This magisterial tome surveys 1,280 years of Jewish and Christian history from 640 b.c.e. from a “maximalist stance” (695). Appropriate to a broad college-level readership, the views represent scholarly consensus rather than new scholarship. The chapters are divided by period into chronological summaries, with thematic syntheses following each section (about every five chapters). Each chapter begins with a view of the broader political context before focusing on Jews and Christians. The longest section, part 3, devotes 144 pages to the shortest chronological period, 14–138 c.e., due to the book's emphasis on the two communities' co-emergence. Vines Intertwined includes eight black-and-white maps and ten appendices containing lists of personalities grouped by political, civic, and religious office. The latter reveal Sandgren's penchant for biographical history, which sometimes relies overly on legend. This engaging, coherent narrative features political dynamics with shorter treatments of philosophical and theological ideas as well as social developments. Historical trends are delineated in broad brushstrokes (for example, “Christians stressed beliefs; Jews stressed practices” [663]).

By alternating between Jewish and Christian history while intermingling both in each other's narratives, Sandgren illustrates his premise that even though Jews and Christians seem to have parted ways, their common origin and continued convergence cast them as “neighbors: vines intertwined” (696). Attempts to use archaeology as a counternarrative to literary evidence (5) is not as successful since the social import of these finds is not well-integrated into the historical account and is occasionally marred by errors (356, 413, 414). The otherwise extensive index could benefit from more geographical terms (for example, Ostia and Sardis).