In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the...

Exploring Jewish-Christian interaction in Late Antiquity in the form of three case studies, Leonard Rutgers shows that early Christian ideas about Jews and Judaism not only played a determining role in the ideologies that shaped early Christian identity formation, they also had a tendency to spill over into the real world. Therefore such ideas deeply influenced the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations during a period that saw the curtailing of Jewish...