A good
opening
paragraph:
There
are
many factors that contributed to the separation of Christianity
from
Judaism; nevertheless the main cause was Christians' view of
Jesus as
the messiah. First of all there was the denial by many Jews that
Jesus
was the Messiah they were expecting. Another event that added to
the
separation was Paul's letter to the Galatians and the Council of
Jerusalem where such matters as circumcision and the diet
followed by
Jews were in dispute. The Destruction of the Second Temple
demonstrated
how Christians were not interested in helping the Jews defeat
the
Romans. In 135 CE the event known as the Bar Kokhba revolt took
place
making clear the distinction between Christianity and Judaism.
I can
tell from
the start that this is going to be a good paper. Key events
are
summarised in chronological order, and the final two sentences
make it
clear that the student is concerned with Jewish history as
well as the
Christian perspective. Many students simply ignored the
upheavals that
Jews experienced in this era.
An example of good research:
To
understand
this we must first know the types of ban that the Jews had.
The first
was caused Niddui and this form of ban is seen to be
temporary and it
was only for the taking of decisions within the
religion...This had a
duration of about thirty days. The other one was known as
Herem and
this one was much more serious, this ban meant ...permament
exclusion...But there has been no evidence that this type of
abn was
ever used before 200 CE [Katz, Steven, "Issues in the
Separation of
Judaism and Christianity After 70 CE: A Reconsideration",The Society of Biblical
Literature,
103, 1984, p.43]
The
student has
used J-STOR, a database that we can access through the
library, in
order to find some excellent secondary source material. If
you want to
know why you are not getting above a B+, one thing to ask
yourself is
whether your research ever reaches this level of detail.
Now an example of poor research:
As
Jesus
began moving from town to town more people began to
follow what Jesus
said, and the vast majority were not Jews.
When
Jesus
was spreading his ideals, circumcision was not preached,
mentioned nor
urged by Jesus, instead he changed this ritual to
baptism.
The
first
sentence is completely wrong. Jesus had very little
contact with
gentiles. He preached to Jews, and his followers were
all Jews. So of
course, he didn't mention circumcision - all the men
had been
circumcised as babies, and so there was no need to
remind them. It is
true that Jesus encouraged his followers to baptize,
but this was not a
substitute for circumcision. Only when Paul started
converting large
numbers of gentiles was it necessary to ask whether
gentile converts to
Christians needed to be circumcized, and the fact that
this was then a
controversial question indicates that Jesus himself
had never had to
confront the issue. A very basic failure of research
leads, in this
case, to a misunderstanding of Jesus' message. A bit
more attention to
the class, and to the evidence contained in the
primary sources, and
this error would have been avoided.
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