In the year AD 66, the Jews broke out in revolt against the rule of Rome. The First Jewish War was the result, a war which proved a disaster for the Jews. The imperial forces crushed them and, in AD 70, destroyed the Temple itself. Its treasures were carted off to Rome in triumph.
Given the role that the Temple played in Jewish religion and society, this was clearly a critical moment for Judaism. The priests who had previously led the people suddenly had no role; the sacrifices which had been carried out every day to bind the people to God ceased. To many it seemed that the end times must be near indeed, Jesus himself had apparently predicted the Temples destruction as a sign of the end times.
A group of Jewish scribes and scholars fled Jerusalem for Jamnia, a town on the coast. Here, they set about rethinking their faith. It has traditionally been supposed that these scholars were Pharisees, and this may well be true, since the kind of Judaism that they preserved revolved around the keeping of the Law in everyday life rather than the bits about sacrifices and the study of the Law, better to understand how to do this. The form of Judaism that resulted from this is what is now known as rabbinical Judaism, meaning that it revolved around the teaching of rabbis, learned scholars who devoted themselves to the study of the ancient texts and to commenting upon them. These rabbis would, in the years to come, produce the Mishnah, a huge series of commentaries upon the Law and other associated writings. Officially, the system of sacrifices was never actually abolished or superseded its abandonment was forced by the destruction of the Temple but the rise of rabbinical Judaism was, in essence, the beginnings of Judaism as we know it today. From this time on, Judaism would be much more monolithic than it had been in Jesus day.
In around AD 90, a council was held at Jamnia to settle a number of questions. One issue was the canon of Scripture: until this time, the Jews had had no fixed set of holy books, but had generally regarded anything that seemed sufficiently ancient as authoritative. Now, though, the rabbis of Jamnia set out a list of books they considered Scriptural. They were to be read in Hebrew, not the Greek translation used by most Christians. Moreover, the rabbis approved a prayer to be said in all synagogues. The exact text of this new prayer is lost, but one traditions records it like this:
And for apostates let there be no hope; and may the insolent kingdom be quickly uprooted, in our days. And may the Nazarenes and the heretics perish quickly; and may they be erased from the Book of Life; and may they not be inscribed with the righteous.
This council therefore represents the final break between the Jews and the Nazarenes, that is, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Relations had certainly been deteriorating long before this, though. We saw earlier how Stephen was killed by a Jewish mob for his Christian faith and his attack on the unbelieving Jews, and Acts testifies to a series of persecutions by the Jewish authorities on the burgeoning Christian movement in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Paul, before his experience of the risen Christ, was one of the most earnest Jewish persecutors of Christians. A major incident occurred in the early 60s with the death of James, leader of the church at Jerusalem. Strikingly, James fate seems to have been not dissimilar to that of his brother, Jesus. Together with some of his companions, he was brought before the high priest and his advisers and condemned as a breaker of the Law. Different sources give different accounts of his death: we told, variously, that he was stoned to death, thrown from a tower of the Temple, beaten to death with a club, or pushed down a flight of stairs. Evidently, where Jesus was legally executed by the Roman prefect, James was lynched. But both brothers had been condemned by the high priest and killed, thirty years apart.
It is hardly surprising that Christians became increasingly bitter about the situation, and came to characterise non-Christian Jews as their opponents. Different books of the New Testament, written at different times, testify to the developing situation. So in Pauls letters we find anguish about the Jews failure to recognise Christ, but no bitterness towards them on the contrary, Paul states in Romans 9 that he wishes he could be condemned if it would save them.
The Gospels, written a couple of decades later, tell a rather different story. Arguments between Christians and non-Christian Jews evidently led to greater interest in how Jesus himself, during his lifetime, had handled such situations, and so we find many stories in the Gospels of Jesus debating with other Jews. Most of his interlocutors are Pharisees unsurprising given the rise of Pharisee-style Judaism during this period. And the different Gospels apparently reflect different attitudes. For example, most scholars believe that Marks Gospel was written first, and here we find a mixture of positive and negative characterisations of Pharisees. Matthews Gospel is far more negative, culminating in its famous chapter 23, a long diatribe against the Pharisees, denounced as hypocrites, children of hell, and a brood of vipers. This Gospel is often thought to have been written at around the time that the Christians at least those Matthew knew were redefining themselves as a separate group from Judaism. Relations between the two groups were at their worst, hence the bitterness that comes across in his Gospel. Johns Gospel, by contrast, was probably written shortly after the introduction of the new prayer in the synagogues, and here we find that Jesus opponents are generally just the Jews, with little attempt to distinguish between Pharisees, priests, and the rest; and the debates about the Law and Sabbath observance that punctuate the other Gospels are missing. It seems that by this time, the Christians and the Jews had finally split. The debates between the two were, for the author of Johns Gospel, a dead issue, and he was not interested in reproducing that kind of material in his work. For him, the Jews were apparently a fairly homogenous group who were largely hostile to Jesus and who were not critically engaged with except to be denounced.