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by Jerry D. Neal (Author)
The Jewish Origins of Christianity and the Separation of Church and Synagogue discusses the political reasons why the Church and the synagogue separated: the death of an emperor; an empire-wide Roman civil war with 4 generals and 4 armies fighting for the emperor's crown; a right-wing Jewish group causing the cessation of sacrifices in the temple for gentiles; an inept Roman governor; a Jewish group carrying out assassinations; an attempt at reinstating sacrifices by the Romans that backfired; the ambitions of Roman generals to become emperor by destroying Jerusalem and the Temple, instituting a Roman policy of repression and persecution of Jews-which caused 2 more revolts and the rise of warlike messiah figures-how the expulsion of Jews from Rome caused a change in the attitude of Christians; how Christians sought the favor of Rome and joined the persecution of Jews; how this became theology; how Paul was immersed in the Jewish literature of his day and how his Jewish connection was erased by interpreting the Bible in a Platonic fashion; how Paul never left Judaism; how Paul's vision of Jew-and-gentile unity in the church was destroyed; how the Jerusalem church didn't disappear in the ashes of Jerusalem, but survived near the end of the 2nd century; how Jewish Christianity survived until the 7th century. The book discusses manuscript discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls that have enabled scholars to recover the Jewish background of Paul and Jesus, and the new efforts of scholars to understand what Paul really said. It is a concise summary of 12 years of research, 300 years of publications, and thousands of pages of scholarship into a thoroughly documented and readable text of approximately 50 pages. The The Jewish Origins of Christianity and the Separation of Church and Synagogue tells the true story of what really happened that the church hasn't been told for 2,000 years with complete and thorough documentation, and an extensive 15-page Bibliography.
