Jesus is acknowledged by modern scholars to be an enigmatic and – to an extent – irretrievable historical figure. It is now widely agreed that Christianity arose within the beleaguered and fragmented Jewish community of first-century Palestine. Jesus and his immediate followers were clearly Palestinian Jews. Living through a tumultuous period in Palestinian Jewish history, Jesus and his disciples adumbrated their own special view of the covenant between God and his people Israel – its essence, its dynamic, its demands, and the special significance of the immediate historical moment. To be sure, this formulation was but one of many competing first-century Jewish perceptions of the divine–human covenant. Clearly, Jesus' vision did not win the day among his Palestinian Jewish contemporaries. However, exactly what he claimed and how they disputed these claims cannot now be known with certainty.

This very earliest set of views and commitments – whatever they might have precisely been – proved attractive to groups beyond the original Palestinian Jewish matrix. We hear of a number of Diaspora Jews resident in Jerusalem who were attracted to the Jesus movement. Paul, one such Diaspora Jew and a former persecutor of the young community, became an important figure in the movement, disagreeing on key issues with Jesus' more immediate followers. For many recent scholars, Paul represents the onset of a serious break between the new movement and its Jewish matrix.