Into this carefully maintained urban religious ecosystem, working their way via the network of diaspora synagogue communities, walked the apostles of the early Jesus movement. What these apostles urged on their Jewish hearers would have required no huge adjustment religiously so much as an altered perspective. The god (sic) of Israel, they proclaimed, was about to end history. Some of the behaviors that they consequently encouraged—focused repentance, immersion for sin in Jesus’ name, reception of divine spirit— were indeed new. But diaspora Jews attracted to the Jesus movement still prayed to the same god as before; they still read the same scriptures as before; they still kept the same calendar as before; and their traditional practices, domestic and liturgical, were all the same as before. Jews joining the Jesus movement, in short, did not “convert” so much as make a lateral move within Judaism, similar to a decision to move from being a Sadducee to becoming a Pharisee, as Josephus, in his own life, had done. To an outside observer, it would all have seemed like some version of Jewish business as usual.  -Paula Fredricksen, When Christians Were Jews, p.131