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a Christian talmudist, and Claude G. Montefiore, a Jewish interpreter of the New Testament.
However, in 1927, Travers-Hereford commented that the Christian historian, in seeking to give ‘an account of the process by which Christian religion claimed and acquired a separate existence from the Jewish, confined (his) attention almost exclusively to the Christian factor, with but little interest in or knowledge of the Jewish factor and of its subsequent condition’.31 He was speaking about the almost exclusive use of the New Testament by most Christian historians to document the separation. Over seventy years later, Christian scholarship has taken more account of Jewish sources in seeking to address this question, but a balanced picture is not always being presented.
The Challenge
The challenge in seeking to write an historical account of the separation of early Christianity from Judaism lies in achieving a balance and a certain degree of objectivity in the treatment of such a sensitive subject. One has to take a focussed view of the Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman sources, which leave many questions unanswered, and attempt to extract the relevant from the vast array of commentaries and interpretations from the secondary material available. In 1934 The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, a seminal and comprehensive study, was published by James Parkes on the subject of Christian-Jewish relations from the standpoint of the history of anti-Semitism. His study grew out of a concern for the contemporary situation, which was witnessing the rise of Nazism and an accompanying sharp increase in anti-Semitism. Parkes traces the conflict to Visigothic Spain, and treats the earlier period, being convinced that the roots of current anti-Semitism lie in the continuing conflict of the church with the synagogue.32 He states that the real conflict at the outset was the question of the law.33 The careful documentation and argumentation make this an enduring work, despite the passage of time, advances in the study of New Testament and source criticism, and the discovery of new documentary material such as the Dead Sea Scrolls