But they all believed in the hope of Israel—the hope for a great divine rescue, which for the Jesus-followers had already been launched though obviously had not yet been fully implemented. They all believed in utter loyalty to Israel’s One God. Fierce division existed over what precisely that loyalty should mean, but it would have taken a bold maverick to suggest that there might be forms of loyalty in which Israel’s ancestral traditions, focused on the Torah, would not play a central role.
