If you’ve been a Christian for a good while or if you are not a Christian, let me emphasize something about my title above: it does not refer to feuds between Jews and Christians but to quarrels and debates between Jewish groups which followed Jesus as Messiah.  In this, I’m following the book I’m reviewing.

Let me interject this before getting into specifics: I highly recommend this book! It is very readable for those with little background yet meaty for the well-informed.  With that said, I will develop some of the reasons and a broad outline of the book.

The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book, by Dr. Julie Galambush, is far from the only book to focus in on the great variety Christian beliefs among communities of Jesus followers in the first to early second century.  (But it takes a unique and in-depth approach.) Such communities were almost always partially to fully Jewish.  So it should not surprise us that the New Testament (NT) was written primarily by Jewish authors, for a mostly-Jewish audience (Luke being the main likely exception).  And that group going beyond the “Twelve Apostles” who were reputedly direct disciples of Jesus and may or may not have written any of the NT books.

However, the real significance of this strongly Jewish authorship, and of the heavily Jewish context and content of our specifically “Christian Scriptures” (NT) we almost completely miss.  This is true of almost all Jews as well as Christians.

This is pointed out by both the author and by the writer of the powerful forward, James Carroll, prolific author and former priest.  Author Julie Galambush is in an unusually good position to know of our misperceptions, as both a highly qualified biblical scholar and a Jewish convert, previously having been a Baptist minister.  Carroll points out in the forward that, despite hundreds of years (and thousands of books) of focused historical and spiritual searching, “Jesus remains the hidden man of Christian faith. He is the hidden man of Jewish memory, too…. But Julie Galambush suggests that this hidden Jesus… can have a fresh set of meanings to Christians and Jews alike.  Christians can recover Jesus as their Jewish Lord who preached nothing but the God of Israel.  Jews… can… recognize in him an embodiment – as this Christian sees it, at least – of the longing for God’s reign that remains central to Jewish hope.” (xiii.)

The core thesis of The Reluctant Parting is partially told in the title.  Followers of Jesus-as-Messiah, particularly the large proportion who were observant Jews and wanted to remain so, separated only slowly and painfully from the larger population of Jews who rejected the idea of Jesus having been the expected Messiah.  This fact is fairly widely recognized among Christians – at least those who have read the NT carefully and gained some historical knowledge.

What is very little understood yet critical to understanding the setting and meaning of the NT is that the pain and acrimony of separation we see at various places throughout it involve conflicts specifically within the relatively small “family” of those who did follow Jesus-as-Messiah.  These small communities were geographically spread apart, apparently even in Judea, Galilee and Samaria (current Israel), and in scattered diaspora Jewish communities around the Roman Empire. So conflicts and separations were not just among strangers, but often involved family and neighbors.  The adage that fights are often more intense or bitter the closer are the combatants seems to have been at play significantly in the early decades of the gradual transition out of Judaism.  This affected particularly ethnic Jews but also newly converted Christian Gentiles and the near-Jewish “God-fearers” worshipping among Jews.

The book accomplishes a lot more than Galambush pointing out and illustrating the “insider” Jewish-Christian struggles and separations. I also consider it an excellent introduction to the NT overall.  Like the typical “introduction” text (and most are written in basic textbook style for college or graduate students), it covers all the NT books and their basic groupings.  This one is more readable and interesting than most, I find more so than any I’m familiar with (far from all of them).

What else you’ll find in The Reluctant Parting is a generous amount of well-summarized “backgrounds” material.  This is critical for understanding both the books of the NT and the real-life setting of its original readers and the authors – cultural, political, economic, religious and other conditions and belief systems.  In the process of reading the author’s explanations, one can gain a lot of insight about the establishment and growth of sects in the Ancient Near East (which in the case at point, Jewish Jesus-following, became a separate and major religion).

If you get a copy of this highly insightful, important book, be sure to read both the introduction and the epilogue.  The introduction sets up the issues regarding why the perspective Galambush takes on the NT writings and their setting is highly relevant to our forms of faith today… to our subconscious as well as conscious views toward those of differing traditions and beliefs (particularly Christians toward Jews and vice-versa).  In it she describes Parts One and Two, and how they can be read separately (not recommended by me, for anyone).  She says of Part One that it “… provides an overview of the history of the post-exilic period, and introduces the contents and arrangement of the New Testament, including a brief discussion of early Christian writings that were not including in the Christian canon.” Part Two covers the specific books of the NT.

The Epilogue is “The Image of the Jew in Christian Scripture”.  Here’s one statement of how and why major problems developed and still persist in this area to this day: “One might hope that a sensitive reader could come close to hearing what the authors intended to say, but in the case of the New Testament, the barriers to an ideal reading are very high indeed.” The author goes on to develop the specifics.

The way most Christians have treated the New Testament, if they even read it seriously at all outside of snippets at church, is as a guide to personal salvation and spiritual practice.  They’ve had very little historical sense or interest.  Thus the traditions of centuries of often-distorted Christian theology and attitudes toward ancient (and now modern) Judaism and Jews then and now are just taken in without the moderating and correcting effects of much that is right within the New Testament itself.  But it does take some background and careful reading to discern much of this.  And this is precisely what this book helps provide in an exceptionally clear, interesting and readable way.