In 70CE the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Second
Temple Judaism, whose worship consisted of animal sacrifice
permitted by biblical command only at the Temple, would have to
reinvent itself as Rabbinic Judaism. Contemporaneously, the
authors of the New Testament Gospels were writing about the
Jewish apocalyptic prophet whom they believed was the awaited
messiah. For both the rabbis and the gospel writers, for both
ancient Jews and ancient Christians, the central authoritative
text was the Torah and the other books we now call the Hebrew
Scriptures. This course surveys how the interpretation (and
reinterpretation) of these books spawned two rival cultural
systems, Judaism and Christianity. The issues addressed are: 1)
What are the truth claims of Judaism and Christianity? 2) In the
first centuries of our era, how did Jewish biblical
interpretation differ from Christian? 3) What differences
resulted in "the parting of the ways" between Judaism and
Christianity? 4) How does each culture deal with the