Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, A.D. 70 to 135.

• Author: Feldman, Louis H.

This collection of thirteen papers delivered at the University of Durham commemorates the centenary of the death of the Bishop of Durham, Joseph B. Lightfoot, who, in his famous debates with F. C. Baur, agreed that the most important issue in the history of early Christianity was how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism, severed itself as a new religion. In his preface the editor notes that Baur and Lightfoot disagreed on three major issues: whereas Baur saw the relation between Judaism and Christianity as between Jewish particularism and Christian universalism, Lightfoot stressed the Christological particularity in earliest Christianity. Secondly, whereas Baur concluded that the struggle between Pauline and Petrine Christianity did not come to a resolution until the latter part of the second century, Lightfoot insisted that the essentials of Christianity were established by Paul within the first two generations of Christianity. Thirdly, Baur, beginning with the undisputed Pauline letters, extrapolated them to the whole history of Christian beginnings, whereas Lightfoot asked how the words would have been understood, given the usage of the time. The present collection goes far toward examining these issues but, in the end, to the great credit of the contributors, the matters remain sub iudice.

Philip S. Alexander, "`The Parting of the Ways' from the Perspective of Rabbinic Judaism" (pp. 1-25), concludes that we may have to date the parting of the ways much later than the Bar Kochba period because the rabbis continued thereafter to interact with Jewish-Christian Minim. The parting does not really occur until the triumph of rabbinism, which did not take place until the third century. But, we may remark, there is considerable doubt that the word minim refers to Jewish-Christians or, at any rate, refers to them exclusively. The very fact that the Tosefta (Yadayim 2:13 and Shabbath 13 [14]:5) refers to the Gospels (gilyonim) and the books of the Minim would argue against such an identification, since if Minim were Christians the text should have read "the other books of the Minim." Moreover, to delay until the third century the date when the rabbis triumphed is questionable, especially since the greatest opponents of the rabbis, the Sadducees, disappear with the destruction of the Temple in 70.

Martin Goodman, "Diaspora Reactions to the Destruction of the Temple" (pp. 27-38), notes that it is no accident that a clear distinction between Jews and Christians begins regularly to appear in pagan Roman texts, beginning with the letters of Pliny the Younger (10.96) after 96; if...