Parting Ways (5/5): Empire, enforcement, and the split that never ended
Part 5 follows the split between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity into the fourth and fifth centuries, when imperial power entered the story and the cost of overlap began to rise. We start in Antioch, where John Chrysostom’s sermons reveal Christians still attending Jewish festivals and synagogues, and ask what that persistence tells us about how slow separation really was. From there we move to Nicaea and the struggle over sacred time, as Easter and Sabbath become identity markers, then to the ratchet effect: preaching becomes canon, canon becomes law. The Theodosian Code turns boundary-making into administration. The Callinicum synagogue burning shows how bishops could bend imperial policy. Augustine offers a theology of “toleration” that keeps Jews alive but subordinated, and Jerome’s reliance on Jewish Hebrew learning exposes a dependence Christianity could never fully escape. The episode ends in the Jewish east, where rabbinic authority becomes more portable and resilient, and with the central claim of the series: the divorce papers were written in calendars and law, but the two communities never stopped sharing the same book.