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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