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out of a seminar and was titled The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages;55 work on early liturgy by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, titled The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity;56 and the recent book, Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship: New Insights into Its History and Interaction, edited by Albert Gerhards and Clemens Leonhard.57
Much of the literature treating the subject appears to be based on two assumptions. First, Judaism was pluralistic, although some treat it as monolithic.58 Insufficient account is taken of the evidence to show that there was a variety of forms in both. This point has been stressed by Jacob Neusner: ‘At the period between the first and sixth centuries, the manifestations of the Jewish religion were varied and complex, far more varied, indeed, than the extant Talmudic literature would have led us to believe’.59
Second, either after the fall of the temple, the rebellion of Bar Kochba Revolt, or when the Mishnah was completed, Judaism closed ranks. This is to assume that after the fall of the temple, Judaism was controlled by the rabbis. How far and from what period did the rabbis’ authority extend to all the areas where Jews were settled? On the Christian side, could there be a claim to a centralised Christianity before Constantine?
Much of the secondary literature that seeks to address the question of the separation of early Christianity from Judaism goes over the same ground and repeats entrenched errors despite the available scholarship on these very issues. For this reason, in seeking to cast new light on the separation of early Christianity from Judaism, a number of documented areas that often are treated separately by authors have been examined to find evidence for this moving apart that is concrete and can be tabulated, weighed, and compared. The aim has been to find common themes in the moving apart, and where possible, to show stages of separation in these selected areas, so that an assessment can be made.
Chapter 1 examines the geographical evidence for separation, early Christian organisation, and the development of centralisation of the western church with the rise of the papacy. A map shows the relationships between Christian and Jewish populations, and tables included in the appendix name the towns from which they came to attend the