Of the religious groups in first-century Judaism dealt with so far it is the Pharisaic which has had the most lasting influence. It developed into Rabbinic Judaism and has persisted to the present. But one other contemporary Jewish group can be compared with it in continued influence. It is the one that arose in response to Jesus of Nazareth, his life, death and resurrection, and ultimately evolved into the Christian Church. The origins of Christianity are immensely complex. They have usually been approached in two main ways which, paradoxically enough, have not been mutually exclusive. One approach, not strictly historical, bearing the authority of a very long history and renewed with vigour in the first half of the twentieth century, has emphasized the radical newness of the Christian Gospel as a supernatural phenomenon breaking into the world with a startling discontinuity which defies rational analysis. The other approach, more characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has sought to understand the emergence of Christianity as a phenomenon to be interpreted within and over against the contemporary first-century religions. The second approach has generally forked in two directions, one leading to the Graeco-Roman world and one to the Jewish. The Christian movement has correspondingly been illumined mainly in terms either of Hellenistic syncretism or of the Judaism of the first century. Only in the twentieth century has the recognition grown that the Hellenistic and Judaic cultures and religions of the first century cannot be easily separated but reveal deep interpenetration (see herein pp. 680–1).
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