The question mark in the title of Tobias Nicklas's revised version of his Deichmann lectures, originally delivered in Israel at the Ben Gurion University, Beersheeva, in 2013, reflects ongoing scholarly controversy surrounding the history of Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity. When is it that we can talk about clearly defined entities called Judaism and Christianity and, given the evident controversy surrounding that matter, are we not mistaken in using a metaphor like the ‘parting of the ways', with all it can be taken to imply about specific timelines of separation? Nicklas accepts that the story is a complex and intricate one, made more so by the variety and inadequacy of the extant sources, and his lectures seek to illustrate this point through consideration of a body of Christian (not Jewish) evidence.

Nicklas goes about his task by choosing four different subjects which he thinks are pertinent to it and discussing a variety of Christian engagements with them: the image of the Jewish people; the problem of God's relationship to Israel; Christian usage of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible; and the question of the ongoing role, or lack of it, of the Torah in Christian expressions of ethical identity. His coverage in each case is necessarily selective and that selection is dictated to some extent by picking on examples of apparently representative varied positions. So, for instance, in his discussion of the image of the Jew, the evidence ranges from the negative images that we find in Melito's Peri Pascha and the Gospel of Peter, on the one hand, to, on the other, the Pseudo-Clementines where we can see evidence of a greater desire to associate the Christian movement with Judaism, though Nicklas is aware that sometimes monolithic representations of the attitudes of individual authors will not do. So, a figure like Melito writes in the way that he does about Jews in the Peri Pascha but also seeks out their opinion on the contents of the Old Testament canon. Here issues relating to the context of an individual author further complicate matters, a point which becomes especially clear in Nicklas's second chapter where he discusses views of Israel and its relationship to God. Positions on this issue oscillated not simply because people held different views on the matter (here contrast the position of Barnabas with that of the writer of The Testament of the Patriarchs), but as a consequence of the audience being addressed (pagans or fellow Christians).

The book ends with a set of conclusions which draw out some of the implications of the discussion of the previous four chapters. Limitation of evidence is emphasised, the complexities of identity formation, and the need, in the face of the fragmentary evidence, to construct some kind of a model which is ‘complex enough to at least understand better what we cannot grasp as a whole any more’. In this vein Nicklas predictably rejects the old partings model (‘we should not simply talk about two uniform and consistent groups of people who walked together along the same path for a certain time and, from a certain point in history, separated from each other’) and seeks tentatively to replace it with the bucolic one of the old bush. ‘If we look at it (the bush) from a distance we have the image that this bush is cut into two main parts, but as soon as we look closer we see that there are many more divisions, but there have always been veins connecting the different parts of the plant.’

This is a helpful volume, which reflects complex developments in recent discussion of Jewish-Christian relations and does so by careful engagement with a variety of texts, thus giving the book a more concrete character in contrast to the sometimes overly theoretical discussions of the subject seen elsewhere. The coverage of texts is broad and the interpretation of them solid and thoughtful. The absence of any discussion of Jewish sources, or even the consequences of their near total absence from the second-century record, as well as the pagan evidence, which assumes, as Nicklas indicates, a much more separatist view of Christian and Jewish identities, though intentional, could be seen to detract somewhat from the book's value. But its aim is to elucidate the varied Christian perspectives on the matter. Whether one emerges with a clearer view of the subject under discussion, or even with a more durable and effective model, is not clear. Some of the discussion seems only tangentially to touch upon the issue of separation; and the model of a bush, insofar as it assumes a division into two discernible sections, may raise more questions than it answers. But Nicklas should be thanked for having produced an uncluttered and sensible discussion of a highly contested subject.