Among histories of Christianity there has long existed a gap, which either has passed unnoticed or has been deemed of little consequence by Christian scholars. It is only where this gap is at its narrowest, in the early days of the Church, that any consideration has been paid to it,
and then the treatment of the subject involved, the life and faith of primitive Jewish Christianity,
has been of the most partial character. A common judgment has been expressed by the late Dr.
Hort in his lectures on Judaistic Christianuy. He describes the Jewish Church as;
“a natural product of the circumstances of the Apostolic Age, living on for some generations,
and that probably not without times of revival, but becoming more and more evidently a futile anachronism as the main body of the Church grew up into a stately tree in the eyes of all men; and at length dying naturally away.”
