Jesus' Wife

[Mudhammam]

a split from Second Temple Judaism in the beginning to mid first-century A.D.

That's the story which they began telling. Evidence for it happening is so thin it is transparent.

How so? I'm not really interested in debating the dating of the New Testament or relevant extra-bliblical references to the early Church, primarily because I don't think New Testament studies and the historical method in general is very scientific or reliable. I say this because both liberal and conservative camps have a wide variety of interpretations on key issues and there seems no path to solvency until archaeologists do the hard work and make some further discovery that leads to extensive progress. I do think scholarship is getting better and more refined since the Enlightenment but it has a ways to go. That said, I try to combine the best of all arguments and compromise by allowing for time frame in the middle. This puts all the Gospels post 70 A.D. and possibly into the early second century. I think there are about six Paulian epistles considered authentic. Those six Paulian epistles and the Gospels are what I think are most historically relevant, and probably the book of Revelation. Paul's works are arguably 50-60A.D.-ish considering internal language, content, etc. So granted you push all these into the second-century, you still have a movement that has already some coherency and structure, in both doctrine and organization. What argument is there for any other century but the first of the Common Era, and at least by the middle?