Lactantius Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Tesis de Doctorado / PhD Thesis.
Since J. Parkes invented it in 1934, the expression “Parting of the Ways” has deeply rooted in the scholarship to study the distance between Jews and Christians during Antiquity. Indeed, issued from the same common background, which was the Second Temple Judaism, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism became two opposing orthodoxies which excluded each other and, largely, based their own identity in opposition to the other one, in a process started by the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70. This doctoral thesis analyses how this parting of the ways happened throughout the first three centuries of the Common Era in the different regional realities of the Roman Empire, taking as a main source the literature of the Church Fathers, though also other ones, as the rabbinic literature, the so-called “cycle of the Talmud”. So, despite their rivalries, Judaism and Christianity form a large spectrum where, in an extreme, we find the Rabbinic Judaism, for which Jesus represents nothing, and, in the other, different forms of Gnostic Christianity, which fully denied the identification between the Jewish Jahveh and the God Father preached by Jesus Christ and, because of that, refused all the Jewish heritage of Christianity. Between both extremes became established the self-proclaimed Orthodox Christianity, over the basis of the anti-legalistic thought of the Apostle Paul. This form of Christianity also felt obliged to harmonize Hebrew Scriptures as a part of the history of salvation with the idea that the Mosaic Law had been abrogated with the coming of the Messiah. This proto-Orthodox Christianity found in the method of allegory applied to the interpretation of the Old Testament the legitimation of its doctrine and its universalistic and uniformist wishes. On the other hand, the rabbis, with the Patriarch as their leader, got the decisive support of the Roman authorities in their purpose to proclaim themselves as the leaders of Judaism, which was decapitated after the disappearance of the Temple. This Judaism found its way of expression in the so-called Talmudic literature, where the Rabbis systematized an orthodoxy that excluded from the people of Israel all those who did not share their doctrines, as we can see, for example, in the Birkat ha minim, imprecation which, included in the liturgy of the synagogue worship, was pronounced against the Followers of Jesus of Nazareth.