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James D. G. Dunn, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. By Daniel Boyarin. Pp. xviii + 374. (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. isbn 0 8122 3764 1. £25.50/$38.50, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 229–232, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fli284
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How and when did ‘the parting of the ways’ between Judaism and Christianity take place? The old questions are still on the agenda in many seminars on the New Testament, early Christianity, and early Judaism. Some think that the impact of Jesus, his death and resurrection, were sufficient in themselves to pull the two apart. Indeed, if early Christian apocalyptic means that Christianity was seen from the beginning to have emerged on a quite different plane, then any heilsgeschichtlich continuity with Israel of old can be set aside as a claim made by Paul's Jewish-Christian opponents (as Lou Martyn argues). Most, however, accept that what came to be called ‘Christianity’ functioned initially as a sect within Second Temple Judaism, ‘the sect of the Nazarenes’ (Acts 24:5, 14), so that the question whether the ways would or should part was by no means obvious, during the first generation at any rate. A stronger body of opinion clusters round the first and second Jewish revolts, their consequences and aftermath. But the earlier cautions of James Parkes and Marcel Simon, that there was a considerable degree of overlap between the newly emergent Christianity and (rabbinic) Judaism well into the fourth century, have been largely neglected.
