Dan Jacobs Podcast

Part 5 follows the split between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity into the fourth and fifth centuries, when imperial power entered the story and the cost of overlap began to rise. We start in Antioch, where John Chrysostom’s sermons reveal Christians still attending Jewish festivals and synagogues, and ask what that persistence tells us about how slow separation really was. From there we move to Nicaea and the struggle over sacred time, as Easter and Sabbath become identity markers, then to the ratchet effect: preaching becomes canon, canon becomes law. The Theodosian Code turns boundary-making into administration. The Callinicum synagogue burning shows how bishops could bend imperial policy. Augustine offers a theology of “toleration” that keeps Jews alive but subordinated, and Jerome’s reliance on Jewish Hebrew learning exposes a dependence Christianity could never fully escape. The episode ends in the Jewish east, where rabbinic authority becomes more portable and resilient, and with the central claim of the series: the divorce papers were written in calendars and law, but the two communities never stopped sharing the same book.

By the second and third centuries, the question is no longer mainly how gentiles enter Israel’s story. It is who gets to tell the story at all. This episode follows the fight over Israel’s scriptures as a shared library that becomes contested property: through translation, naming, canon-building, and the delegitimising of Jewish continuity.

Part 3 traces the slow split between the Jesus movement and Jewish communal life. As gentiles became the majority, Torah shifted from lived practice to quoted text, and overlap grew harder to sustain through calendars, meals, taxes, and prayer.

Part 2 follows the Jesus movement before it became a separate religion. In the first decades after Jesus’s death, the argument was still internal: how to read Torah in a messianic moment, what Gentile followers should do about circumcision and food laws, and whether Jews and Gentiles could share a table without dissolving Jewish boundaries. We move through Paul’s letters, Acts 15, and the everyday mechanics of mixed communities under Rome, and you can already see the split forming long before anyone calls it “Christianity.”

Religious splits are rarely neat. Part 1 begins in the late Second Temple world, before the catastrophe, with Hillel and the Pharisaic culture of argument. It then follows the shock of 70 CE and the long aftermath: how Jewish life survived when sacrifice and priestly authority could no longer function as the public centre. Along the way: messianic expectation in the air around Jesus, Josephus on certainty under pressure, the rabbinic survival story of Yavneh, and a set of classic texts that show what “portable Judaism” meant in practice.