The young church, flexing its muscles, responded to polemic with polemic. Sayings, many of them bitterly hostile to Judaism, were put in the mouth of Jesus, even though they reflected the conditions in the 80s and 90s rather than the period of Jesus’ own ministry or the first generation of the church. A sense that the gospel and the Torah were incompatible grew up for the first time. In many works that have taken this line, there is the constant implied suggestion: if only we could get back to the pure early period, prior to such hostility, how much happier things would be.52 Sadly for that
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