Torah Praxis after 70 CE: Reading Matthew and Luke-Acts as Jewish Texts

These are exciting times for exploring any topic relating early Christianity to its original Jewish matrix. How fortunate we are to lie far away from those days when many Christian theologians and historians felt anxious about the Jewish heritage embedded in their Christian tradition. From the historical Jesus to the apostle Paul, many are the scholars of Christian provenance who have affirmed in positive terms the Jewishness of these two foundational figures. This tendency has also been reciprocated among several Jewish scholars, first with the historical Jesus, and eventually even with Paul who had previously been viewed, and still is by some, as a Jewish apostate and the first “Christian.” Ever since the publication of E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism, many Christian scholars have finally heeded to George Foot Moore’s prophetic cry against Christian misrepresentations and stigmatizations of rabbinic Judaism. The fascinating discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the new intellectual and ecu- menical atmosphere reigning after World War II have only encouraged and accelerated the process of recovering the diversity of Second Temple Judaism, which in turn has brought the early Jesus movement, at least some of it, back to its original Jewish pastures.