Another distinguishing mark of the Jerusalem Jewish Christians was religious communism. "No one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common" (Acts 4:32). They were not formally obliged to divest themselves of their property and goods, as was the case with the Essenes, but there was strong moral pressure and not to do so would have been judged improper.

So prior to the admission of Gentile candidates, the affiliates of the Jesus party appeared to ordinary people in Jerusalem as representatives of a Jewish sect. They reminded them of the Essenes, who were comparable in number, and exhibited similar customs such as the daily solemn meal and life from a common kitty. Indeed, the followers of Jesus were referred to in the late Fifties of the first century as the "sect [hairesis] of the Nazarenes" (Acts 24:5, 14) and in later patristic literature the Judaeo-Christians were designated as the Ebionites or "the Poor". The Church Fathers, who counted the Ebionites as heretics, sarcastically (and mistakenly) interpreted the title as pointing to the poverty of the Ebionites' beliefs. If the final sentence of the Jesus notice of Josephus is accepted as genuine then the Palestinian Jewish-Christian community still existed in the Holy Land after the war against Rome in 66-73/4 CE. The Testimonium Flavianum (Jewish Antiquities 18. 63-4) in fact speaks of them as a tribe (phylon) of the Jewish nation. In his turn, the church historian Eusebius (260-339 CE) reports that up to the war of Bar Kokhba (132-5 CE) all the 13 bishops of Jerusalem, starting with James, the brother of Jesus, came from the "circumcision" (Ecclesiastical History 4. 3, 5).

The author of the Acts of the Apostles identifies the big demographic watershed regarding the composition of the Jesus movement. I do not allude here to the admission, despite Jesus's earlier prohibition, of the Samaritans into the church by Peter and John (Acts 8:16-7), for the Samaritans were Jews, inhabitants of the former northern kingdom of Israel, notwithstanding their differences from the Judaeans in religious traditions (they worshipped on Mount Gerizim and not in Jerusalem and their Bible was restricted to the Law of Moses, without the Prophets and the Writings). Nor was the baptism of an Ethiopian official, the finance minister of Queen Candace (Acts 8:26-38), by the deacon Philip against the accepted rules, because he was already a Jewish proselyte. 

The revolution started around 40 CE with the admission into the church of the family of the Roman centurion Cornelius in Caesarea, and later that of the Gentile members of the mixed Jewish-Greek church in Antioch, not forgetting the many pagan converts of Paul in Syria, Asia Minor and Greece. With them the Jewish monopoly in the new movement came to an end and Jewish and Gentile Christianity was born.