In his natural eagerness to exonerate first-century Jews from the charge of being arrogantly exclusive and stand-offish towards Gentiles,95 Sanders seems to me to have made two unjustified moves. First, he argues (rightly) that one cannot retroject later rabbinic passages into the pre-70 period, but implies (surely incorrectly) that the pre-70 period would have been less likely than the post-70 period as a setting for anti-Gentile codes.
