Start here: The Parting of the Ways (5-part series)

How Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity emerged from Second Temple Judaism, and how the split helped shape later antisemitism

This is a five-part account of how rabbinic Judaism and Christianity emerged out of Second Temple Judaism, developed side by side for centuries, and then separated in a way that was slow, social, and never quite finished. The focus is on the very Jewish character of early Christianity, the internal disputes about Torah and belonging, and the long process by which overlapping practice was pushed, argued, legislated, and eventually priced out.

I’ve been reading, thinking about, and teaching this material in one form or another for around twenty years. I’m publishing it now because the history is interesting in its own right, but also because it still shapes the present. A lot of later antisemitism is downstream of this story: shared scriptures and rival inheritance claims, the recurring Christian anxiety about ‘Judaizing’, and the way church authority and (later) imperial power reshaped how Jews were described and treated.

You can read the series in order, but each instalment is written to stand on its own.

Part 1 (live): From Temple to text, law, and argument

How Judaism survives the destruction of the Temple by relocating authority into Torah lived through study, practice, and disciplined dispute. Why that pivot is not just a post-70 invention, and why it sets the stage for later conflicts that are, at first, family arguments.

Part 2 (live): A Jewish Jesus movement, and the fight about Torah

Early Jesus-following as a Jewish movement arguing about Torah from inside Jewish life. Paul, table fellowship, circumcision, and the practical problem of building mixed communities under the empire without dissolving Jewish continuity.

Part 3 (live): When the centre of gravity changed, and both sides drew borders

What changes when gentiles stop being guests on the edge and become the default member. Torah still gets quoted, but it becomes harder to “hear” as a lived rhythm. Time, food, prayer, and the slow work of boundary-making.

Part 4 (live): Two communities, one Bible, and a fight over ownership

A shared library becomes contested property. Translation, naming, and competing authority structures. The overlap zone doesn’t vanish by itself, so both sides work to make it expensive to inhabit.

Part 5: Empire, enforcement, and the prelude to medieval antisemitism

The shift from argument to rule: calendars, councils, and the state’s interest in legible categories. How late antique Christian policing of overlap helps form habits that later centuries inherit, including some of the preconditions for medieval antisemitism.

If you’re arriving mid-series, start with Part 1 and come back here for the running order.