The earliest and most tenacious opposition to Christianity arose not from pagan Rome, but from within Judaism itself. The conflict began in the synagogue, long before it reached the senate or the forum. Though the church was born out of Israel’s womb, her first cries were met not with maternal embrace, but with hostile rejection—a tragic estrangement recorded in the New Testament and echoed across the early centuries.
Josephus: A Complex Witness
Among Jewish writers of antiquity, Flavius Josephus occupies a singular position. A Pharisee by background and a Roman collaborator by politics, Josephus offers in his Antiquities of the Jews one of the earliest non-Christian references to Jesus. The famed passage in Book XVIII, while positive in tone, is widely suspected of interpolation or Christian embellishment. It praises Jesus as a wise man and doer of wonderful works—language uncharacteristic of a devout Jew writing under Roman patronage. Scholars debate which parts, if any, reflect Josephus’ authentic voice.
Yet apart from this contested paragraph, Josephus’ entire corpus remains a treasure for contextualizing the New Testament. His Antiquities forms, as it were, a “fifth gospel”—a historical companion to the evangelists, rich in social, political, and religious detail. More striking still is his Jewish War, which unintentionally reads as a vivid commentary on Christ’s apocalyptic prophecies: the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the horrors of famine and siege, the rise of deceivers, and the survival of the early Christian community that fled the doomed city. In these uncanny fulfillments, history and prophecy meet.
Rabbinic Polemic and Justin’s Trypho
As the church grew and distinguished itself from the synagogue, rabbinic polemic hardened. Yet the content of Jewish opposition remained largely unoriginal: a denial of Jesus’ messiahship and contempt for his followers. These attacks echo those confronted by Jesus himself. A full sense of their tone and content is captured in the Dialogue of Justin Martyr with Trypho the Jew, an invaluable apologetic treatise wherein Christian claims are defended with philosophical clarity and spiritual depth against Jewish objections.
Earlier attempts at such debate include the now-lost Disputation of Jason and Papiscus, mentioned by Celsus and later Christian writers. Likely composed by a Jewish Christian—possibly Aristo of Pella—it offered an apologetic response to Jewish critiques but was lost after the seventh century. Celsus, who read it with disdain, dismissed it as an allegorical farce—yet even that dismissiveness attests to its circulation and perceived threat.
The Talmud and the Wall of Separation
The Talmud—the monumental compendium of Jewish law, lore, and tradition—emerged as the definitive scripture of post-Temple Judaism. It crystallized the separation between Judaism and the growing Christian movement. Surprisingly, it rarely addresses Christianity directly. The absence is telling: Christianity had become the heresy too grave to name. Where references do exist, they are often indirect or veiled in euphemism, with Jesus alluded to in veiled terms and his followers portrayed as deceivers.
Thus the Talmud played a powerful role in cementing the spiritual and cultural isolation of post-Temple Judaism. It became not merely a theological fortress, but a cultural wall—separating Jews from Gentiles, and from the Christians who had once worshipped beside them. In this silence and distance, the breach between the synagogue and the church widened into a chasm that centuries of history would only deepen.
