Partings Never and Pretend

The editors of The Ways That Never Parted made an understandable choice to omit the problem of Christian origins from its reassessment of Jewish-Christian relations. This essay aims to demonstrate how subsequent developments in the fields of New Testament and ancient Mediterranean religion have rendered the first two centuries more amenable to the sort of approaches and insights the volume encouraged. It first makes a case for localizing the discursive dynamics of interest to several The Ways That Never Parted contributors to a specific social context: competition among self-authorized religious experts, including Paul and his “Judean” rivals but equally later self-identifying Christians. It then takes the profound reconfiguration of Paul’s relationship to Judaism in the last three decades as an impetus to reexamine the vilification of Ioudaioi in other New Testament sources seemingly written with knowledge of his letters. Because parting of the ways scholarship tended to attribute Christianity’s divergence from Judaism to some inflection point (e.g., the Judean War), it has fallen out of fashion with the paradigm to connect these elements to a specific event or historical climate. And yet, whatever the character and diversity of Jewish–Christian relations prior to the fourth century, depictions of Ioudaioi as persecutors in the Gospels and Acts remain an explanandum. Evaluating these images not as evidence of a fissure between two religious groups but as strategic acts of differentiation among individuals claiming a common form of expertise changes entirely their scope and consequence. It also invites reconsideration of what sociohistorical pressures might have made this strategy expedient.