Note 34 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

So far as anything can be clearly gathered from the scattered polemic in the Talmud against “the Minim,” the standing title for Jewish heretics, including Christians as such,34 they at least appear not as maintaining the oneness of God but rather as affirming a second Deity,35 and this as early as the beginning of the second century. That the Jewish Rabbis took this view of their doctrine is explained in terms of the actual theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. If there was any new doctrine of monotheism bound up with Jesuism, it must have been outside of the Jewish sphere, where the unity of God was the very ground on which Jesuism was resisted. As such, the Jewish Christians did not even repudiate the Jewish law, being expressly aspersed by the Rabbis as secret traitors who professed to be Jews but held alien heresies.36