ABSTRACT
Whether or not the Jesus of history was a consequential figure in the making of Judaism, the Christ of tradition determined the status and culture of the Jews in ways that are only beginning to be understood. This volume and the conference that occasioned it are indicators of renewed interest in the ways Christianity and the image of its founder affected the history of Judaism. In recent decades, historians have reevaluated the paradigms by which the relationships between the communities that became Judaism and Christianity have been described. 1 Many have concluded, based on subtle analyses of midrashic and legal texts, that both communities forged their identities through the robust dialogues between them. For the study of ancient Judaism, this has not always been the case. Not long ago scholars of ancient Judaism and Christianity were warned of “parallelomania” or cautioned that Jews and Christians were “different people talking about different things to different people” until the fourth century. 2 This trend was itself a reaction to a maximalist historiography of a previous generation that sought to place the Rabbis on par with Christians as theological interlocutors. 3
