22 - Jewish Christianity

Summary

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM

The term ‘Jewish Christianity’, in German ‘Judenchristentum’, was current in the eighteenth century, but was brought to prominence by Ferdinand Christian Baur. He used it to describe what he took to be an important phenomenon within the Christianity of the first two centuries ce. On this at least most scholars can agree. But here perhaps agreement can be said to cease, for, in spite of a history of investigation stretching back to the early 1830s, many questions relating to Jewish Christianity, its history, origins and social and religious profile, remain matters of controversy.

There are a number of reasons for the confused state of scholarship on this question. First, insofar as we know, no one in the ancient Church or synagogue referred to themselves, or were referred to, as Jewish Christians. This gives rise to a number of problems, not least that of defining the term. Secondly, we have to contend with the inadequacy of the relevant primary sources. These are few in number, and nearly all written by those who were opposed to Jewish Christians, and had an incomplete and/or confused knowledge of what Jewish Christians might have thought. Those apparently written by Jewish Christians are often preserved in fragmentary form (this particularly applies to the Jewish Christian Gospels), and in complex corpora like the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions, which present literary-critical problems of an almost insurmountable kind. Moreover, while we may be in a position to know what some Christians thought about Jewish Christians and how they described them, we appear to be much less well informed about what Jews thought about Jewish Christians.