I’m working on the final chapters of a book for Baker Academic Press, An Early High Christology: Paul, the Lord Jesus and the Scriptures of Israel. It should come out in fall 2017. Along the way I’ve come across Daniel Boyarin’s book The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012). Boyarin is a well known Talmudic scholar, a professor at University of California, Berkley.
Boyarin makes a cogent case that for the first few centuries (AD or CE, if you prefer), the situation between Jews and Christians was complicated. There were Jewish Jesus-followers who kept kosher and non-Jewish Jesus-followers who did not. These seemed to exist more or less side-by-side in churches and synagogues up until the Council of Nicea (AD 325). In important ways this was a time before the parting of the ways had occurred, and Judaism and Christianity were not…
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