" In the later part of the first century, the more the Christian converts were detached from the Jewish community, the more they were exposed to the hostility of the pagan world, since they no longer had the status of a recongnized national community to protect them. Thus the early Christians seemed to be living in a social vacuum, suspended between the Jewish and the Gentile worlds, and this cultural isolation was but the social expression of the deeper spiritual issue of which they were so highly conscious. "

― Christopher Henry Dawson , The Formation of Christendom