Jews and the early Christians.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: From Michael Giffin's review of Yoder's The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (March 2008), it seems more than likely that Yoder, as in so many cases of historical revisionism, is merely reconstituting a set of facts which were formerly, as it were, "half-full", as instead, "half-empty".

Christianity, he says, was not initially a problem to the Judaism from whence it sprang, nor Judaism to what was novel in Christianity, the eventual schism being the result of bad feeling generated some two centuries later; and Judaism was so various that Christianity was just another non-threatening variant. However, the picture given in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul and others in the New Testament, the writers of which were immediately involved in the establishment of the new sect, and who presumably were capable of recording their own experiences, is rather different.

Timothy's account of Paul's harassment by the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem does not suggest a trouble-free acceptance of the new dogma. In this account, the Jews (both Sadducees and Pharisees) seized Paul, determined to kill him, and he was only saved by the intervention of a tribune, who then wrote to the Roman Governor, Felix, to the effect that: "I found that he was accused about questions of their law, but charged with nothing deserving death or imprisonment" (Acts 23:29). The Jewish leaders were permitted to make their case, and their accusation was that: "we have found this man a pestilent fellow, an agitator among the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. He even tried to profane the Temple but we seized him" (Acts 24:5-6).

For Paul, there was essentially a repetition of what happened to Jesus, except that in his case successive Roman governors did not succumb to the demands of the Jewish leaders, and were assisted in their stand by Paul's plea that as a Roman citizen he had the right to be sent to Rome for trial. While Yoder's claim that Jewish Christians continued to worship in Jewish synagogues is supported, it hardly indicates a tolerant acceptance of their presence.

The Epistles of Paul, apart from all their filler material of exhortation, appear to be chiefly devoted to creating a context within which non-Jews can be Christians--the obvious problem being that Christianity is a new graft on the old rootstock of Judaism. Paul's instructions were that non-Jewish ...