Making myths

Exploring Jewish-Christian interaction in Late Antiquity in the form of three case studies, Leonard Rutgers shows that early Christian ideas about Jews and Judaism not only played a determining role in the ideologies that shaped early Christian identity formation, they also had a tendency to spill over into the real world. Therefore such ideas deeply influenced the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations during a period that saw the curtailing of Jewish civil rights and liberties precisely as a result of early Christian exegetical activity.