Jewish Christianity

A compelling account of Christianity’s Jewish beginnings, from one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient religion How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians. In this electrifying social and intellectual history, Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.

A fresh exploration of the category Jewish Christianity, from its invention in the Enlightenment to contemporary debates For hundreds of years, historians have been asking fundamental questions about the separation of Christianity from Judaism in antiquity. Matt Jackson-McCabe argues provocatively that the concept "Jewish Christianity," which has been central to scholarly reconstructions, represents an enduring legacy of Christian apologetics. Freethinkers of the English Enlightenment created this category as a means of isolating a distinctly Christian religion from what otherwise appeared to be the Jewish culture of Jesus and the apostles. Tracing the development of this patently modern concept of a Jewish Christianity from its origins to early twenty-first-century scholarship, Jackson-McCabe shows how a category that began as a way to reimagine the apologetic notion of an authoritative "original Christianity" continues to cause problems in the contemporary study of Jewish and Christian antiquity. He draws on promising new approaches to Christianity and Judaism as socially constructed terms of identity to argue that historians would do better to leave the concept of Jewish Christianity behind.

Jewish Book - Christian Book: Hebrew Manuscripts in Transition between Jews and Christians in the Context of German Humanism is intended as a contribution to the history of the production, circulation, and reception of Hebrew materials outside of a Jewish context. An intriguing development in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Christian Hebraism is how and why Christian scholars came to produce their own Hebrew books. Jewish Book - Christian Book: Hebrew Manuscripts in Transition between Jews and Christians in the Context of German Humanism offers a novel examination of this phenomenon in light of nearly unknown Hebrew manuscripts produced by German Hebraists in that period. Anticipating Hebraist printed editions, the Hebraist manuscript copies of Jewish texts represent one of the earliest attempts of Christians to independently form a stock of Jewish literature, which would meet their scholarly needs and interests, and embody a unique encounter of Jewish and Christian views of the Hebrew text and book. How Hebraist copyists coped with the inherent Jewishness of the Hebrew texts and in what ways they transformed and adapted them both textually and materially to serve Christian audience are among the key questions discussed in this study.

Biblical Studies

"Jewish-Christianity" is a contested category in current research. But for precisely this reason, it may offer a powerful lens through which to rethink the history of Jewish/Christian relations. Traditionally, Jewish-Christianity has been studied as part of the origins and early diversity of Christianity. Collecting revised versions of previously published articles together with new materials, Annette Yoshiko Reed reconsiders Jewish-Christianity in the context of Late Antiquity and in conversation with Jewish studies. She brings further attention to understudied texts and traditions from Late Antiquity that do not fit neatly into present day notions of Christianity as distinct from Judaism. In the process, she uses these materials to probe the power and limits of our modern assumptions about religion and identity.

Over the past few decades, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift in Jewish -- Christian relations, including signs of a new, improved Christian attitude towards Jews. Christianity in Jewish Terms is a Jewish theological response to the profound changes that have taken place in Christian thought. The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which features a main essay, written by a Jewish scholar, that explores the meaning of a set of Christian beliefs. Following the essay are responses from a second Jewish scholar and a Christian scholar. Designed to generate new conversations within the American Jewish community and between the Jewish and Christian communities, Christianity in Jewish Terms lays the foundation for better understanding. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001.

Effective interpretation views the New Testament in historical perspective. In this expository survey of Acts i to xii, James, I and II Peter, Jude, and Hebrews, the author treats these portions of the New Testament as the life and literature which developed from the original disciples of Jesus and their Jewish followers. The work is designed for the average student of the English New Testament.