This change takes us to the other end of the spectrum, to writers who understand early Christianity as simply a Jewish sect, not too unlike the many other Jewish sects of the period. This new point of view owes something to the discovery of the Scrolls in 1947/8, but more to the change in general attitudes towards Judaism in the period following the Second World War.10 Suddenly Jewish material was good, pure, early, ‘biblical’, and Hellenistic material was corrupt, distorted, later and non-‘biblical’. These evaluative sub-texts precipitated a widespread new reading of the period. Phenomena
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