I return now, for a couple of posts, to my thoughts on the rise of anti-Judaism in the early Christian tradition, and my thesis that it was largely driven by a different way of reading the Bible, that the Christians insisted the Jewish scriptures were looking forward to Jesus as a suffering messiah who would die for sins, and in doing so fulfilled all sorts of prophecies, and most Jews thought this entire view was nonsense, if not blasphemous. Here is where my thoughts move on from what I said in the last post on the matter.  Should you need to refresh your memory, it is here:   https://ehrmanblog.org/why-christians-needed-an-old-testament-pagan-attacks-on-the-faith/   An important point to stress is that Christians recognized that if their own interpretations of the Jewish Bible were correct, the Jews’ own interpretations were necessarily invalid.   As I argued in Triumph of Christianity, the distinctive feature of early Christianity vis-à-vis all the other religions of the Roman world – including Judaism – was that Christians argued their views provided the way of salvation and the [...]