History

How Christianity began, and the Jewish writings that shaped it.

Christianity did not begin as a new religion. It began inside Second Temple Judaism, as a movement of Jews who believed a fellow Jew — Jesus of Nazareth — was Israel's promised messiah. Everything the earliest church read as Scripture, argued from, and prayed with was Jewish: the Hebrew Bible, the Greek Septuagint, and a wider world of Jewish writing that never made it into either. This page follows that story from the Second Temple period to the point where 'Christian' and 'Jewish' became separate, recognized identities — a process historians call the parting of the ways.

Second Temple Judaism and Its Scriptures

After the Babylonian exile (586–539 BCE) and the return under Persian rule, the Judean community rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple (completed c. 516 BCE) and, over the following centuries, collected, edited, and copied the writings that became the Hebrew Bible — the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. By the last two centuries BCE, Jewish communities in Judea, Babylon, and Egypt treated these texts as sacred and authoritative, even where the exact edges of the collection still varied. This body of Scripture — read in synagogues, studied by scribes and priests — was the only Bible that existed when Jesus was born. Every claim the earliest Christians made about him, they made by appeal to it.

Ezra–Nehemiah, on rebuilding the Temple and the public reading of the Torah under Ezra.
Josephus, Against Apion 1.37–43, on the twenty-two books Jews of his day held as authoritative.

The Septuagint: Scripture in Greek

Beginning in the 3rd century BCE, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Torah, and later the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures, into Greek — the translation later called the Septuagint (LXX). By the first century CE it was the Bible most widely read by Greek-speaking Jews across the Mediterranean diaspora, and it became, almost without exception, the Scripture quoted by the writers of the New Testament. When Paul or the Gospel writers say a prophet's words were fulfilled, they are usually quoting the Septuagint's wording, not the Hebrew directly. Christianity inherited its Bible, and the very language of its first missionaries, from diaspora Judaism.

The Letter of Aristeas, a legendary account of the Torah's translation into Greek.
Jennifer Dines, The Septuagint (T&T Clark, 2004), on its origin and spread.

Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and a Land under Rome

Second Temple Judaism was not one thing. Pharisees emphasized oral tradition and the resurrection of the dead; Sadducees, tied to the priesthood and Temple, rejected both; Essenes withdrew to await God's judgment, some settling at Qumran near the Dead Sea; and a broader popular hope, fed by decades of foreign rule — Persian, then Greek, then Roman after Pompey's conquest of Jerusalem in 63 BCE — looked for God to send a deliverer, a 'messiah,' to restore Israel. Jesus, his first followers, and the movement's early critics all belonged to this same contested, diverse Jewish world; the New Testament's debates over Torah, resurrection, and the Temple continue arguments already underway among Jews before Jesus was born.

Josephus, Jewish War 2.119–166 and Antiquities 18.11–25, describing the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes.
The Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran), for Essene-related community rules and end-times expectation.

Enoch, Qumran, and the Writings behind the New Testament's Imagination

Alongside the books later gathered into the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Jews wrote and read other works that shaped how they pictured the end of history: 1 Enoch, with its visions of judgment, fallen angels, and a heavenly 'Son of Man'; the Community Rule and War Scroll found at Qumran, describing a final battle between light and darkness; Jubilees; and the Psalms of Solomon, with its portrait of a royal messiah who purges Jerusalem of its enemies. None of these became part of the Hebrew Bible or, later, the Protestant Old Testament, but their language runs through the New Testament. Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly as prophecy, and Jesus's preferred self-designation in the Gospels, 'Son of Man,' draws on this same apocalyptic well.

Jude 14–15, quoting 1 Enoch 1:9.
R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912).
John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (Eerdmans, 1998), on Enochic and Qumran literature.

Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish Teacher in Roman Galilee and Judea

Jesus was a Jew from Nazareth in Galilee who taught, gathered disciples, and was executed by Roman crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate, most likely around 30 CE, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. Independent of Christian testimony, the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus both attest to his existence and crucifixion under Pilate. His teaching, as the Gospels present it, worked from within Jewish Scripture and practice: parables about the kingdom of God, debates with other Jewish teachers over Torah, and an announcement that Israel's story was reaching its climax. His followers were Jews who kept the Sabbath, attended the Temple, and read the same Scriptures as their neighbors.

Josephus, Antiquities 18.63–64 (the Testimonium Flavianum, widely regarded as authentic in part) and 20.200, on 'James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.'
Tacitus, Annals 15.44, on 'Christus,' executed under Pontius Pilate.

The First Believers: A Jewish Sect in Jerusalem

After Jesus's death, his followers — convinced he had been raised and was Israel's promised messiah — did not leave Judaism. According to Acts, the earliest community in Jerusalem, led by Peter, John, and Jesus's brother James, continued to worship at the Temple, kept Jewish law, and understood itself as the faithful remnant of Israel, not a new religion. Outsiders described it as a sect within Judaism — 'the sect of the Nazarenes,' in the language of Acts — much as Josephus described Pharisees or Essenes as Jewish sects. In its first years, the Jesus movement had no separate scriptures, no separate Sabbath, and no name distinguishing it from the Judaism around it.

Acts 2–5, 15, and 21, on the Jerusalem community's Temple worship and Torah observance.
Acts 24:5, calling the movement 'the sect of the Nazarenes.'
Josephus, Antiquities 20.200, on James, leader of the Jerusalem community.

Paul, the Gentile Mission, and the Jerusalem Council

The movement's reach beyond Judea owed most to Paul (Saul of Tarsus), a Pharisee who, after a transformative encounter he described as an appearance of the risen Jesus, became its most energetic missionary to non-Jews. Paul argued, and the leaders in Jerusalem agreed at a council held around 49 CE, that Gentile converts did not need to be circumcised or keep the full Torah to belong to the community. That decision — recorded in Acts and in Paul's own account in Galatians — opened the movement to the wider Greco-Roman world and set it, gradually, apart from a Judaism that required circumcision and Torah observance of anyone who joined it. Paul's letters, written between roughly 50 and 60 CE, are the earliest surviving Christian documents, predating the Gospels.

Acts 15:1–29, the Jerusalem council.
Galatians 2:1–10, Paul's own account of the council.
Galatians 1:13–17 and Acts 9, Paul's call.

The Jewish War and the Fall of the Temple (66–70 CE)

In 66 CE, Judea rose in revolt against Rome. The war ended in 70 CE with the Roman army under Titus destroying the Jerusalem Temple — the center of Jewish sacrificial worship, and a place the earliest Jesus movement itself had continued to frequent. The Temple's destruction forced every strand of Judaism to reimagine itself without it. Rabbinic Judaism, developing around the sages at Yavneh and later centers and eventually codified in the Mishnah, became the main path Judaism took afterward. The Jesus movement, no longer anchored to Temple worship in Jerusalem and already spreading through Gentile cities via Paul's mission, took a different one.

Josephus, Jewish War, book 6, on the siege and burning of the Temple in 70 CE.
Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Westminster John Knox, 2006), on Yavneh and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism.

The Parting of the Ways

The split between Judaism and Christianity was not a single event but a process stretched across the late first and second centuries, moving at different speeds in different cities. By the early second century, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was already using the word Christianismos — 'Christianity' — as something distinct from Ioudaismos, 'Judaism.' Justin Martyr, writing around 160 CE, debates a Jewish partner, Trypho, as someone from a visibly separate community. Historians describe this gradual separation as the 'parting of the ways' — a reminder that for decades after Jesus, the line between 'Jewish' and 'Christian' was far less fixed than later centuries assumed.

Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Magnesians 10, an early use of 'Christianity' (Christianismos) as distinct from 'Judaism.'
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, an early Christian–Jewish debate.
James D. G. Dunn, The Parting of the Ways (SCM Press, 1991; 2nd ed. 2006).

From Jewish Scripture to a Christian Canon

For its first centuries, the church's Bible was the Jewish Scriptures in Greek — the Septuagint — read as pointing forward to Jesus. Alongside it, communities began collecting and circulating Paul's letters and, from roughly 70–100 CE, the four Gospels, which are themselves saturated with quotations and allusions to Jewish Scripture. It took until the fourth century for lists resembling the twenty-seven-book New Testament to appear — Athanasius's Festal Letter of 367 CE is the earliest surviving list matching it exactly — and Christian communities differed for centuries more over exactly which Jewish writings belonged in their Old Testament. See the Canon tab for how those decisions played out, tradition by tradition and book by book.

Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (367 CE).
Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1997).

For how individual writings were received across traditions — councils, manuscripts, and canon lists — see Canon.