According to the editors, the fundamental premise behind this collection of essays, which consists of papers delivered at a conference in the Jewish Museum in Brussels in September 2011, is the view that Judaism and Christianity cannot be treated as two separate entities in the first two centuries ce. ‘Thus the birth and unfolding of Christianity represents a major development within Second Temple Judaism … Similarly, the emergence of rabbinic Judaism concerns a development of prime importance for the history of Christianity and should not be treated as an event on the margins or periphery of church history’ (p. 4). Important as a unifying factor in this history is the Roman Empire, whose impact upon the lives of Jews and Christians, manifested in particular in the three Jewish revolts of the period running from 66 to 135 ce, has to be kneaded into any account of this complex history.

The volume divides itself into three parts. Part i, ‘Varieties of Judaism and Christianity in late Second Temple Judaism’, consists of four essays. Paula Fredriksen discusses a number of what she takes to be ill-conceived assumptions which adversely affect our understanding of Paul's Jewish identity. Eyal Regev examines Judaism in the period preceding 70, highlighting its sectarian character and the controversies surrounding understandings of the temple. Baudouin Decharnaux shows how Philo's depiction of the Carabas affair in the late 30s, which sparks off a crisis in Jewish-Gentile relations in Alexandria, betrays an ideology in which a variety of senses of order, imperial, natural and cosmological, play a significant part. Huub van de Sandt explores approaches to purity in three New Testament writings (Jude, James and Hebrews). While all these writings use purity language to reinforce a sense of unity, their approaches are different, with Hebrews’ emphasis on moral, as opposed to ritual, purity indicating a possible ‘Christian’ response to the crisis of the temple's destruction.

In the second part of the volume, ‘The Period of the Revolts, 66–135 ce’, James Rives provides an interesting discussion of sacrifice and its central role in ancient society and attempts to place Jewish understandings within that context. Against the background that he has portrayed, the Jewish decision to stop sacrificing on behalf of the emperor in 66 ce may well have been a significant factor in the start of the Jewish revolt. Steve Mason's essay on the causes of the first Jewish revolt, the longest of the volume, examines a variety of approaches to this subject, in the end arguing for what he calls a ‘tragic-ironic’ cause, that is, one which has less to do with the intentions of its major participants and more to do with happenstance (a view, interestingly, questioned by the editors in their opening essay). Adrian Goldsworthy seeks to contextualise the Jewish revolts within a wider Roman setting, exploring Roman approaches to the revolt, and noting that Romans rarely ever lost wars as opposed to battles. Such an observation, however, should not lead one into thinking that the Jewish decision to revolt was somehow ridiculous. Hindsight is a great thing and we should take seriously the fact that Josephus decided to join the revolt and that the thought of divine assistance played an important role. Joshua Schwartz critiques Seth Schwartz's view that Jewish culture somehow collapsed in the wake of the first Jewish revolt, showing that archaeological remains in Israel for the period between the first and Bar Kokhba revolts betray more continuity in Jewish life than might have been expected. J. Andrew Overman looks at the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jewish and Christian authors, arguing that there is perhaps a tendency to exaggerate its significance in the light of its obvious importance (together with the whole Jewish war) in a developing Flavian ideology. Jews were clearly affected by it from an early stage, while Christians saw it as an important factor in a developing anti-Jewish ideology, somewhat later, after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Ze'ev Safrai concludes the section with a helpful examination of socio-economic and cultural developments in Galilee from after the first revolt to the early third century, noting that this is marked by a greater concentration of Jewish populations in the villages rather than the cities.

The final part of the volume is entitled ‘Post-Revolt Jewish and Christian Identities’. John Barclay, in one of the most compelling essays of the volume, argues that there is no unambiguous evidence until Celsus for pagan authors thinking that Christians were either Jews or indeed related to Judaism. Marius Heemstra looks at the role of the Fiscus Judaicus in a developing history of Jewish-Christian relations, arguing, inter alia, that it was an effective instrument in bringing about separation between the two, and indeed viewed positively in this regard by Jewish authorities, who wanted to end any sense of association with the despised Christians. Adiel Schremer looks at the law of the minim in Tannaitic literature, concentrating in particular upon Tosefta Hullin 2.20–1, arguing that by the first third of the second century the rabbis had identified certain individuals as heretics. Peter Tomson examines the Didache, Matthew and Barnabas as sources for early second-century Jewish and Christian history, noting variant attitudes to Judaism, and arguing, significantly, for the view that Matthew and Didache use ‘rabbi’ in a way that implies knowledge of Yavnean rabbis. Albert Baumgarten looks again at the much-discussed subject of Celsus’ Jew, arguing for his ‘real’ character, and then showing how consideration of the words attributed to him impact on current debates about Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity. In particular Baumgarten highlights the fact that the Jew in question assumes an absolute division between Judaism and Christianity and rather than concentrating upon issues of ritual as central to that difference, chooses to highlight issues of doctrine. In the final essay of the volume Ushay Rosen-Zvi looks at the way in which Jewish ideas of the evil inclination and Christian ideas of demonology coincide (here concentrating on rabbinic and monastic material). The similarities outlined are, however, to be considered as a witness to what the author terms ‘a shared discursive space’ rather than actual contact.

As is always the case with collective volumes, it would be difficult to draw a particular conclusion from the various essays. Some seem more favourable to the general rationale of the volume as set out by its editors, that is, taking more seriously the shared character of Jewish and Christian history in this period (one thinks especially of the essays by Fredriksen, de Sandt and Tomson), while others are not (see Barclay's and Baumgarten's contributions). Some bypass the question of a shared history, arguing for something more complex (Rosen-Zvi), and some barely engage with the subject at all (Schwartz, Safrai, Mason and Goldsworthy), their essays, one assumes, forming a kind of helpful background to discussion. The revolts do loom large, but aside from Overman's piece, and by a different route, de Sandt's and Tomson's, there is little direct engagement with the problem of the effect of these events upon Jewish-Christian relations. The editors are aware of these matters, and indeed some might think that the presence of variant perspectives and methodologies is preferable to a more monochrome product. Certainly many of the essays bear closer inspection in their own right, whatever we might think of the coherence of the volume in which they are found.