The wars against Rome, the rise of Rabbinic Judaism and of Apostolic Gentile Christianity, and the Judaeo- Christians: elements for a synthesis

The aim of this first contribution is to try and gain an overview of the period of history in which the phenomenon of Judaeo-Christianity saw the light. The underlying assumption is that up till now, partial views of this history predominate among scholars, and that it is only in a more inclusive perspective that we can really begin to understand Judaeo-Christianity. Con-sequently, the task of this paper is anything but a summing up of well-known facts all agree on. Rather, it will have to consist of an inventory of major problems that must be tackled and of a sketch of some elements for a synthesis: building blocks for an inclusive overview of the first centuries of common Jewish and Christian history in which the Judaeo-Christians can be naturally accounted for. A paradigm for the early history of Jews and Christians The problems we are dealing with have to do not just with the nature of the sources and the way we read them, but, even more fundamentally, with the way we view it all together, or in other words, with the paradigm by which we interpret the period and its events and work them into a synthesis. In various ways, this includes both early Christian and early Jewish history, by themselves, and taken together. As to early Christianity, we have been taught to view it as an entity whose splendid isolation vis-à-vis Judaism was not impaired by the rather incidental encounters between church fathers and rabbis. Reports of clashes between Jesus or Paul and the Jewish leaders, or between rabbis and Christian heretics, only reinforce our idea of separateness. If we come to think of the Judaeo-Christians, however, they seem to be hard to fit in. They are something of an anomaly, and this is revealing.1 1 I am referring to KUHN’s description of the process of a scientific ‘paradigm shift’ being prepared by the gradual identification of ‘anomalies’, i.e. observations that remain unexplained and that finally lead to the breakthrough of a more adequate overall theory. Tomson