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The “Parting of the Ways” between Judaism and Christianity

Introduction

When, how, and why did the Jesus movement — a small Jewish group born and nourished within a first-century Jewish matrix — come to be Christianity — that defined itself as separate from, and even in opposition to, Judaism? Our conversation will focus on the ways that historians and theologians responded to this question from the mid-19th century to the present. I will suggest that these responses were shaped by two factors: theories and ideas that circulated in the scholars’ own eras; and the views about Jews and Judaism in predominantly Christian societies. Among the theories to be discussed are: the Great Man theory (mid-19^th century); evolutionary theory (late 19^th century); Holocaust theory (post-1945), and postmodernism (late 20^th century to the present.

Dr. Adele Reinhartz is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. Adele served as the General Editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature from 2012-2019 and as the President of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2020. She will serve as President of the Society of New Testament Studies in 2026-27. Adele was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2005, and into the American Academy for Jewish Research in 2014. In 2021 she won the Konrad Adenauer Prize, awarded to one Canadian annually by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and in 2025 she received the Eternal Light Award for her contribution to Catholic-Jewish relations. Her most recent books are The Bible and Cinema: An Introduction (2^nd edition, 2022), and Jousting with John: Essays on Jews, Gender, and Ethics in the Fourth Gospel (2025). Her new book, Theories, Models, and Metaphors in the Historiography of Christian Origins, will appear in spring 2026.

Texts – John 8:31-59 and all of John 9

Transcript

Shirley Paulson

Welcome everybody to the March 2026 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m really happy to tell you that our guest speaker has come to us this evening by special request. One of you has asked us to have someone explain what happened or how it happened when Christianity began to emerge from its Jewish origins. I thought that was a great question. So we have found the perfect guest for us tonight. Dr. Adele Reinhartz is coming to speak to us about the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity. Dr. Reinhardtz is a professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. She specializes in the history and literature of Christianity and Judaism in the Gospel of John, early Jewish-Christian relations, feminist literary criticism, and the impact of the Bible on popular cinema and television. So I’m so grateful for you to come and talk with us today.

Anyway, several times we’ve heard this question about what was going on in the first centuries after Jesus that resulted in the separation of Judaism and Christianity. And I have found that you are the perfect person to help us with this. So what I love about your work is that you can help us discern attitudes and opinions that we may not even have noticed in ourselves. And I’m eager to hear your thoughts about this. So let’s get going with this. I’m wondering if you could just start us off with some facts that would set the stage for this discussion. There are some specific questions that our participants have asked that might help us get going. So first of all, welcome, and then we’ll get going.

Adele Reinhartz

I’m very happy to be here and eager to talk about this with all of you.

Shirley

Thank you so much. All right. So the first question is then, in maybe the first century or so, was there a scriptural canon for Jews before Christians established their own canon? That’s the first question we have for you.

Adele

Okay. That’s a good question and maybe a bit more complicated than we might think. In the first century, there were already texts that were considered authoritative. So we have the Torah—the five Books of Moses were already considered authoritative—and the works of the prophets. We know that there were other writings that were floating around that became included in the Jewish scriptures, but there wasn’t a formal kind of scriptural canon as such. There were texts that were considered authoritative for all kinds of purposes, but we didn’t have yet the Old Testament or the New Testament or a continuous kind of document that had been sanctioned by all kinds of communities. There was still a matter of some debate around some of the books that made it into the canon of Jewish scripture. And that was a process that was still going on in the first century into the second century, probably. But there were books that were considered authoritative. So as I said, the five books of Moses in particular, those were considered to have been given by God directly to Moses on Mount Sinai and the books of the prophets as well.

Shirley

That’s interesting. So you’re not going to give me a yes or no, so that’s helpful to know.

Adele

But I’m not going to give you a yes or no about anything.

Shirley

That’s why we need scholars in this conversation. That’s right. Okay. So then the second question, maybe similar here, but around the same time, would you have said that there was such a thing as rabbinical authority the way we know it today?

Adele

Probably not yet. The earliest works that we call rabbinic stem from the early third century. The traditions that made it into those works already existed. According to Jewish tradition, rabbis were already around in the first century, rabbis whose words were authoritative. But historically speaking, there was not yet this kind of rabbinic tradition as such. That came about a bit later.

Shirley

So was it possible for Jesus to have been called a rabbi or thought of as a rabbi?

Adele

Well, I mean, the word “rabbi” just means “teacher,” my teacher. “Rav” means “teacher.” Rabbi Rabi in Hebrew means “my teacher.” And we certainly have evidence in the gospels that he was called that. But it doesn’t mean rabbi in the formal sense that we start having later. And I should mention maybe some people on the screen here might be interested to know that a rabbi, a Jewish rabbi, and a Christian minister, these are not exactly equivalent categories. So the essential task of a rabbi is to be a teacher. And so we have it used as an honorific in the time of Jesus, but not as a kind of somebody that went through a rabbinical seminary and got ordained and has a congregation. It’s not like that.

Shirley

Okay. That’s really helpful. And then similarly, to get some background here, is there something that you could say about the impact of the Christian evolution on Judaism, or is that what we’re going to be talking about in the discussion of modern perceptions?

Adele

Well, this is a matter of some discussion amongst scholars as to whether Christianity as it developed, which is much later than the first century, had an impact on the development of Judaism. And probably we can say that there was a reaction of Jews to Christianity that we can document maybe as early as the middle of the third century, but certainly by the time we get to rabbinic writings from the fifth century and beyond. But in the first century, we can’t really document that.

When we look at all this material, we might think if we’re just basing ourselves, let’s say on the New Testament, that we have a whole bunch of believers in Christ and we have hundreds and thousands of Jews who are hearing about Jesus and deciding whether or not they’re going to go along with this. But if we think about it realistically, that might not have been the image at all. For example, some early churches were house churches. How big were those houses? How many people could fit inside? We’re not talking about a McMansion or anything like that. We’re talking about small communities. And then if we’re also thinking from the Jewish perspective, the fact that we have no references to Jesus in first-century Jewish sources makes me think that there weren’t that many Jews actually who were aware of him, who responded or didn’t respond to him.

So we’re not really talking about necessarily a huge impact in the first century. Later on, yes. And later on, it’s as much a matter of political power. Once the Roman Empire became Christian, once Christianity became the main religion in the Roman Empire, like in the late fourth century, then you start having Jewish responses because there was a political impact on Jewish communities. But before that time, there really isn’t that much that we can document as far as impact on Judaism or even knowledge among Jews about this movement.

Shirley

That’s so fascinating because that certainly does change the picture of Christianity coming out of the sky the day Jesus was born with the great big movement. So that’s a very, very different kind of picture. That kind of leads us then, I think, to thinking about maybe you could describe the basic narrative of Christian origins that people generally believe.

Adele

Well, it depends on which people you’re talking about. So we’re talking about ancient people. Let’s talk about ancient people, church fathers, let’s say second, third, and fourth centuries. This is a narrative that they wrote about anyway, that Jesus was born Jewish. He came to preach to Jews. Jews didn’t buy it. So then he reached out to Gentiles. Gentiles bought it, and then God turned God’s attention from Jews to Gentiles. God removed God’s favor from Jews to Gentiles, and that’s how Christianity came to be. So this is what you find in the church fathers. I don’t know that there are a lot of people today that would believe that particular narrative. And in that narrative was also embedded the idea that God meant it to be this way anyway, because everything was foreordained.

So today it’s difficult to say because this whole question of how Christian origins and the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity is being rethought, and there are all kinds of different narratives. So it’s hard to generalize as to what people really believe. But until, I would say the late 20th century, so until about 30 or so years ago, the dominant narrative was that a break occurred sometime between the year 70, which was around the time of the first Jewish revolt against Rome and when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed, sometime between that revolt and the second revolt, which was in 132. So sometime in those 50 years is when the break happened. And depending on which scholar you read, most thought it happened for theological reasons. One of the theological reasons being the interpretation of scripture.

So there’s a huge difference that still exists today between Christian interpretation of the Pentateuch, the Torah, and Jewish interpretation. For Christians, the Jewish scriptures, especially the Torah and the prophets, prophesy the coming of Jesus.

That’s the Christian perspective on it. And you find that in the New Testament, and you find that in Christian theology today. From a Jewish perspective, that’s not how Jews read those texts. And so there were quite a few scholars in the latter part of the 20th century when scholarship was really turning to this question of the parting of the ways who said that that was the key thing, that you had two radically different and really unreconcilable ways of interpreting the same scriptural texts. And that was one of the reasons for the split. And the other reason that was said at that time, which I think many people still would agree with, is that for Jews, the idea that an individual would be both human and divine and the Messiah was not plausible. Whereas, of course, for Christians, that’s the essential thing. So these were two theological foundations for arguing that by the time we get to the late first century after 70, we already have these differences solidifying.

All of these narratives are contested, but one thing that we really have to always keep in mind does have to do with the Gentile nature of early Christianity—that from a very early point, we see this from the letters of Paul, for example, but we also know it from other sources as well. From a very early point, the majority of believers in Christ were from a polytheistic pagan background and not from a Jewish background. And that also, the way that I see it, that was really the major factor in dividing these communities because Christianity became primarily a Gentile community.

Shirley

That’s really helpful. Thank you for explaining that. I know that you participated in a lecture series a couple of years ago entitled “Separation Anxieties, Judaism and the Creation of Christianity.” Could you explain what that anxiety is that you were talking about?

Adele

I think anxiety works on a number of different levels. First of all, it’s the anxiety of scholars that are trying to figure out what exactly happened, given that we don’t actually have any sources that tell us what happened. It would be great if we could find a source from, let’s say, the late first century or early second century and say, “These are the economic factors, these are the cultural factors, these are the political factors, et cetera, et cetera, but we don’t have such sources.” And yet it seems very important. I think the fact that you have a group of people here that are interested in talking about it demonstrates that. But the other anxiety is the anxiety that we see in Christian sources about really, how do we think about Jews and Judaism? How should we, as … I mean, I’m not a Christian, but thinking about those ancient sources, how do we, as believers in Christ and promoters of belief in Christ, what is our stance towards Judaism? And I think that that creates a certain anxiety. Just about every narrative of Christian origins, ancient or modern, has to have a place for Jews in it or the beliefs that Jews have to have some sort of role in the narrative. And so what that role is, is something that I think Christian writers have been struggling with from the beginning to the present.

Shirley

The way you’re talking here, I can see how the anxiety would have to do with, if I don’t know who the Jews are, I don’t really know who I am since we’re so connected in some way.

Adele

That’s one element of it. And I think that’s what we see today when we recognize that Jesus was Jewish and that Christianity became in a Jewish matrix. But in the ancient world, and until really the modern period, that’s not how it was seen. It was more seen like, what did Jews do to drive Christianity away? Or because the gospels are so rooted in Judaism, whatever narrative is proposed has to deal with that in some sense because for the very early period, we only have those sources for the time of Jesus and so on. For the first century, we only have those sources. So it’s not only a matter of who we are, given that Judaism was so influential in our origins, let’s say. It’s not only a matter of that. For the ancient authors, it was more a matter of why did they reject this message? What do we do about them now? How do we think about them? How do we accommodate Jews in our theology? And there were different ways that Christian writers did that.

Shirley

And of course, Christians claim as their own the Torah.

Adele

Christians claim as their own the Jewish scriptures, which they read in a different way.

Shirley

So in your lectures, you presented a few new theories for the separation of the Jesus movement from the matrix of early Judaism, which account for the origins of Christianity. We may have time to think about two of them, I think, today. The first one you called the Great Man Theory of Christian Origins, which I think is a great title. So how does that theory work, the great man theory?

Adele

Okay. So first of all, I should clarify that these are not theories that I’m proposing.

Shirley

Okay.

Adele

This is part of a study that I’ve just completed, and it’ll be out in about six weeks, I guess, on the historiography. How have people told the story? So it’s not that I’m proposing these theories as my own theories. That’s not at all what I’m doing. What I’m doing is looking at how scholars, historians, and theologians in the 19th century and in the 20th century into the 21st century—how have they tried to understand the story of Christian origins?

And my basic argument is that the way in which we as scholars understand ancient things is influenced by our own context, by the ideas in our own context. So the great man theory—we first start seeing it in the middle of the 19th century, and this was around the time that there’s a Scottish thinker named Thomas Carlyle, some of you may have heard of. So he proposed a comprehensive theory of human history, and his theory was that human history was moved forward by great men, great men, and that without those great men, history wouldn’t have taken the shape that it does. So based on that theory, and so this was a comprehensive theory. For him, for Carlisle, Jesus was the greatest man of all, but he didn’t really explore that. Instead, though, theologians from the middle of the 19th century—really, this is still a concept that exists today—started arguing about whether Jesus was the great man who founded Christianity or Paul.

Shirley

Okay. 

Adele

So this was really because they ran with the great man theory. And the comparison I always make is that we might today talk about the Oedipus complex and about the ego and things like that. Because of Freudian psychoanalysis and Freudian theory, we can use those concepts, and we might understand certain phenomena by those concepts, even if we’ve never read Freud. These are ideas that are in the air, and we use them to understand certain things. And so in the same way in the 19th century, the great man theory was huge. It was absolutely huge. And so people started using that as a way of trying to understand all kinds of things, including Christian origins. And so there you have … So Jesus was seen as the founder by some. Paul was seen as the founder by others. There were some who said, “Okay, it was both Jesus and Paul.” And then they tried to figure out, did Paul distort Jesus’s ideas, or did Paul further Jesus’s ideas? And then we still have a book that came out just a couple of years ago, still debating whether Jesus or Paul was the real founder of Christianity. Now there’s a problem with that theory, which is that actually neither of them was a founder of Christianity, historically speaking, because Christianity as a thing, as a church, as a comprehensive sort of theological perspective didn’t yet exist in the time of Jesus and Paul.

Shirley

Yeah. And so the idea of great men also sounds like they could be greater than Moses or something. Is that the idea that they were great, and then we have supersession going on?

Adele

Well, we have supersessionism going on all the way down. It’s everywhere. And some Christian theologians would argue that supersessionism, which is the belief that the Jews were God’s people, but then they were superseded as God’s people once Jesus came along, is supersessionism. And that’s really kind of hardwired into Christianity as the second revelation, as the New Testament, as … I’m not saying that all Christians have this view by any means.

I’m just saying that from a theological perspective, it’s kind of hardwired into Christianity. Now, the great man theory in itself didn’t require that because for somebody like Carlyle, of course, he thought that Jesus was the greatest of great men, but all Carlyle was trying to do was show that all of human history was moved forward by the activities of great men. We don’t see things that way now, right? We look at political forces, geopolitical forces, and economic forces. We understand human history as being affected by lots and lots of things, including certain individuals for sure, but those individuals themselves are products of a certain culture and a certain history and a certain society.

Shirley

And of course, the men would be the ones who would be the great ones. I get that too. Okay.

Adele

Yes, that’s right. The concept of a great woman did not exist in the middle of the 19th century.

Shirley

And so one of the other theories you presented, you’d called it natural succession. What does that mean, and how does that work then?

Adele

Okay. So that’s another one. So for that one, I argue for the influence of Darwin and evolutionary biology. So this for me was a huge amount of fun to learn about. All these things brought me into areas very far from my own, so I really learned a lot in this. But basically, Darwin wasn’t the first evolutionary biologist, but we associate evolutionary biology with him, and he published his On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man not much later than Carlyle, but we see that his influence on Christian theologians and historians—we start seeing that really strongly towards the end of the 19th century, where you start having all kinds of books called The Evolution of Christianity, and they talked about the ways in which Christianity developed out of Judaism. And for some of them, it meant it developed away from Judaism. It started with Judaism, but then it developed away from Judaism, getting better and better and better all the time and being far superior to Judaism.

Here’s where we have supersessionism again. And some said, “Well, no, the Jewish influence on Christianity really continued all the way along.” But that’s what I mean by natural succession. So we start having books on the evolution of Christianity that refer really directly to Darwin’s theories and marry it, marry evolutionary theories, which is the idea that through the survival of the fittest, that you end up having adaptations of species that are improvements on the previous versions.

And so once that was applied to Christian theology, the claim was made that Christianity is kind of the perfection of human evolution. And so it started with Judaism but then adapted and adapted and adapted to become this superior form. And so that led to, as I said, books on the evolution of Christianity, but also on the use of mother-daughter language. This I found really interesting as well, that you have Christianity being described as the daughter of Judaism. So you have mother-daughter language. And what’s interesting about that is that that also implied a kind of narrative. So you have a mother who gives birth to a child, a daughter; she grows up and moves away from the mother. That’s how life works, right? We’ve all experienced this easily, either as children or as mothers or as both. And then as the daughter grows up, according to this metaphor, the mother gets old and dies.

And so from that, that led, along with being bolstered by certain types of readings of the letters of Paul, to a view of Judaism as kind of withering away once Christianity was born. And the problem was that Judaism didn’t disappear. I mean, this was always the problem: that according to these old narratives, Judaism should have disappeared, but it didn’t. Jews are still around.

So in any case, that’s the natural succession, the impact of evolutionary biology on the narratives of Christian origins.

Shirley

This is so helpful. I really appreciate you showing, especially having two different theories that we can understand. Oh yeah, I can see how you’d see it that way, but there’s a problem and so forth. But now that you’ve awakened us to some of the subtle ways that these things may have influenced our own thinking about the origins of Christianity, can you, in a nutshell, kind of give us a clearer picture as to what did happen? How did it happen?

Adele

The problem is that we have certain sources, but we always have to read between the lines because those sources don’t answer our questions. Or if they do, we can see how they’re influenced by other factors. So we don’t really know. So I’ll just tell you what it is: the kind of consensus that scholars are coming to is that there was no one process of the parting of the ways. So you can’t really date it to between 70 and 132, as they tried to in the late 20th century. It probably was more or less complete by the fourth century, by the time Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, but it was a very long process, and it took place in different ways in different places.

Because the Roman Empire was huge, absolutely huge. We might not realize it today, but it extended up to Northern England and all around the known world that we consider Europe and beyond today. So the process would’ve taken place in different places in different ways and in different timeframes. And so the way to approach it is really to look at one place and see what evidence we have for that place as to relationships between Jews and Christians and also at institutional developments and things like that. Now, I would want to say one thing: now there are many scholars who would say, “Well, Jews and Christians continue to talk to each other and continue to have social contact with each other, economic contact, all kinds of contact. So we can’t talk about a parting of the ways at all in the ancient world.

I would say to that, if social contact is the criterion that we’ve never had a parting of the ways, there’s always been social contact. Here we are in this virtual room as an example of social contact. And many of us in our everyday lives, we don’t even think about it. We’ve got contact with all kinds of different people, but it doesn’t mean that we’re all just one thing. We have our own identities, we have our own communities, and we have our own affiliations. And I think it was always that way throughout history—that we could and did; people did have contact across these sorts of boundaries for all sorts of reasons. So I mean, I do think that we need to see it as a long and drawn-out process that took place in different ways in different places, but it is a process that did eventually result in a Jewish community and a Christian community, with all of the variations that we know within our own communities as well.

Shirley

Well, you have raised so many more questions. I would love to talk to you in another two hours about this, but we don’t have time for that. But I think you’ve done a really helpful job in helping us recognize the gradual movement of this and the fact that there’s no one answer to the question and that we need to be aware of many, many more facets of this picture, which is why it would be such a fascinating conversation. So right now, we’re just about ready to let everybody else join this conversation. And so I want to take a moment to remind you why your participation as a Bible and Beyond supporter and Patreon supporter is so helpful to us because everybody who contributes helps everybody else. With your support, we’re able to offer more for the public and for you. In other words, everybody is thanking everybody else for your support.

And one last thing I wanted to mention to you is that we’ve just added a new feature where you’re able to make your donation annually with a 10% discount now if you prefer. So you can go to patreon.com/bibleandbeyond to either sign up for a monthly process or an annual one, and you can make your change if you want to. So whatever you’re doing, thank you. That’s my main message. So we’re opening up to questions now, and I see some hands up already. So we will get started with… Maureen, you go first.

Maureen

I confess, I might not have heard what you said exactly, right? And I apologize if I kind of zoned out, but it seemed like in the very beginning you were saying that there was not a Jewish … In other words, the Hebrew scriptures—they’re not collected in one batch, or it sounded like you were saying some of the things didn’t happen until after Jesus was gone, but maybe I misheard.

Adele

Okay. So yeah, let me just clarify that. We had books that were considered divinely given or divinely inspired. Divinely given, that would be the five books of Moses, the Torah. Divinely inspired would be the books of the prophets, let’s say. Those books existed, and they had authority, but there was still … It wasn’t like you could pick up one book that had the Hebrew Bible with all of the different pieces that we have now. And that was the same in Christianity too. The development of a canon of scripture is actually a very long process. And the books that are included in the canon are included because they were already considered authoritative. So that’s really what I was saying, that there were books that were considered authoritative and therefore later became included in the canon. It’s the same with the gospels: we’ve got dozens of gospels, but there are only certain ones that became considered authoritative by enough Christian communities to then be included in the canon.

Maureen

I was basically thinking, what could Jesus have been referring to in his teaching and preaching?

Adele

Well, he knew those … He would’ve known.

Maureen

Got it.

Adele

We’ve got stories of Jesus being in the synagogue and even reading in the synagogue. So let’s say if we imagine Jesus, I like to do this. I like to imagine Jesus as a Jewish guy in the first century, doing the things that Jewish guys did in the first century. And one of the things that we think they did was that they went to synagogue and they read the Torah. They were familiar with the Torah. They would’ve been educated in that way. And so yes, he would’ve known that.

Maureen

Okay. Thank you. That cleared it up.

Shirley

Thank you, Maureen. Okay. Honor, you’re next. Go ahead.

Honor

Well, when I was reading the passages in John that were part of the preparation here, something occurred to me more forcefully than it has yet. And that is Jesus is very argumentative. He says very impolite and unkind things to the Jewish people whom he’s addressing. And when you read it all together like that, it looks very antagonistic. And it almost … I mean, he says, “This is why you’re trying to kill me.” Well, where did he come up with that? And it doesn’t seem to square with other things in the other canonical gospels because there he’ll do something very high profile like healing someone, and he says, “Keep it quiet. Don’t tell anybody.” Like he’s trying to be under the radar, but then we get into these parts in John, and he’s baiting them almost. Do you think that that is somebody, whoever wrote John writing that to try to explain or maybe to start a split?

Adele

That’s exactly what I think. Thank you.

Honor

Okay.

Adele

I’ll just expand on that a little bit, but that is exactly my perspective—that I think it’s true for all the gospels. The gospels were written. We need to remember that the gospels were written 40 to 60, maybe even 80, years after Jesus’ death. So they’re based on earlier traditions, but they also reflect the perspectives of their own time. Just as I said earlier, 19th-century theologians were affected by what was going on at their time, and that the same is true of the gospel writers telling their stories, telling the story of Jesus in ways that would’ve appealed or been important in their view for people at the end of the first century. So my view as a scholar of the Gospel of John, which is my main area of expertise, is that everything that Jesus says in the Gospel of John has been scripted for him by whoever it was that wrote the Gospel of John.

And whoever the evangelist was had certain aims in mind. I think that one of those aims was to begin to drive a wedge between Jews and Christ confessors. And so he puts this very antagonistic relationship at the core of his portrayal of Jesus. Now, in other gospels, if you think about Matthew, for example, Matthew has Jesus getting into arguments all the time with the Pharisees, but you don’t have them labeled as the Jews in the way that you do in the gospel of John. In John, it seems like Jesus is always argumentative with the Jews, and that’s the term in Greek when you translate it into English. That term for the Jews, “Ioudaioi” in Greek, appears 70 times in the Gospel of John, more than the rest of the New Testament put together. So yes, I think that all of that is scripted by whoever it was that wrote the Gospel of John for his own reasons.

Shirley

Thank you for sharing that nice question, Honor. We’re going to go to Leanne, and I want to say before Leanne starts to speak that Leanne is the one who raised this question that brought you to us, Adele. So here goes, Leanne.

Leanne

Hi, Adele. Thank you so much. This has been very informative and really gives me a lot more to think about in relation to all of this. But before I ask my question, because it kind of ties into it, in the chat, PG asked a question about whether the destruction of the temple was what instigated the canonization process for the Jewish scripture.

Adele

Oh, for Jewish scriptures.

Well, I think it would have had something to do with it. I mean, within Jewish studies, a lot is contested as well. A lot of the narratives, the things that I would have learned as a child, and even my university studies in Jewish studies are now being contested. And one of the things that is up for grabs now has to do with what exactly was the impact of the destruction of the temple. The way that I was taught before is that that changed everything because with the destruction of the temple, you don’t have the sacrificial system anymore. So Jews had to find a new way of understanding themselves as a religious community. And so the Pharisees are the ones who became dominant because they had modes of interpretation of scripture, and that would also have led to a need for a canonized scripture. So maybe that was part of it.

It’s very hard to know. We know in the Talmud, which is the main work of rabbinic literature, the Talmud was written down at the beginning, probably again; it’s contested, right? But we normally say the beginning of the sixth century, but in the Talmud, it tells stories of the canonization of scripture and the development of Jewish liturgy and all kinds of other things and backdates that to the end of the first century, but we don’t know if that’s historically true or not. I think you generally have a process of canonization once you have a community spread over a large geographical area and you want to find or figure out ways to create continuity and community over a large geographical area. I think that’s what happened in early Christianity, and I think that had a role in the canonization process in Judaism as well.

Shirley

That’s a fascinating answer.

Leanne

So my question that kind of went off of that was, did you see in the Jewish communities in the early centuries there the same kind of diversity of thought that you see in the Christian communities and the early Christian texts, and are there a lot of, as we call the extracanonicals of Christian literature or scripture, or whatever you want to call that, is there a comparable set of that for Judaism?

Adele

Yes, absolutely. Even in the first century or before the common era, and we know this, of course, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls really forced Jewish study scholars to really grapple with the diversity of early Judaism. And we’ve got lots of other texts as well. There are dozens and dozens of texts, and they’re collected in collections of what we call apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. Now they’re called, I don’t know, now they’re called early Jewish writings, but we used to call them apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. Pseudepigrapha are texts that are written in the name of other people that didn’t actually write them.

But in any case, there are dozens and dozens of these texts from before the common era and all the way through. And it’s the same even once we get into the common era after the time of Jesus—really huge, huge diversity. And one of the main locations of that diversity was, for example, in Egypt, where we have Hellenistic Judaism. So these were Jews who had set up communities centuries before Jesus. They were Greek-speaking Jews. And one of the things that they did was they translated the Torah and other Hebrew documents that became canonical. They translated them into Greek. And we see in the Hellenistic Jewish writers, the Jewish writers writing in Greek at this time, a debate as to whether the Greek translation of the scriptures was as authoritative as the original Hebrew. And they said, yes, of course it was. So yeah, tons of diversity.

Shirley

That’s a wonderful question, Leanne, and answer because I think it helps us to understand more that it wasn’t Judaism versus Christianity when you have so much diversity going on in both. That’s a really, really helpful question. All right. So moving on to Pats. Go ahead, Pat.

Pat

Yes. It seems like the most egregious example of antisemitism to us modern people is the Nazis. Were the Nazis really pursuing a great man or natural succession theory or what was the … I know they had some alleged Christian support for their views. What was it?

Adele

Well, I’m not an expert on … I should say my parents were Holocaust survivors, so I feel very personally invested in that whole history, but you can’t explain Nazism by their views about Christianity. I mean, I think that the history of Christian antisemitism had a role in preparing Europeans or Germans for accepting antisemitism, but the Nazi program—the Nazis themselves were quite anti-Christian, and there were Christian churches that devoted themselves to kind of cozying up to the Nazis for political protection, basically. There’s a really good book that I would recommend if you’re interested in this. It came out about 20 years ago, written by Susannah Heschel, called The Aryan Jesus, A-R-Y-A-N. And she focuses on this institute that was in Yena, which was the Institute for the Study and the Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Society or something like that. And there were prominent Christian theologians who were involved in the Nazi program and tried to argue from a historical perspective that actually Jesus wasn’t Jewish. So they argued that actually that Galilee was populated by Gentiles, and so Jesus was a perfect Aryan to remove him completely from a Jewish perspective. They also promoted their own translation of the New Testament, which featured the Gospel of John, precisely because of what we’ve already talked about, because of the way in which the Gospel of John has Jesus arguing against the Jews.

So I’m not sure … I think that the Nazis operated with a great man theory, but their great man was Hitler, who was presented in Messianic terms and very much drew on that 19th-century notion of a great man who would somehow impose his vision on the entire world. So that’s what they were promoting, not really the kinds of theories that we’ve already talked about.

Shirley

What I like about that question, Pat, is you’re bringing up that each era keeps on having their own reactions to this, and they have their own context from which to look at the question. We have different answers because of where we live and where we come from. And I really appreciate that, Pat, and I appreciate your answer on that too. So we’re moving on to Helen.

Helen

Hi, thank you, Adele, for being with us. In the Gospel of John, I think chapter nine really captures the whole tension of the evolving community around Christ with the Jewish community. And they have that special word, “Aposynagogos,” which is unique to the Gospel of John, which means “against the synagogue. “And the whole chapter is a discussion about the parents and how they’re kicked out of the synagogue. And so that I think between that sort of tension and antagonism that you have mentioned, and also the fact that I think one of the indigestible parts for the Jewish community that was evolving in Christianity, if I understand it correctly, was the divinization of Jesus, and the Gospel of John doesn’t help with that. And neither does the Septuagint in a sense, because from what I understand, the name for God in the Septuagint is Curios, and they transferred that over to the New Testament to make it a name for Jesus.

And then, of course, the whole divinization, and that the Jewish community wasn’t really interested in adapting ultimately any connection with the Septuagint. So I think the divinization of Jesus was a huge indigestible part for the Jewish community as well, and this is probably a misconception on my part, but the inability of some of the Jewish community to insist that if the Gentiles wanted to come into the movement with Christ, that they would have to become Jews first, the whole circumcision issue. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts about all of that.

Adele

Okay. So I have lots of thoughts about all of that. First of all, that chapter nine in the Gospel of John is probably not historical.

Helen

Oh yeah, I get that. But that’s what I mean—it reflects the community that was writing the gospel.

Adele

If there was a community.

Helen

Okay.

Adele

Okay. This was, again, a theory from the middle of the 20th century that the gospel of John … Yeah, not Ray Brown, but Lou Martin. Ray Brown and Lou Martin argued that this reflects the experience of the community being kicked out of the synagogue. I’ve written a lot about this. There’s no historical evidence for it, and we really can’t say one way or another if that’s how things evolve, but it doesn’t seem that way. And it doesn’t seem that way because … I mean, John says, well, that the parents were afraid of being kicked out. “Aposonagagos” means “out of the synagogue.” “Apo” means “away from” or “out of,” not against so much, but away from, for confessing Jesus to be the Messiah. But within a Jewish context, that wouldn’t be here nor there. I mean, in the second century, Rabbi Akiva, one of the most respected early rabbis, proclaimed somebody to be the Messiah, and he didn’t get kicked out. Now we see it this way because even a lot of Jews will say, “Well, the difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Jews don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah.” But in the first century, that wouldn’t have been the make-it-or-break-it thing. The other thing I would just want to mention is I think there are other questions, so I don’t want to go on for too long, but the idea that we find in Paul’s letter to the Galatians about this question about whether Gentiles should be circumcised or not, that wasn’t a question coming from Jews.

That was a question coming from Jewish Christians. This is what I was trying to say at the beginning. It’s really hard to know how many Jews knew or cared about this in the first century. Later, yes. But in the first century, I don’t think so. All of our sources for this are Christian sources that have to, as their expression of anxiety around what the Jews have to do with all of this, Christians are the ones that had to deal with this, but Jews did not have to deal with Christianity, not at that stage.

Shirley

Very good. And so speaking of what you’ve written, I think we should highlight this. Peggy, I have not been able to keep up with the chat, but do we have the writings of Adele available for people? You’re on mute. I’d like to

Peggy

Yes, I’ve put it in twice, and there’s a question that relates to the last two questions with Helen, and I’ve forgotten it was before that. And it may be just asking for a simple Reader’s Digest answer. Is there an easy way to understand why Jews did not see Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah? And that’s from Maureen.

Adele

Well, again, we don’t know how many Jews were actually confronted with this at that time, but Jews read those passages as referring to a future time. Within a Jewish context, the Messiah was only going to come at the very end of days, and that hadn’t happened. So that’s my reader’s digest answer. I mean, the other thing is, just to refer to one particular passage that’s often cited, Isaiah 7:14, which is often like, “A virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son who will be named Emmanuel.” This is based on the progression from the Hebrew to the Greek, then married to Christian theology, because all the Hebrew says is that a young woman shall conceive and give birth to a son. Now, most people who give birth, and this was certainly true in the ancient world, were young women. Hebrew has one word for young woman and one word for virgin in the technical sense, and in Isaiah 7:14 is the word for young woman, not the word for virgin, but Greek does not have that distinction.

So when it got translated into Greek, it left that open to Mariology and all of the ideas about Mary. So that’s one example where Jewish interpretation and Christian interpretation really differ, and it has to do also with the relationship between the Hebrew text and the Greek text.

Maureen

So did Christians basically reach back into Jewish scripture and present it the way they wanted to?

Adele

Yes, that’s what they did in ways that were … I wouldn’t put a diabolical interpretation on this. They were looking … They agreed, and part of what they took from the Jewish matrix was the idea that the Torah and the prophets were divinely given or divinely inspired. And so if they were kind of working through a theology around Jesus, it had to be supported by those scriptures, which were also a revelation. And so they went back and looked for that. Now, Jews were also doing this. They just did it in a different kind of a way without focusing on a specific historical individual. That’s

Shirley

So interesting. They’d both be doing this.

So then we’re ready for Tina.

Tina

Well, hi, I really appreciated this. My question is, I heard 20 to 30 years ago that John had to be rewritten many times to make it into the Bible. And now you’re saying that chapter nine probably wasn’t there originally, so that’s my question. I’m

Adele

I’m not saying that John Nine wasn’t there originally. I mean, there actually are sections of the Gospel of John that weren’t there originally. You know the story of the woman caught in adultery,

John 7:53 to 8:11. In different manuscripts, that’s in different places. So we conventionally now put it in the Gospel of John because that’s one of the places where it appears, but it doesn’t always appear there in the ancient manuscripts. And so that’s not considered part of John, but John nine was always there. I’m just saying that it’s not historical; at least in my view, it’s not reflecting something that actually happened in the time of Jesus. And there is this theory that John and all the gospels really went through multiple redactions. That means multiple editions, people added stuff, people took away stuff. It’s just a theory. We don’t know for sure because we don’t have the evidence to show it.

Tina

Was John one of the last books accepted?

Adele

It wasn’t the last book accepted. We see it as the last gospel chronologically. Chronologically, what most … Again, every single thing I’m saying is contested by other scholars, so you’re lucky to have my view, or at least I’m lucky that you’re only hearing my view, but most scholars think that Mark was first around 70 or 75, and then we have Matthew and Luke around 80, and then we have John, I don’t know, anywhere from 85 to 110, something like that. But I don’t know that it was the last book to be accepted. In the canonization process, and I’m not an expert on this, but I’ll just tell you what I know. In the canonization process, we actually have different lists. Different people made different lists, and eventually … And even now, the Catholics and Protestants don’t have the same list of what’s canonical. So I don’t know what made it last. Depending on who is making the list, it would depend on what they considered to be authoritative and what they didn’t. But John was probably the last of the four gospels to be written.

Shirley

To be written, yeah. So I’m wondering, Adele, if you could do two things for us. One is the book that people like to read of yours the most, could you tell us what that book is so that people might go find that book?

Adele

Yeah. The book that people like to read the most is called Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John.

Shirley

Great. Okay.

Adele

I would say that’s the book of mine that is best known.

Shirley

That’s great. And then the last thing I want to ask you, do you have some kind of summary that you would like us to take away from this, that you’d like us to think about more?

Adele

Yes. I would like you to take away from this the idea that the way that we understand any historical process depends on how we read the sources and on what’s going on in our own era, the intellectual currents in our own era. I think that’s an important point. As far as the specific topic of the parting of the ways, we should see it, I think, as a complex process that we’re probably never going to be able to pin down with any certainty. But I would say just as our own historical processes and situation, which we understand to be a product of many different factors that would’ve been true in the ancient world as well about the parting of the ways and the origins of Christianity.

Shirley

Wow. I can’t thank you enough for coming to share your wisdom and your long experience of thinking about this with us tonight because it’s been a big question for us and you’ve really given us some meat to chew on. Excuse me, vegetarians, but I just mean something important.

Just a metaphor. But I think you’ve just really given us some very important things to think about. I am so grateful. And thank you everybody else for your participation and being with us. So this was the March 2026 Bible and Beyond discussion titled The Parting of the Ways: Between Judaism and Christianity with our wonderful guest scholar, Dr. Adele Reinhardtz. So thank you for being with us. And these discussions, I just want to mention, are led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of some early Christian text or issues. In the second half hour, participants always have a chance to ask their questions. We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month from 8:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern time. And let me tell you who’s coming next month. We have Professor James McGrath, who’s going to talk about how not to lose faith when the Bible doesn’t say what you want it to say.

Yeah. And the title of our talk next month will be called “The Bible as Idol.” And that’ll be the fourth month, a Monday on April 27th. So now everyone, please join me in a special thanks to Adele for coming to be with us and helping us with a much better perspective on all these issues related to the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity. Many thanks to you.

Adele

And I want to thank you for the invitation and to all of you for being so engaged with these questions.