Beyond Jewish Christianity: Ancient Social Taxonomies and the Christianity-Judaism Divide

This concluding chapter demonstrates how one can get around the problems created by Jewish Christianity by approaching the question of the origins of Christianity and the Christianity–Judaism division as a study in the production and dissemination of ancient social taxonomies. The central question from this perspective is neither the similarities and differences in culture nor even the social interaction among ancient Christians and Jews, but how early Jesus groups imagined themselves and their characteristic cultures in relation to Judeans and theirs. At what point did some Jesus groups begin to assert that Judeans and their distinguishing culture were, per se, “other” and to reify that difference by postulating a distinction between Christianism and Judaism? Whatever its various social consequences, how widespread was this taxonomy before its imperial adoption in the centuries after Constantine? Through an examination of a few exemplary cases, a significant distinction can be observed well into late antiquity between Jesus groups who made sense of their social experience with reference to such a notion of Christianism and those who did not; between those who came to differentiate a new “us” from the Judeans and the Nations alike, and those for whom Judeans and the Nations remained the primary division.

Apostolic vs. Judaizing Jewish Christianity: The Reclamation of Apostolic Authority in Post-Baur Scholarship

This chapter shows how Ferdinand Christian Baur's more traditionally minded critics, in an effort to turn back his assault on apostolic and canonical authority, combined the disparate models of John Toland and Baur into new and more complex taxonomies of Jewish Christianity. This resulted in the notorious problems of definition and terminology that have plagued the category ever since. Underlying the varying details of these new accounts of Jewish Christianity was a common counternarrative that restored the integrity and authority traditionally accorded to the apostolic and canonical spheres by revising Baur's theory at two critical junctures. First, the apostles, while superficially similar to Paul's “Judaizing” opponents in outward practice, were said to have been aligned with Paul, not with those opponents, in essential religious principle. Second, the “Judaizers” were said to have quickly become a nonfactor in the development of the early Catholic Church and thus to have had virtually no meaningful influence on the New Testament.

The Legacy of Christian Apologetics in Post-Holocaust Scholarship: Jean Daniélou, Marcel Simon, and the Problem of Definition

This chapter examines central developments in the study of Jewish Christianity in the post-Holocaust era. It explores how Christian apologetic assumptions—and the interpretive problems they generate—continued to shape discussions of Jewish Christianity, and treatments of Jewish and Christian antiquity more generally, even as Christian theology became increasingly marginalized in critical scholarship. The tone was set when French scholars Marcel Simon and Jean Daniélou produced their own fresh analyses of Jewish Christianity—each, however, based on fundamentally different definitions. Simon defined it strictly with reference to Torah observance. Daniélou's iteration, on the other hand, was formulated along the lines of what Albrecht Ritschl had called judaistisches Christenthum: “the expression of Christianity in the thought-forms of Later Judaism.” Over the next half-century, analyses of Jewish Christianity coalesced largely around one or the other of these two approaches.