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The Big Split

      If the believers in Jesus were full-fledged Torah-observant members of the Jewish community in the mid-first-century, it is indisputable that less than a hundred years later the majority of those who claimed to follow Jesus had established themselves as a separate religion and were doing all they could to distance themselves from the Jewish people and the biblical lifestyle. This trend came to a climax with Marcion, who in the middle of the second century tried to claim that the God of the Jews was the enemy of the Christian God. He proposed a new canon of scripture that didn't include any of the Hebrew Bible or any writings that referred to it.

      How and why did the believing community change so drastically in the span of a few short years? As usual, there was not just one cause of this change. The following pages attempt to review some of the main factors that led to the split between the church and the synagogue that began in the last half of the first century.

The Big Split - Early Opposition