The object of the present study is to describe the intellectual foundations of the ancient schism between Judaism and Christianity as it appeared to its earliest surviving Jewish witnesses. Since the early nineteenth century, critical efforts at documenting the grounds of the historical conflict between Jew and Christian have drawn primarily upon the ancient Christian literary record and significantly less upon the contemporary Jewish record as represented by the literature of the early rabbinic sages. The net effect of this scholarly tendency has been a dominant historical discourse on the schism heavily biased toward the Christian experience, often to the marginalization or exclusion of the Jewish experience. In light of this discrepancy, the author's aim is to outline a new historical model of the schism adequately accounting for the Jewish evidence while nonetheless complementing the dominant Christian narrative. The author proposes to achieve this goal by analyzing the Christian schism as a function of Jewish history. Acknowledging that the ancient Jewish authors would likely have commemorated the schism in different terms than their Christian contemporaries, the author proposes to read the Jewish evidence in light of the unique socio-rhetorical objectives of its authors. Specifically, the author proposes to situate its dual epistemologies of Judaism and Christianity within the objective confines of the Roman Near East, the setting of the early rabbinic movement. Tracing the development of the ideas of Jewish and Christian identity in the minds of the region's Jewish ethnic polity, the author attempts to demonstrate a process of gradual dissociation between the two spanning roughly the first three centuries of the Common Era. This cognitive process, the author argues, was spurred by political and cultural developments affecting the internal social dynamic of Near Eastern Jewry. The result was a gradual deterioration of the theological platform of the so-called Jewish Christians, i.e., ethnic Jews who maintained characteristically Christian beliefs. It was this process, the author concludes, that informed the uniquely Jewish impression of the Christian schism inscribed upon the classical rabbinic literary corpus and subsequently upon the collective historical consciousness of the Jewish people.