The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.(Book review)

The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Edited by Adam H. Becker & Annette Yoshiko Reed. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 410. Paper, $29.00.

This volume is a paperback edition of a collection of essays by various authors originally published in 2003 (Mohr Siebeck) as a collective challenge to the "Parting of the Ways" reconstruction of early Jewish and Christian history. According to that model, which has dominated scholarship since World War II, the complex array of social interactions between the various groups of Jewish and Gentile devotees of Jesus and other forms of a diverse Second Temple Judaism had essentially ceased by the early second century. After the Roman destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kokhba rebellion, that model tells us, the variety of early Judaism was significantly diminished, and Jews and Christians went their separate ways as …