Beyond Jewish Christianity: Ancient Social Taxonomies and the Christianity-Judaism Divide

This concluding chapter demonstrates how one can get around the problems created by Jewish Christianity by approaching the question of the origins of Christianity and the Christianity–Judaism division as a study in the production and dissemination of ancient social taxonomies. The central question from this perspective is neither the similarities and differences in culture nor even the social interaction among ancient Christians and Jews, but how early Jesus groups imagined themselves and their characteristic cultures in relation to Judeans and theirs. At what point did some Jesus groups begin to assert that Judeans and their distinguishing culture were, per se, “other” and to reify that difference by postulating a distinction between Christianism and Judaism? Whatever its various social consequences, how widespread was this taxonomy before its imperial adoption in the centuries after Constantine? Through an examination of a few exemplary cases, a significant distinction can be observed well into late antiquity between Jesus groups who made sense of their social experience with reference to such a notion of Christianism and those who did not; between those who came to differentiate a new “us” from the Judeans and the Nations alike, and those for whom Judeans and the Nations remained the primary division.