A House Divided

Who can profit most from Vincent Martin's 1995 A HOUSE DIVIDED: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS BETWEEN SYNAGOGUE AND CHURCH? Who least? *** Scholars who have spent their lives studying the whys and hows of Christianity's separating from its mother Judaism will probably spend three or four easy hours with a text that skims through (from a pedant's perspective) libraries of controversy. They will note that Martin interprets. He spins. Scholars will take as normal the author's view as just one more among many. *** Laymen, by contrast, just getting started on how Judaism spun off Christianity will find A HOUSE DIVIDED a slow but very rewarding read. Especially so, if they have alrady read two or three books which sweep through the centuries giving "the big picture." They will have read a bit about Second Temple Judaism, the controversy as to whether Jesus was a loyal Jew or an apostate, the decisive turning to the Gentiles by Saul/Paul, the influence of the Septuagint translation of Hebrew Scriptures, about synagogues of the diaspora and more broad brush materials. ***Broad brush preliminary reading is excellent preparation for A HOUSE DIVIDED. The author will not be rushed. He spends time with the life and personality of Jesus: did he attract the first disciples because of his friendliness rather than his teaching? Martin also looks with delicate care at various strata of Jews in Palestine at the time of the Crucifixion. How many people were really set against Jesus and why? Decade by decade we move with the Apostles outward toward Antioch and more interaction with Hellenized Jews and God Fearers of the Diaspora. We see Saul/Paul as almost the Leon Trotsky of early Christianity or a Henry Ford: "History is bunk" for Paul. Of the whole Old Testament it is the story of Abraham that matters to Paul.Paul was not "taught" his Christianity and he is not empathetic with people, who like the earliest disciples, were slow, slow learners. ***Movement toward a Christian break with real-life post Temple Destruction (70 CE) rabbinic Judaism accelerates in the diaspora as more and more pagans move directly to baptism without submitting to the Jewish law on circumcision, diet and more. But the decisive break comes with the second century popularity of the writings of John, probably the Beloved Disciple. For the first time with great clarity Jesus the carpenter's son is presented as the pre-existing Word of God. God stooped to become matter, human. To emerging rabbinical Judaism this conception was an abomination: to insult God when Jews were deepening their sense of God as utterly other than his creation, transcendent. ***Those are some of the main lines of A HOUSE DIVIDED. It is not the first book a novice will want to read as he/she digs into the history behind 2000 years of Jewish-Christian interaction, misunderstandings and conflict. But it may well be book number five or six. -OOO-