Continuity and Discontinuity: Early Christianity in Its Jewish Setting

In the course of time the antagonism between Jew and Christian became so bitter that Christians began to behave like cuckoos, or like tycoons who had taken over the company. So concerned were they with their own position in God’s scheme of salvation that they ceased to ask fundamental questions about God’s purpose for ‘Israel according to the flesh.’ They forgot that poignant verse in Romans in which Paul declares: ‘I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen by race.’ For by the time that the church had become a predominantly Gentile community, it had been cut off, not from Christ, but from Paul’s kinsmen. I have been attempting in these lectures to understand the situation of those who wrestled with the problem of relating old and new in the first years of the Christian era: if we wish to understand the origins of our faith, then clearly it is essential to explore the context in which it was first formulated. It may well be that the way in which these men and women related old and new may be of help to Christians today who experience the tension between past tradition and present experience. It may be that a better understanding of what was going on as the Christian community sought to establish its own identity could affect our attitudes to questions concerning Jewish-Christian relationships today.