La sinagoga cristiana (1989 Montserrat Torrents), book

La sinagoga cristiana: El gran conflicto religioso del siglo I <Spanish> / The Christian Sinagogue: Religious Conflict in the First Century CE (1989) is a book by Josep Montserrat Torrents.

Abstract

After a careful methodological, historical, textual, and hermeneutical analysis which comprises the major part of the book, the author attempts at establishing a “global theory” of the process that lead to the foundations of the Christian religion between the mid-first and the mid-second century CE. He explores the parting of the ways between John the Baptist and the Petrine group under Jesus’ influence and proposes to distinguish between the nationalistic members of the new movement who wanted to operate in Jerusalem in both religious and political terms and those who did not and intended to develop a more spiritual option in Galilee. He then offers a tentative reconstruction of the events that, following the death of Jesus under the pressure exerted against the Jewish and Roman authorities by the nationalists, culminated in the repression of Jesus’ followers, favoured the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, and precipitated the schism between the two factions after the first Jewish war. Finally, he suggests that attempts were made to produce a synthesis of the contrasting theologies inherent to both groups and to lay the premises a new religion with a new Scriptural canon between the first and the second Jewish wars, and that Christianity took definite shape, thereby, in the first half of the second century CE. The author is entirely dependent upon Josephus in his reconstruction of Second Temple sects. Conversely, his analysis of the Jewish groups that emerged between 70 and 135 CE is, albeit somewhat conventional, more elaborated. Regarding the composition of the New Testament, he merely offers a glimpse at the different theories advanced by different source-critical scholars. Yet his study of the Jewish roots of early Christian theology is both comprehensive and insightful and his study of the regional trajectories of the early Christian faith extremely useful and respectful of its many nuances. -- Carlos A. Segovia, Camilo José Cela University

Editions and translations

Published in Barcelona, Spain: Muchnik, 1989 (Religiones, 1; ISBN: 84-7669-103-3); Madrid, Spain: Trotta, 2005 (2nd ed.)

Table of contents

• Prefacio
• 1. Sobre métodos y procedimientos

PRIMERA PARTE

• 2. El judaísmo hasta el año 70
• 3. Filón de Alejandría
• 4. La Carta a los Gálatas
• 5. Aspectos de la misión paulina
• 6. Jerusalén y Roma

SEGUNDA PARTE

• 7. El judaísmo entre las dos guerras
• 8. El concepto de judaísmo cristiano
• 9. Corrientes del judaísmo entre 70 y 135
• 10. El judaísmo cristiano (1)
• 11 El judaísmo cristiano (2)
• 12. El judaísmo cristiano (3)
• 13 El judaísmo cristiano (4)
• 14 La evolución del judaísmo cristiano

TERCERA PARTE

• 15. Galilea
• 16. Jerusalén
• 17. La diáspora siríaca

• Conclusiones