Charles L. Cohen

Indeed, for virtually all of their mutual existence, Christians and Jews considered themselves separate groups and wanted little interaction. The idea of a Judeo-Christian civilization is a twentieth-century creation, one result of which has been a massive reconsideration of Christianity’s Jewish origins. The phrase “Abrahamic religions” connotes a category founded on the three traditions’ practice of invoking Abraham, but this book further deploys it to consider Islam as being less alien to the Jewish and Christian worldviews than one might suppose

These options usually coexisted peacefully, and one might cast off or pick up a god or goddess depending on fortune’s twists. Jesus’s followers, to the contrary, bore a text-based gospel about the One God who made ethical demands, judged people according to their deeds, and had, in human form, foretold an impending new age.

Observers from the second-century pagan critic Celsus to Marxist intellectuals have alleged that converts came overwhelmingly from the lower and slave classes, but the first churches in fact attracted individuals from across the social spectrum.

Christianity had achieved intellectual respect among the Empire’s educated citizenry. An earlier appropriation appears in the Gospel of John: “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1)—divine thought existing and being actualized in Christ. Neither Genesis nor the Quran construes deific creativity in such a metaphysical cadence.

Mark depicts Jesus as a mysterious figure whose persona his disciples never quite grasp but whom the reader learns is the Son of God, a messiah who—contrary to Jewish expectations of a triumphant king—saves the world through his suffering and death. Matthew emphasizes Jesus’s Jewishness to portray a messianic teacher come “not to abolish but fulfill” (5:17) scripture; steeped in Torah, he stresses its ethical demands to the exclusion of ritual, thereby reworking Jewish tradition into a universalized framework that allows Gentiles as well as Jews to participate.

Luke downplays Jesus’s Jewishness, rendering him primarily as a prophet, born of God, who calls for social justice and preaches about the salvation offered to all.

John characterizes Jesus as a supernatural being, coequal with God, who reveals his identity by performing spectacular miracles and declares that he alone is the way to eternal life.

The Jesus movement’s acceptance of Gentiles, coupled with the refusal of most Jews to convert, facilitated its evolution from a sect within Second Temple Judaism to an independent faith with a rationalized institutional base. Constructing Christian identity involved determining what constituted acceptable beliefs, practices, and sources of religious authority. Building an organization required erecting permanent structures capable of managing expanding networks of churches and settling theological disputes, given the recognition that the end time no longer seemed imminent. During their first two centuries, Christians began to shape their own distinctive religious tradition.

The rabbis did not create the synagogue, whose practices they sometimes derided, nor did they unilaterally determine the composition of Tanakh, the contents of which reflected a long collective process. They did, however, create a fresh liturgical environment by legitimating new practices, such as communal prayer as a proper means for soliciting divine favor in place of the bygone priestly sacrifices.

The first application of these principles was the compilation of the Mishnah (“Repeated Tradition”), overseen by Judah ha-Nasi around 200 to 225 ce. Treating such subjects as religious festivals and family life, it elaborates scriptural passages to spell out the proper legal procedure (halakhah) for fulfilling God’s commandments. For instance, Deuteronomy’s laconic charge to “Observe the sabbath” (5:12) discloses, when placed under rabbinic scrutiny, thirty-nine categories of labor that a dutiful observer must shun