Charles L. Cohen

Indeed, for virtually all of their mutual existence, Christians and Jews considered themselves separate groups and wanted little interaction. The idea of a Judeo-Christian civilization is a twentieth-century creation, one result of which has been a massive reconsideration of Christianity’s Jewish origins. The phrase “Abrahamic religions” connotes a category founded on the three traditions’ practice of invoking Abraham, but this book further deploys it to consider Islam as being less alien to the Jewish and Christian worldviews than one might suppose

These options usually coexisted peacefully, and one might cast off or pick up a god or goddess depending on fortune’s twists. Jesus’s followers, to the contrary, bore a text-based gospel about the One God who made ethical demands, judged people according to their deeds, and had, in human form, foretold an impending new age.

Observers from the second-century pagan critic Celsus to Marxist intellectuals have alleged that converts came overwhelmingly from the lower and slave classes, but the first churches in fact attracted individuals from across the social spectrum.