ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1960s, the study of Judaism in America and eventually in Europe moved from the theological seminaries to the secular universities, and the publication of scholarly works migrated from exclusively Jewish publication venues to university and broadly focused scholarly presses. Jonah Frankel in Israel and Jacob Neusner in America, working independently and on unrelated literary studies, changed how we view rabbinic literature. Frankel argued that midrashic stories should be studied as literature, or perhaps folklore, but not as history. In a series of Hebrew articles and then in several Hebrew books, Frankel applied the tools of Higher Criticism to rabbinic texts. The complexity involved in distinguishing between Jews and Christians before the fifth century stems from the variety of Jews and Christians during the first centuries ce. Following Boyarin's image, it is easy to distinguish between those Christians who totally rejected Judaism and those Jews who totally rejected Jesus.
