Sources: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.5.2–3, 4.5.1–4; Epiphanius, Panarion 29, 30; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho.

Judean Christianity (~70–135 AD) is the transitional period between the Jerusalem church of the apostolic generation and the full separation of Christianity from Judaism. After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 AD), the Jewish-Christian community that had fled to Pella (reported by Eusebius from Hegesippus) returned to a rebuilt Jerusalem. They maintained Torah observance, circumcision, and Jewish practice while confessing Jesus as Messiah. Eusebius records a list of fifteen “Hebrew” bishops of Jerusalem ending with the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 AD) — after which Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and banned Jews from the city. The Hadrianic prohibition forced Jewish Christians to choose: they could stay only if they did not observe Jewish law, which they refused. After 135 AD the Jerusalem church becomes entirely Gentile. Judean Christianity is the community squeezed out at the Parting of the Ways — too Jewish for mainstream Christianity (which increasingly defined itself against Judaism), too Christian for rabbinic Judaism (which inserted the Birkat HaMinim). Their gradual disappearance is one of the more poignant historical processes in religious history: a people whose entire identity was holding two things together, destroyed by the hardening of the boundary between those two things.