terms of a "Parting of the Ways" is to misconstrue the social and intellectual history of Judaism, of Christianity, and of majority Mediterranean culture at least up through the seventh century, and possibly beyond." (pp. 37-38, notes omitted)
———. 2008. "Christian anti-Judaism: polemics and policies." In The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume IV: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, edited by Katz, Steven T., 977–1034. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"Introduction

The Church endorsed by Constantine in the early fourth century represented a form of Christianity that drew most directly upon the traditions and Scriptures of Israel. Its Bible rested on the foundation of the Septuagint; its cosmology affirmed the positive relation of the highest deity, God the Father, to material creation; its soteriology anticipated the resurrection of the dead; its Christology asserted the lineal descent of Jesus Christ from the House of David. These common religious points of principle notwithstanding, however, this Church eventually came to persecute Jewish communities with a deliberation that pagan Rome never had. To understand imperial Christianity’s policies toward Jews and Judaism requires an appreciation of its foundational history in the second century, when the younger community fought doctrinal diversity within and persecution without.

During this earlier period, the seeds of orthodoxy’s anti-Judaism, which flourished especially from the late fourth century onward, developed and became established." (p. 977)
———. 2018. "How Later Contexts Affect Pauline Content, or: Retrospect is the Mother of Anachronism." In Jews and Christians in the First and Second Centuries: How to Write Their History, edited by Tomson, Peter J. and Schwartz, Joshua, 17–51. Leiden: Brill.

"Concluding Questions

Historians of Christian origins inevitably know more about Christianity than did the ancient apostles who spread the euangelion in the middle decades of the first century. We know, first of all, that despite the convictions of this first generation – a conviction that unites them, mutatis mutandis, with the historical Jesus(79) – Christianity would go on to have a long future. We also know that, within a very few years of Paul’s mission, the Temple in Jerusalem would cease to be a focus of active Christian piety. And we know that Christianity would continue to develop vigorously and variously as a movement that was increasingly gentile and, eventually, anti-Jewish. All of this knowledge can unobtrusively shape how and what we see.

I have argued here that we have good reason to construe Paul as a diaspora Jew of the late Second Temple period who fits into his inherited cultural/religious context by way of continuity rather than by way of contrast. Were we to take this proposition seriously, we would need to recast much of how we think about what we do. I close with a short series of examples."

(...)

"The so-called ‘new perspective on Paul’, germinating in mid-twentieth century Scandinavian New Testament scholarship, inaugurated fully in Anglophone studies in the 1970’s and 80’s, led to a deepening appreciation of Paul’s relationship with Judaism. The paradigm shifted from Paul against Judaism to Paul and Judaism. That perspective is shifting yet again, from Paul and Judaism to Paul within Judaism.(86) A daunting task of re-imagining lies before us. The letters must all be retranslated. The word books must all be recast. The commentaries must all be redone."

(79) On the apocalyptic teachings common to Paul and to the later gospel traditions thus, perhaps, tracing back to the historical Jesus – see Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, 74–119.

(86) See the essays assembled in Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism.

References

Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, New Yok: Vintage Books 1999.

Mark D. Nanos, Magnus Zetterholm (eds.), Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2015.
Frey, Jörg. 2012. "Temple and Identity in Early Christianity and in the Johannine Community: Reflections on the “Parting of the Ways"." In Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History? On Jews and Judaism before and after the Destruction of the Second Temple, edited by Schwartz, Daniel R. and Weiss, Zeev, 447–508. Leiden: Brill.

"Did the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple affect Christians as well as Jews, and potentially not only in Palestine but all over the Mediterranean Diaspora?(5) And how is the so-called “parting of the ways,”(6) the process of separation between the emerging church and the synagogue, related to the events of the year 70 ce and the loss of the cultic center of early Judaism?" (p. 448)

(...)

"III. Conclusion: Who Made the Difference: Jesus or Titus? The conclusion is unavoidable: The direct impact of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem on the Fourth Gospel and on the development of the identity of the community members as “children of God” is remarkably small. The question put by the organizers of this conference, as to whether Jesus or Titus made the difference, must be answered clearly in the sense that the difference was primarily made internally, by the developing Jesus tradition (and Christology). The consequences of the year 70 ce further stimulated the already ongoing separation between the local synagogue and the emerging Christian communities in the Mediterranean Diaspora." (p. 507, a note omitted)

(5) See M. Goodman, “Diaspora Reactions to the Destruction of the Temple,” in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways ad 70 to 135 (ed. J.D.G. Dunn; Tübingen, 1992), 27–38.

(6) On the paradigm of the “parting of the ways,” see J.D.G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London, 1991); and J.M. Lieu, “ ‘The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?” JSNT 56 (1994): 106–9. On the recent interrogation of this paradigm, see A.Y. Reed and A.H. Becker, “Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions,” in The Ways that Never Parted (ed. A.H. Becker and A.Y. Reed; Tübingen, 2003), 1–33; and see further D. Boyarin, “Semantic Differences; or, ‘Judaism’/‘Christianity,’ ” ibid., 65–85; and M. Goodman, “Modeling the ‘Parting of the Ways,’ ” ibid., 119–30.
———. 2017. "Toward Reconfiguring Our Views on the “Parting of the Ways”: Ephesus as a Test Case." In John and Judaism: A Contested Relationship in Context, edited by Culpepper, R. Alan and Anderson, Paul N., 221–239. Atlanta: SBL Press.

"The present contribution aims at providing a wider framework for a more comprehensive understanding of a process that can be observed in parts of the Johannine literature: the gradual separation between Jesus followers and synagogal Jews that resulted in the later existence of two separate plants in spite of the one common root.

(...)

Can we identify a certain point of decision, such as, for example, the reformulation of the Birkat Haminim, often attributed to the sages at Yavneh, as J. Louis Martyn (1968) suggested with the Johannine ἀποσυνάγωγος in view? Was there a decisive stumbling stone, such the veneration of Jesus as a divine being (see John 5:17–18) or already with Paul’s view of the Jewish law? Or did the processes of separation happen in a locally and temporally incoherent manner, with different factors involved in various group constellations and regions?

In my view, the latter is the case, and the task of reconfiguring our views on the parting of the ways can only mean to step back from the general perspectives for a while and to look more precisely at particular authors, groups, or regions, in order to get hold of the variety of factors involved in that extended and multifaceted process." (pp.221-222, two notes oitted)

Note 3: The present article draws in many aspects on the more detailed discussion of the development in Ephesus in Frey 2013g, where also much more scholarly literature is considered than is possible in the present framework.

References

Frey, Jörg. 2013g. “Von Paulus zu Johannes. Die Diversität ‘christlicher’ Gemeindekreise und die ‘Trennungsprozesse’ zwischen der Synagoge und den Gemeinden der Jesusnachfolger in Ephesus im ersten Jahrhundert.” Pages 235–78 in The Rise and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries of the Common Era. Edited by C. K. Rothschild and J. Schröter. WUNT 301. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Martyn, J. Louis. 1968. History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel. Nashville: Abingdon.
———. 2024. "Josephus’s Account of the Martyrdom of James: A Source for the Position of the Jerusalem Community of Jesus Followers within Their Environment?" In A Vision of the Days: Studies in Early Jewish History and Historiography in Honor of Daniel R. Schwartz, edited by Brody, Robert, Hacham, Noah, Piotrkowski, Meron M. and van Henten, Jan Willem, 262–278. Leiden: Brill.

"In the present contribution honoring Danny Schwartz, I would like to focus on the brief passage on the martyrdom(11) of James in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities (20.199–203), which can be read both as a source on the interaction between various Jewish factions in Roman Palestine and as a source for the reputation of both James, the brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem community of Jesus followers among contemporary Jews during the period shortly before the Jewish War. Such a reading can add an interesting aspect to our image of the Palestinian Jewish Jesus movement before 70 CE.(12)" (pp. 263-264)

(11) The term is used here in a wider sense. Of course, James did not die willingly, as is presupposed in the accounts about martyrdoms from the Maccabees to later Christian martyrs.

However, he was brought to death for dubious reasons and probably because of his connections to Jesus. In any case, later authors such as Hegesippus classify his death as such.

(12) In his discussion of the passage, Mason, Josephus, 259–67, does not elaborate on its relevance for assessing the reputation of James and other Jesus followers among the Jewish people. See further Ralph P. Martin, “The Epistle of James” and, most recently, Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Die Urgemeinde und das Judenchristentum, 492–500.

References

Hengel, Martin, and Anna Marie Schwemer. Die Urgemeinde und das Judenchristentum. Geschichte des frühen Christentums 2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018.

Martin, Ralph P. “The Life-Setting of the Epistle of James in the Light of Jewish History.” Pages 97–103 in Biblical and Near Easter Studies. Essays in Honor of William Sanford LaSor. Edited by Gary A. Tuttle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.

Mason, Steve. Josephus and the New Testament. 2nd ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. German translation: Flavius Josephus und das Neue Testament. Translated by Manuel Vogel. UTB 2130. Tübingen: Francke, 2000.
Gabrielson, Timothy A. 2021. "Parting Ways or Rival Siblings? A Review and Analysis of Metaphors for the Separation of Jews and Christians in Antiquity." Currents in Biblical Research no. 19:178–204.

Abstract: "Since the early 1990s, ‘the parting of the ways’ has become academic shorthand, especially in anglophone scholarship, for the separation of Jews and Christians in antiquity. Often it is associated with a onetime, global break that occurred by the end of the second century, particularly over one or more theological issues. This model has been challenged as being too tidy. Other images have been offered, most notably that of ‘rival siblings’, but the ‘parting’ model remains supreme. Consensus has shifted in other ways, however. The ‘parting’, or better, ‘partings’, is now understood to be a localized, protracted, and multifaceted process that likely began in the second century and continued into or past the fourth century.

It is also suggested here that the current debate covers five distinguishable topics: (1) mutual religious recognition, (2) the continued existence of ‘Jewish Christians’, (3) religious interaction, (4) social concourse, and (5) outsider classification."
Gager, John G. 1993. "The Parting of the Ways: A View from the Perspective of Early Christianity: “A Christian Perspective”." In Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians Through the Ages, edited by Fisher, Eugene J., 62–73. New York: Paulist Press.

"What I have argued thus far is that we cannot read the New Testament—or its individual writings—as if they provide a full or unambiguous account of relations between Christians and Jews in the early centuries of the common era. We have seen that the official story of Christianity’s encounter with Judaism has stressed one voice in a much wider conversation—in this case the voice of harsh criticism and rejection.

The New Testament represents the views of the winners in a long series of ancient debates about Judaism within the Christian community.

We must be careful not to confuse the retrospective, value-laden story told by the winners with the much more complex picture that is now beginning to emerge. In particular, it is now possible to state with assurance that the assumption of a parting of the ways somewhere between 70 and 150 is true only for what we may call the official leadership within Christian circles. It is most certainly not true for many ordinary Christians who did not share the view that loyalty to Jesus meant breaking all contacts with Jews or repudiating the religious validity of their faith.

In other words, I want to advance the proposition that for many Christians, there was no break at all with Judaism—not in 70, not in 150, indeed not even in 370, some three hundred years after virtually all previous scholars have told us that the final break took place. I could point to all sorts of evidence to illustrate this assertion. I could cite the rulings of various ecclesiastical councils in the fourth century in which bishops forbid Christians to have their fields blessed by rabbis and charge Christians not to celebrate Passover in Jewish homes.(8) I could mention the fact that in the third and fourth centuries, Christian writers ranging from North Africa in the west to Syria in the east, write about Christians who were practicing circumcision, celebrating Jewish festivals and regularly attending Jewish ynagogues.(9) Or I could move in a somewhat different direction by reinforcing Martha Himmelfarb’s picture of Judaism’s continued appeal among Gentiles long after Christianity has supposedly replaced Judaism as the only biblical faith either interested in or open to Gentiles." (p. 67)

(8) See the old but still valuable discussion of James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism (New York, 1961), pp. 174-177.

(9) In general on this and related subjects, see M. Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135-425) (New York, 1986).

References

Martha Himmelfarb, The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman Empire: “A Jewish Perspective”, same volume, pp. 47-61.
Galambush, Julie. 2005. The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

"The Reluctant Parting seeks to reconstruct the ways in which the early Christians saw themselves and their movement in relation to the rest of the Jewish world. It is an attempt to enter the imaginative world of Jesus' followers who not only lived, thought, and worshiped as Jews, but took it for granted that their movement had a Jewish future. Can we understand Matthew, the scribe who painstakingly depicted Jesus as a true teacher of Torah, and then turned to portray the entire Jewish people calling for Jesus' blood on themselves and their children? If we miss the tragedy of this pious Jew, who unwittingly gave warrant to the slaughter of his own people, we have not yet encountered the painfully ambiguous truth of the New Testament as a Jewish book.

(...)

The core of The Reluctant Parting consists of a book-by-book discussion of the New Testament and its authors. Each of these sections provides an overview of the individual New Testament book, highlighting the way in which each author balances his claims about Jesus as messiah and risen Lord with his commitment to nurturing the Jewish identity of the community for which he writes. Thus, Paul, for example, struggles fiercely to explain on the basis of Torah, how Jesus can be the messiah despite having been crucified. Luke seeks to prove, also on the basis of Torah, that non-Jews should be allowed into the sect without undergoing circumcision. Each author pushes the boundaries of his Jewish identity; none consciously abandons it." (Introduction, pp. XX-XXI)
Gallagher Elkins, Kathleen, and Bolin, Thomas M. 2020. "Boundaries, Intersections, and the Parting of Ways in the Letter of James." Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology no. 74:335–343.

Abstract: "The letter of James reveals long embedded anti-Semitic elements at work in the articulation of the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. However, careful examination of the text and the history of the early synagogue and church challenges us to rethink how (and whether) Judaism and Christianity have parted ways. James’s use of biblical traditions is not simply an embrace of torah piety or “works righteousness,” but rather a careful juxtaposition of wisdom and prophetic traditions aimed to call the letter’s first readers, and us, to move toward the margins of our ecclesial, academic, and wider communities."
Geraty, Lawrence T. 2013. "From Sabbath to Sunday: Why, How and When?" In Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two, edited by Shanks, Hershel, 255–268. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society.

"Conclusion

The first explicit, but timid, reference to Christian Sunday is found in the Epistle of Barnabas (chapter 15), which mentions simply that Christians spent the eighth day rejoicing, inasmuch as it represented the prolongation of the eschatological Sabbath, to which is united the memory of the resurrection.

Since Barnabas lived at the crucial time when Emperor Hadrian (117-138 C.E.) adopted rigorous and repressive measures against the Jews, outlawing their religious observances and particularly their Sabbath-keeping,

both external pressures and internal needs encouraged many Christians at that time to break radically with the Jews.

(...)

"It is quite clear then that Sunday observance was introduced in a climate of controversy. Christians had a need to force a break with Judaism. That occurred first and to a greater degree in the church of Rome. In Rome most Christian converts were of pagan extraction; they experienced an earlier differentiation from Jews than converts in the East. The repressive measures adopted by the Romans against the Jews—particularly felt in the Roman capital—apparently encouraged the predominant gentile membership in the church of Rome to clarify to the Roman authorities their distinction from Judaism. The close nexus between Easter Sunday and weekly Sunday—the latter being viewed by many church fathers as an extension of the former(53)—suggests that both festivities originated contemporaneously in Rome because of the same anti-Judaic motivations."

(...)

"In the end, Sunday worship does not rest on a foundation of biblical theology and/or apostolic authority, but on the later contributory factors suggested here. In the context of this book, it not only facilitated the parting of the ways, but is a cosmic summary of the process.(55)"

(53) See Lawrence T. Geraty, “The Pascha and the Origin of Sunday Observance,’ AUSS 3 (1965), pp. 85-96.

(55) SNo less a Catholic authority than Thomas quinas states unambiguously: “In the New law the observance of the Lord's day took the place of the observance of the Sabbath not by virtue of the precept but by the institution of the Church and the custom of Christian people.” See Summa Theologica (New York: Benzinger, 1947), vol. 2, Q122, art. 4, p. 1702.

References

Samuele Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity, Rome: The Pontifical Gregorian University Press 1977.
Gibson, E. Leigh. 2007. "The Jews and Christians in the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Entangled or Parted Ways?" In The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Becker, Adam H. and Reed, Annette Yoshiko, 145–158. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

"On these and many other counts, Dying for God is a remarkable book.

Students of Christianity, however, may lament that Christian martyrologies do not receive the same original and sustained analysis from Boyarin as do the rabbinic martyr stories. In this paper, I address this gap by renewed attention to the Martyrdom of Polycarp (henceforth MPoly), the well-known second-century account of the final days of Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna. Although Polycarp flees Smyrna upon the advice of his friends when the persecution of Christians begins, two slaves reveal his whereabouts and the police ultimately bring him to the stadium and present him to the authorities. Rejecting their invitations to swear allegiance to the emperor, Polycarp defiantly proclaims, "I am a Christian." Only after a crowd said to include Jews demands that he be burnt alive do the reluctant officials act. The crowd then turns its attention to preparing. his pyre, a task in which the Jews participate eagerly. The fire, however, is unable to consume Polycarp's body, forcing an executioner to pierce him with a dagger, thereby releasing a dove and a quantity of blood so great that it extinguishes the fire. In the final scene, the Jews intervene against the Christians attempting to recover Polycarp's body; in the end the Christians collect only the ashes of his cremated corpse. By revisiting the issue of date and textual integrity of MPoly and utilizing fresh studies on other Smyrnaean texts and on Jewish interest in the remains of the dead, I argue that MPoly does not document active Jewish hostility against Christians but rather is a remnant of the battle within second-century Smyrnaean Christianity about the implication of Jesus-following for the observation of Jewish custom." (pp. 145-146)

References

Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Judaism and Christianity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999).
Goodman, Martin. 2005. "The Persecution of Paul by Diaspora Jews." In The Beginnings of Christianity: A Collection of Articles, edited by Pastor, Jack and Mir, Menachem, 379–387. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press.

"The question addressed in this paper is limited in scope but has, I believe, quite wide ramifications. It is simply this: Why was Paul subjected by some of the Jews he met to judicial punishments? The problem is an issue above all for Jewish rather than Christian history, since the aim is to discover the motivation of the persecutors, not the explanations given for their suffering by the persecuted." (p. 379)

(...)

"The investigation is not without problems. Most obvious is one of method: almost all the accounts of persecution come from the Christians who were persecuted, and since martyrdom early became a potent theme in Christian literature, as in Acts 5:40, which refers to “suffering for Jesus’ name,”(5) it will be hard to find reliable evidence of the views of the Jewish persecutors concerned: the issue raises in a particularly acute form the problem that references to Jews in Christian texts relate only obliquely to references to Christians in Jewish texts, a disjunction which should not really surprise." (p. 380)

(...)

"To sum up, I have suggested that although there may well have been all sorts of theological reasons for Jewish hostility to early Christians, theology alone can never explain the risks taken by synagogue authorities in imposing violent discipline on the Christian Jews such as Paul in their midst. In the case of Paul I have suggested that the political factor which impelled diaspora Jewish leaders to persecute him was the need to live a quiet life untroubled by the hostility of pagan neighbors resentful that a Jew should try to lure them away from the ancestral worship on which, in their eyes, their security depended." (p. 387)

(5) See W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus, Grand Rapids 1965.
———. 2007. "Modeling the "Parting of the Ways"." In The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by Becker, Adam H. and Reed, Annette Yoshiko, 119–129. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Reprinted in M. Goodman, Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays, Leiden: Brill 2007, pp. 175-185.

"Much of the disagreement in modern scholarship about when, how, why, and indeed whether, the ways of Judaism and Christianity parted in antiquity derives from confusion about differences of perspective. The relationship of one group to another may be seen quite differently by members of the two groups, and differently again by the modern observer." (p. 119)

(...)

"In illustrations of these varieties of perspective I drew up, for the last of the seminars held in Oxford before the Princeton colloquium, a series of schematic diagrams for the seminar participants to refine." (p. 119)

(...)

"If no image is perfect, some images are more useful than others. In any case, models should only be used as heuristic devices for finding out more about the import of the ancient evidence. It is in that minimal spirit that the diagrams are reproduced here, expertly transformed from my incompetent artistic efforts through Jeremy Boccabello's expertise in computer design." (p. 120)
Gore-Jones, Lydia, and Llewelyn, Stephen. 2017. "“The Parting of the Ways”." In Into All the World: Emergent Christianity in Its Jewish and Greco-Roman Context, edited by Mark Harding, Mark and Nobbs, Alanna, 158–183. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

"According to the great commission (Matt 28:16-20) Jesus, before hisascension, charged the eleven with the task of making disciples of all nations and teaching them to keep everything that he had commanded. Within decades, the Jesus Movement had spread rapidly in the Greco-Roman world, attracting large numbers of followers of non-Jewish descent. Neither Jesus himself nor his apostles apparently intended to create a new religion, yet in hindsight it would appear that the Gentile mission was a major factor contributing to the development of a new “religion” that in time viewed its own identity as distinct from emergent Judaism. But, of course, this is to view the development from a Christian perspective.

The question of the “parting of the ways’”—the expression often used to designate the phenomenon—investigates the historical separation of Christianity and Judaism from a common background to become two distinct identities: why, how, and when it happened. But before we approach the question, a number of preliminary issues need to be addressed, the first of which involves the metaphor itself(1)" (p. 158)

(1) The metaphor seems to be first adopted in 1912 in a volume edited by F. J. Foakes-Jackson, The Parting of the Roads: Studies in the Development of Judaism and Early Christianity (London: Edward Arnold, 1912). For a history of the concept, see Judith Lieu, “The Parting of the Ways’: Theological Construct or Historical Reality?” JSNT [Journal for the Study of the New Testament] 56 (1994): 101-19. Also Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Introduction,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, TSAJ 95, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 8-9.
Grayston, Kenneth. 1980. "The Parting of the Ways." European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe no. 14:22–25.

"The parting of the ways between the Israel of God and the Ecclesia of God is documented in the Epistle to the Galatians. It was caused by divergent understandings of Torah. The writer of the Epistle was profoundly concerned with Torah, having been 'circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the Church, as to righteousness under the law blameless' (Phil 3:5f.). In Gal 4 he says that God sent forthhis son ... to redeem those who are under the law, and he seems to say that being under the law is the same as being enslaved to the elemental spirits of the universe (ta stoicheia tou kosmou Gal 4:3-5). I propose to interpret that strange expression and suggest why Paul applied itto Torah." (p. 22)
Greenspon, Leronard. 2015. "Reflections on a Course: Judaism and Early Christianity: The Parting of the Ways—When? Where? Why?" In Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis, edited by Garber, Zev, 133–145. New York: Routledge.

"Earlier scholarship reckoned that this parting of the ways took place quite early, within a generation or two after the death of Jesus at the latest. But many researchers today would date the parting to a considerably later period and characterize it more as a series of developments rather than a singular or single event.

Our primary perspective will be to look at the evidence and its interpretation through the lens of Jewish Studies. The New Testament and Early Christianity have come increasingly into focus as fields where Jewish scholars can make substantial and substantive contributions. At the same time, we will not ignore either Christian documentation or Christian interpretation.

Major strides have been made, over the past decades, in making relevant Jewish and Christian documents accessible to English-language readers.

Moreover, there are an increasing number of scholarly analyses, in the form of monographs and collected essays, that can be appreciated by advanced students and the literate general public." (p. 133)
Gross, Simcha. 2025. "Beyond Coexistence: Social Boundaries and Violence Between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity." Studies in Late Antiquity no. 9:379–400.

Abstract: "Among its many achievements, The Ways That Never Parted marked a paradigm shift in the study of Jewish–Christian relations by challenging the notion of rigid, essential group identities and boundaries and emphasizing instead that identities were fluid, discursively constructed, and frequently marked by interaction rather than conflict. While the methodological shifts consolidated in this work have had far-reaching and transformative effects, particularly in the study of Late Antiquity, this paper contends that certain tendencies that have emerged in its wake deserve reappraisal. Specifically, the critique of rigid group boundaries has sometimes led to an overcorrection, downplaying the extent to which identities were embedded within broader social and institutional contexts. Likewise, the rejection of an overemphasis on conflict and violence has at times given rise to an overly harmonious portrayal of Jewish–Christian relations. The paper calls for approaches that avoid both extremes in favor of acknowledging the complexities of identity formation in antiquity as well as the complicated and ongoing interplay between conflict and coexistence. By reexamining these scholarly trends, the paper aims to advance a more balanced understanding of ancient Jewish–Christian interactions, attentive to both the local and translocal sociopolitical forces that shaped them."
Grube, Dirk-Martin. 2011. "Reconstructing the Change from Judaism to Christianity as a Paradigm Shift." In Orthodoxy, Liberalism, and Adaptation: Essays on Ways of Worldmaking in Times of Change from Biblical, Historical and Systematic Perspectives, edited by Becking, Bob E. J. H., 225–248. Leiden: Brill.

"In this paper, I will scrutinise the notion of paradigm shifts and its relevance for religious issues. After a predominantly philosophical analysis of this notion in sections 2–6, I will apply its results to religion, in particular, to the change from the Jewish worldview to the Christian worldview as it occurred in the first century CE. After arguing that this change can be reconstructed as being a paradigm shift (section 7)

I will show what consequences follow from this reconstruction (sections 8–10)." (p. 225)

(...)

"Let us, finally, come to the question what consequences the view suggested has for the Jewish -Christian dialogue. I argued above that the change to the family of Early Christian views is legitimate (provided certain constraints are met). Does it follow from this that the family of first-century Jewish views has to be considered to be illegitimate?

The answer is: not at all. The reason some of us may be inclined to think it does, is because they associate legitimacy with uniqueness: If A is legitimate, then it must be uniquely legitimate, i.e., B must be illegitimate. But common as that reasoning may be, it is mistaken.

Above (see section 5), I suggested that both A and B can be legitimate.

This is the epistemic upshot of our analysis of the concept of paradigm shifts." (p. 246)
Gurtner, Daniel M. 2008. "Matthew's Theology of the Temple and the "Parting of the Ways": Christian Origins and the First Gospel." In Built on the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew, edited by Gurtner, Daniel M. and Nolland, John, 128–153. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
Hagner, Donald A. 2012. "Another Look at "The Parting of the Ways" " In Earliest Christian History: History, Literature, and Theology. Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honor of Martin Hengel, edited by Bird, Michael F. and Maston, Jason, 381–427. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Reprinted as Essay 14 in D. A. Hagner, Jesus and Paul in the Context of Judaism and Early Christianity: Collected Essays, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2025.

"For all the considerable Jewishness of Christianity, describing it as a sect within Judaism cannot do it justice. As Hengel remarks, "even an illegitimate daughter has decisive features in common with her mother."(133) To speak of the parting of the ways, as is sometimes wrongly assumed, necessitates neither anachronistic "essentialism" nor triumphalist supersessionism. For paradoxically, the parting of the ways is itself the fulfillment of Israel's divine commission and thus the realization in part of Israel's hope. When the old man Simeon referred to the salvation which God has prepared in the presence of all peoples, he described it poignantly as "a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel" (Lk 2:30-32).

(133) "Early Christianity as a Jewish-Messianic, Universalistic Movement," 40. Although the two metaphors are usually understood as alternatives, Hengel finds both useful: "One might therefore express the relationship between Judaism and Christianity not only as one between mother and daughter but also as one between two siblings that have grown increasingly apart" (ibid., 34).

References

Hengel, M. "Early Christianity as a Jewish-Messianic, Universalistic Movement." Pages 1-41 in Conflicts and Challenges in Early Christianity. Edited by D. A. Hagner. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999.
Han, Jae Hee. 2025. "Histories from Contradiction: Introduction to the Twenty-Year Retrospective on The Ways That Never Parted." Studies in Late Antiquity no. 9:373–378.

Abstract: "This special issue of Studies in Late Antiquity emerged out of a 2023 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) panel on The Ways That Never Parted volume on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. Our goal in convening this panel was not to celebrate the considerable impact of The Ways That Never Parted nor was it to document its reception over the years. Rather, we aimed to index and assess how scholars today were responding to the provocations and challenges raised by The Ways That Never Parted. We tasked our panelists, which included the contributors to this issue, with offering a frank assessment of contemporary scholarship on “Jewish–Christian relations” and what they hoped to see in the futur."
Harrington, Daniel J. 2011. "The Gradual Emergence of the Church and the Parting of the Ways." In Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships, edited by Cunningham, Philip A., Sievers, Joseph, Boys, Mary, Henrix, Hans Hermann and Svartvik, Jesper, 92–104. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

"In this essay I want to explore three key moments in the parting of the ways in the New Testament: Christianity within Israel (Paul, with special attention to his letters to the Galatians and Romans), rivalry among Jewish groups (the Gospels of Matthew and John), and transcending historic Israel (the letters to the Colossians and the Ephesians). I am not suggesting that a definitive parting of the ways occurred in New Testament times.

Rather, my contention is that within these New Testament writings it is possible to discern different elements that led eventually to what has come to be known as the parting of the ways. My focus will be what these different moments meant for the development of christology and ecclesiology. I want to show how much these moments have done to shape the relationship between the church and the Jewish people through the centuries, with regard to both the ways taken and the ways not taken." (pp. 92-93)
Hartog, Paul. 2023. "The Early Christian Reception of Jewish Rituals During the “Parting of the Ways”." In Routledge Handbook of Jewish Ritual and Practice, edited by Leaman, Oliver, 540–557. New York: Routledge.

"In academic discourse, the “parting of the ways” refers to the process of earliest Christianity becoming a distinct movement, differentiated from its Jewish roots.(1) This process affected rituals, as early Christians both adapted existing Jewish rituals and formed their own distinctive rituals. This twofold nature of development (reception and differentiation) is reflected in numerous early Christian texts, but this essay will focus upon examples found in the Book of Acts, as further illustrated by materials in the so-called “Apostolic Fathers.”

The Book of Acts does not represent a comprehensive history of earliest Christianity, but rather serves as a highly selective rendition of the growth of the early Jesus movement (from roughly 30 to the early 60s CE).(2) In particular, Acts focuses upon the ministries of the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul. Peter was viewed as “the apostle to the circumcised” (Jews), and Paul as “the apostle to the uncircumcised” (Gentiles).(3) Initially, the disciples only proclaimed the Christian message to fellow Jews (Acts 11:19).4(4) Early on, both Jews and Gentiles conceived of the Jesus movement as a sectarian development within Judaism, and its adherents were known as followers of “the Way” and as “the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:5, 14, 22; 28:22).(5) Yet the Book of Acts also reflects tensions between the Jesus movement and its early Jewish framework." (p. 540)

(1) For recent studies of this complex topic, see Standhartinger 2020; Vogel 2020. For a seminal introduction, see Cohen 1954. Of course, both earliest Christianity and contemporaneous Judaism reflected diversity in belief and practice.

(2) On the relationship of Acts to history, see Hemer 1989.

(3) Gal. 2:7– 8.

(4) Cf. Matt. 10:5– 6; 15:24.

(5) English translations of scriptural texts come from the English Standard Version (ESV).

References

Cohen, Abraham. 1954. The Parting of the Ways: Judaism and the Rise of Christianity. London: Lincolns- Prager.

Hemer, Colin J. 1989. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Standhartinger, Angela. 2020. “‘Parting of the Ways’: Stationen einer Debatte,” Evangelische Theologie 80, no. 6: 406–17.

Vogel, Manuel. 2020. “Jüdisch versus christliche: ‘Parting of the Ways’ als Problem der Terminologie in Quellen- und Beschreibungssprache,” Evangelische Theologie 80, no. 6: 418– 31.
Heemstra, Marius. 2010. The Fiscus Judaicus and the Parting of the Ways. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

"In this study it will be my aim to describe the Roman influence on the process of separation between Judaism and Christianity that resulted in two distinct religions. In my view this influence reached its climax in the form of the fiscus Judaicus, which was the Roman financial institution designated by the emperor Vespasian in the early seventies of the first century CE to levy a tax on Jews in the Roman Empire. But who could be regarded as a Jew? Who was supposed to pay this tax? Not long after its introduction this became a major issue." (p. 1)

(...)

"In this study it will be my aim to fill this gap and investigate the connections between the Roman fiscus Judaicus, the Christian New Testament, some other early Christian writings and also Jewish (Talmudic) sources, focusing on the situation under the Roman emperor Domitian. It will be argued that new and important insights can be gained from investigating the actions of the fiscus Judaicus during Domitian’s reign and their possible impact on the early Christian communities in the Roman Empire.

Taking into account the fact that his successor Nerva thought it necessary to solve some kind of problem with respect to this fiscus, one should also try and find out what this solution meant for these same communities. Doing this may shed new light on a number of issues, some of which have been among the most important in the study of ancient history, early Jewish history and the study of the New Testament over the last few decades." (p. 3)
Heil, Christoph. 2024. "The Sayings Gospel Q and the Parting of the Ways." In Parting of the Ways: The Variegated Ways of Separations between Jews and Christians, edited by Tiwald, Markus and Öhler, Markus, 139–162. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.

Abstract: "Q – like Jesus – thinks and formulates completely within Judean categories. However, it is a still debated issue, where Q positions itself in the wide spectrum of Judean ways of life. To clarify this issue, the paper first looks at the problem of defining ancient Judean identity or better: possible Judean identities. In the main section, this will be applied to the Q document. Then the conclusions about Q’s relationship to Israel and its consequences for contemporary Christian-Jewish dialogue will be presented.

The Q community saw itself as the followers of the Son of Man and claimed to be the only legitimate guardian of the theological tradition of Israel. This by itself did not mean a parting with Judaism, but the possibility of doing so was given. The “Parting of the Ways” was a long and nonlinear process, and without explicitly driving it, Q already provided some early signposts."
Hengel, Martin, and Barrett, Charles Kingsley. 1999. "Early Christianity as a Jewish-Messianic, Universalistic Movement." In Conflicts and Challenges in Early Christianity, edited by Hagner, Donald A., 1–41. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International.

"I would like to summarize the results of the foregoing in the following points.

1. It is generally recognized that a knowledge of Judaism from this time period is essential to scholarship of the beginnings of Christianity and to the interpretation of the New Testament.

Furthermore, relating the beginnings of Christianity to the context of Jewish history of that period constitutes an essential enrichment that allows us better to understand the creative energy of Jewish thought at that time, for even an illegitimate daughter has decisive features in common with her mother.

2. Next to Josephus, Philo, Qumran, and the early rabbinic tradition, the New Testament could become the most important source for a knowledge of first-century Judaism. Viewed historically, it is the most important offspring of Judaism and, as I see it, represented one of several real possibilities within the development of Judaism in antiquity.

3. Jewish research interest should not limit itself to such an exceptional figure as Jesus of Nazareth but also include the corpus Paulinum, the Acts of the Apostles, the corpus Johanneum, indeed, cum grano salis, even the Gnostic texts and the Fathers of the second century up to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. Directly or indirectly, these texts illumine the conceptions and motives of contemporary Judaism; moreover, as Origen and Jerome show, the discussion between Jews and Christians continued even in later centuries.

4. This concerns not only comparative religious studies but also, in part, social and political history. Just as parts of the Gospels and Acts are more easily understood in light of Josephus, so can the former be a source of confirmation to the latter- at times correcting, at times supplementing, in any event so as to make a deeper understanding possible.

(...)

5. The goal of this mutual research of the sources should no longer be the apologetic definition and biased estimation of one's own position but the earnest understanding of classical texts of the other side, their authors and the events that they describe.

(...)" (pp. 40-41)
Himmelfarb, Martha. 1993. "The Parting of the Ways Reconsidered: Diversity in Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations in the Roman Empire: “A Jewish Perspective”." In Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians Through the Ages, edited by Fisher, Eugene J., 47–61. New York: Paulist Press.

"But what I would like to discuss here is not any specific claim in the standard scholarly view of how Judaism and Christianity ultimately separated from each other, but rather the assumption implicit in that view that from some time late in the first century we need no longer concern ourselves with diversity in Judaism, an assumption that has profound implications for our understanding of Jewish-Christian relations. A good example of the reigning view of Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple appears in an excellent recent discussion of early rabbinic attitudes toward Christianity. “. . . By the time Judaism and Christianity made their final break, it was the tannaitic(12) tradition which was almost completely representative of the Jewish community in Palestine and that segment of the Diaspora which remained loyal to its ancestral faith.”(13) Our author feels no need to demonstrate this claim; he takes it as obvious, as do many students of the history of Judaism.

But is it true? Were almost all (note our author’s good scholarly caution) of the Jews of Palestine and the diaspora rabbinic Jews during the period in which Christianity developed from a small Jewish group to the legal religion of the Roman Empire? The answer to this question, I believe, is an emphatic “no"." (p. 50)

(11) Birkat ha-minim and the letters: Reuven Kimelman, “Birkat Ha-Minim and the Lack of Evidence for an Anti-Christian Jewish Prayer in Late Antiquity,” in E. P. Sanders, ed., with A. I. Baumgarten and Alan Mendelson, Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: Vol. 2, Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981).

Origen: Selecta on Exodus 12:46 (Patrologia Graeca XII. 285-88), Homilies on Leviticus V.8 (Patrologia Graeca XII.459); and N. R. M. de Lange, Origen and the Jews: Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations in Third-Century Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1976), p. 86.

John Chrysostom: St. John Chrysostom: Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, tr. and ed., Paul W. Harkins (The Fathers of the Church 68: Baltimore: Catholic University of America, 1979); and Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley and London: University of California, 1983).

(12) The tannaim are the rabbis of the first and second centuries.
Horbury, William. 1992. "Jewish-Christian relations in Barnabas and Justin Martyr." In Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135, edited by Dunn, James D., 315–345. Grand Rapids (MI): Eerdmans.

"The following three points will serve to indicate the distinctive standpoint of this paper.

(1) Rabbinic Judaism cannot easily be equated with normative Judaism before the third century C.E., and even then only in Palestine. The reason for this is that it was not until the third century that a majority of the Jews of Palestine accepted the authority of the Rabbinate. Nevertheless Rabbinic Judaism must remain central to discussion of the parting of the ways even when we are talking of the first and second centuries, not because it represented normative Judaism then, but because it was the form of Judaism which ultimately triumphed and became normative Judaism. The forward-looking character of the question should always be borne in mind.

(2) It is simplistic to look for a decisive moment in the parting of the ways, a crucial doctrine or event that caused the final rupture. There was no sudden break between Christianity and Judaism, but rather an ever-widening rift. The War of 66-74 destroyed whatever existed of a centralized religious authority within Judaism and so removed the institutions which might have speedily and definitively resolved the problem of the status of Christianity. There were radical aspects to the Christian message which aroused opposition not only from the Pharisaic-Rabbinic party, but it was not inevitable that such radicalism should have led to a parting of the ways. History surely can provide examples of radical movements which have sucessfully transformed themselves into the dominant orthodoxy. In the power-vacuum created by the First Revolt the Rabbinic party and the Christians competed for the hearts and minds of Jewry.

The Rabbis emerged victorious. It was the gradual rabbinization of Palestinian Jewish society that pushed Christianity and Judaism ever further apart. (3) Jewish Christianity must be seen as playing a central role in the story of the parting of the ways. Jewish Christianity continued to represent Christianitywithin the Jewish community even after substantial parts of the Church had become Gentile. It blurred the boundaries and retarded the final separation. So long as Jewish Christianity remained a significant presence within the Palestinian Jewish community it is hard to talk of a final rupture. Rabbinic policy towards Christianity was aimed specifically at the Jewish Christians. It attempted successfully to keep them marginalized and to exclude them from Kelal Yisra'el. The story of the parting of the ways is in essence the story of the triumph of Rabbinism and of the failure of Jewish Christianity to convince a majority of Palestinian Jews of the claims of the Gospel." (p. 3)
Ipgrave, Michael. 2023. "Nicaea and Christian–Jewish Relations." The Ecumenical Review no. 75:235–248.

Abstract: "It is widely recognized that the Council of Nicaea marks a watershed in relations between Christians and Jews – both specifically the Ecumenical Council itself and also more generally the decades around and following 325. It was at this time that the separation between Christians and Jews, and between Christianity and Judaism, can be said to have reached a definitively final form, the conclusion of the long, drawn-out process referred to as the “parting of the ways.” Despite periods of co-existence and mutual enrichment, the history of Christian–Jewish relations has too often been marked by toxicity and tragedy. Christians have not only distinguished themselves from Jewish people but have treated them with disparagement, exclusion, and, at times, persecution; moreover, Christian anti-Judaism prepared the ground for a still more deadly secular antisemitism. Against this background, this article approaches the question of how to mark the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea in terms of its significance for Christian–Jewish relations in our own time."
Jackson-McCabe, Matt A. 2024. "Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles, and the “Parting of the Ways”." In The Oxford Handbook of Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles, edited by Gray, Patrick, 89–109. New York: Oxford University Press.

"The compilation of works attributed to the Jerusalem “Pillars” James, Peter, and John (cf. Gal 2:9) and Jude “the brother of James” (Jude 1:1) into a collection of Catholic Epistles, and its canonical juxtaposition with a text traditionally identified as a letter of Paul to the Hebrews, was the work of a group who identified itself, too, as “Catholic” (katholikē, i.e., universal). As it happens, this group was instrumental in the propagation of the notion of a Christianity distinct from Judaism (Jackson- McCabe 2020: 145– 55). Its developing canon, among other things, gave literary expression to the group’s basic historical claim: that the same Christianity that (they said) distinguished them fundamentally and essentially from Judaism had been there from the beginning, embodied already in the apostles and their writings. As some two centuries of critical scholarship have made clear, however, the historical significance of Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles becomes much more complicated when they are analyzed as individual works and through lenses other than those of this apologetic Christian historiography. Brief consideration of the social, cultural, and taxonomic dimensions of these texts can begin to illustrate the problems where “the parting of the ways” is concerned, even if it does not always lead to definitive conclusions." (p. pp. 89-90)

References

Jackson-McCabe, Matt (2020). Jewish Christianity: The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide. AYBRL. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Jacobs, Andrew S. 2008. "Jews and Christians." In The Oxford Handbok of Early Christian Studies, edited by Harvey, Susan Ashbrook and Hunter, David G., 169–185. New York: Oxford University Press.

"If any observation could be said to define the cultural, intellectual, and social contexts of late antiquity, it is that the various discourses of stability (‘Hellenism’, ‘imperium’, ‘Romanitas’) frequently masked deep-rooted and complex fluidities (Bowersock 1990; Cameron 1991; Ando 2000). The implications of this observation are slowly beginning to take hold in the study of Jews and Christians in this period, as much recent, engaging work on ancient Jews and Christians has moved to overcome facile assumptions of stable religious and inter-religious identities (S. J.D. Cohen 1999; Fonrobert 2000, 2001; Boyarin 2004). Even as we take seriously the desire of many ancient Christian and Jews for secure self-definition and differentiation from ‘others’, we must also understand these desires as a species of self-fashioning rhetoric: ‘true’ in the sense that they work materially to shape the worldview of Jews and Christians, even if they are not ‘factual’ in the sense that we directly recover from such historical remains an unmediated past." (p. 178)

References

Ando, C. (2000), Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Bowersock, G. (1990), Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Boyarin, D. (2004), Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Cameron, A. (1991), Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse, Sather Classical Lectures, 55 (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Cohen, S. J. D. (1999), The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Fonrobert, C. E. (2000), Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press).

__________ (2001), ‘The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Followers of Jesus’, JECS [Journal of Early Christian Studies] 9: 483–509.
———. 2025. "Jewish Studies, Christianity, and Even Paganism”:Disciplining the Ways That Never Parted." Studies in Late Antiquity no. 9:401–410.

Abstract: "On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The WaysThat Never Parted, I reflect on the ways that the original framers of the conference and volume contemplated not only convergence and divergence of ancient religions (Christians and Jews) but also modern academic disciplines: classical studies, Jewish studies, and early Christian studies. I ask to what extent these imagined convergences and divergences (ancient religions then, scholarly disciplines now) rely on unacknowledged Christian theological assumptions about religion, religions, and religious studies. One enduring legacy of The Ways That Never Parted is its invaluable work to chart a path out of this tangle of historical and historiographic homologies that we are still grappling with."

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