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Many previous interpreters have sought to locate the origins of the Dormition traditions within ancient “Jewish‐Christianity.” Although they are quite correct in identifying a number of heterodox features present in some of the narratives, Jewish‐Christianity is a highly problematic construct that does not offer the best explanation for these features. Contact with some sort of gnostic Christianity can better explain these elements. Most importantly, these traces of contact with early Christian heterodoxy very strongly suggest that the narratives in question most likely were composed by the third century at the latest. This early date, along with several other features, makes very unlikely the frequently suggested hypothesis that the origin of the Dormition traditions is somehow linked with resistance to the council of Chalcedon.

This chapter examines central developments in the study of Jewish Christianity in the post-Holocaust era. It explores how Christian apologetic assumptions—and the interpretive problems they generate—continued to shape discussions of Jewish Christianity, and treatments of Jewish and Christian antiquity more generally, even as Christian theology became increasingly marginalized in critical scholarship. The tone was set when French scholars Marcel Simon and Jean Daniélou produced their own fresh analyses of Jewish Christianity—each, however, based on fundamentally different definitions. Simon defined it strictly with reference to Torah observance. Daniélou's iteration, on the other hand, was formulated along the lines of what Albrecht Ritschl had called judaistisches Christenthum: “the expression of Christianity in the thought-forms of Later Judaism.” Over the next half-century, analyses of Jewish Christianity coalesced largely around one or the other of these two approaches.

This chapter explores the development of an occlusionistic model of Jewish Christianity, and its relationship to the rise of critical New Testament scholarship, in the works of English Deist Thomas Morgan and German theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur. Morgan and Baur did not abandon John Toland's humanistic retelling of Christian myth so much as simply reconfigure the role of Jewish Christianity within it. The apostles no longer stood alongside Jesus as examples of an authoritative incarnation of transcendent Christianity in Jewish cultural forms. Now they represented the first occlusion of transcendent Christianity by those Jewish forms. The normative authority traditionally ascribed to the apostles and their purported writings, accordingly, was effectively reduced to the singular apostle Paul and his letters. The commingling of the latter with the former in the New Testament was explained in terms of a pervasive and multifaceted miscoloration of transcendent Christianity by its first, Jewish receptacle during the apostolic and postapostolic eras. Thus, Morgan and, more consequentially, Baur both called for a systematic and thoroughly critical study of the New Testament itself, precisely to distill from all its Jewish trappings the true, transcendent Christianity they assumed it concealed.

This chapter addresses the contemporary debate about the enduring utility of the category “Jewish Christianity” in light of the new historical problem. Questions resulting from the eclipse of Christian apologetics in critical reconstructions of Jewish and Christian antiquity have been raised with increasing insistence in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. In the theoretical void left by the evacuation of Christian theology from critical historiography, scholars are seeking to reconceptualize the nature of Christianity, and the problem of its origins and development in relation to Judaism, in light of the more general human propensity to construct and maintain social and cultural identities. This paradigm shift has led to fundamental changes in the scholarly debates about Jewish Christianity. The question at issue today is no longer merely how to define the category. Among those who continue to use it, the question is whether it should be defined at all given the inevitable fluidity of cultural identity. Even more fundamental is the question of the continued utility of the very notion of Jewish Christianity.

This chapter shows how Ferdinand Christian Baur's more traditionally minded critics, in an effort to turn back his assault on apostolic and canonical authority, combined the disparate models of John Toland and Baur into new and more complex taxonomies of Jewish Christianity. This resulted in the notorious problems of definition and terminology that have plagued the category ever since. Underlying the varying details of these new accounts of Jewish Christianity was a common counternarrative that restored the integrity and authority traditionally accorded to the apostolic and canonical spheres by revising Baur's theory at two critical junctures. First, the apostles, while superficially similar to Paul's “Judaizing” opponents in outward practice, were said to have been aligned with Paul, not with those opponents, in essential religious principle. Second, the “Judaizers” were said to have quickly become a nonfactor in the development of the early Catholic Church and thus to have had virtually no meaningful influence on the New Testament.

This chapter explains why Irish freethinker John Toland, in eighteenth-century London, began to reclassify groups long categorized as heresy as “Jewish Christianity.” More specifically, it argues that Toland invented an incarnational model of Jewish Christianity as the centerpiece of a freethinking reappropriation of Christian apologetic historiography. By the end of the nineteenth century, above all because of the influential work of the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, the concept had become a given within the emerging field of historical-critical scholarship on early Christianity. The chapter then looks at Toland's reconstruction of early Christianity, published under the title Nazarenus in 1718. Toland composed Nazarenus not merely as an account of early Christianity, but as an account of true Christianity. The category “Jewish Christianity” was a by-product of Toland's attempt to divert the authorizing power of Jesus and the apostles from traditional orthodoxy to his own enlightened humanism.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the concept of Jewish Christianity. Developed alongside critical New Testament scholarship, the idea of an early Jewish Christianity has long been imagined as the historical site where Christianity and Judaism had once touched each other most profoundly. From the point of view of the Parting of the Ways model, it represented not only the transitional phase between a Jewish Jesus and the full flowering of Christianity as its own religion, but in some cases evidence for an ongoing relationship between Christianity and Judaism even after their split. More recently, with the breakdown of the Parting of the Ways model, the notion of an early Jewish Christianity has taken on a new significance, precisely as a “way that never parted.” At the same time, the breakdown of the Parting of the Ways model has quite exacerbated the definitional and taxonomic confusion that has always surrounded the concept of an early Jewish Christianity. The chapter then presents the central problem of Jewish Christianity: Can the category “Jewish Christianity” be useful for reconceptualizing the origins of Christianity and the Christianity–Judaism divide beyond the parameters of Christian apologetic historiography and the Parting of the Ways paradigm?

This chapter discusses participatory union with Christ, examining Pauline Christianity, Jewish Christianity, Johannine Christianity, Ignatius of Antioch, Valentinian Christianity, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, Hippolytus of Rome, and the early Christian approach to deification. Among Christian authors contemporary with the last New Testament writers, the chapter notes that only Ignatius of Antioch takes up the theme of participatory union. He does not use the terminology of deification but prepares the way for it by speaking of Christ as God. In around 160, Justin Martyr put forward the view that as the people of Christ were the new Israel, the gods were those who were obedient to Christ. Justin's younger contemporary, Irenaeus of Lyons, drew the implications of the conjunction of ‘gods’ with ‘sons’ and claimed that the gods were the baptised.

This concluding chapter demonstrates how one can get around the problems created by Jewish Christianity by approaching the question of the origins of Christianity and the Christianity–Judaism division as a study in the production and dissemination of ancient social taxonomies. The central question from this perspective is neither the similarities and differences in culture nor even the social interaction among ancient Christians and Jews, but how early Jesus groups imagined themselves and their characteristic cultures in relation to Judeans and theirs. At what point did some Jesus groups begin to assert that Judeans and their distinguishing culture were, per se, “other” and to reify that difference by postulating a distinction between Christianism and Judaism? Whatever its various social consequences, how widespread was this taxonomy before its imperial adoption in the centuries after Constantine? Through an examination of a few exemplary cases, a significant distinction can be observed well into late antiquity between Jesus groups who made sense of their social experience with reference to such a notion of Christianism and those who did not; between those who came to differentiate a new “us” from the Judeans and the Nations alike, and those for whom Judeans and the Nations remained the primary division.

The editorial introduction provides an overview of Baur’s New Testament research as set forth in his articles and monographs on the canonical Gospels and the Pauline epistles. It focuses on his conflicted relationship with his former student David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus in 1835 had a profound impact on New Testament studies. It discusses Baur’s critique of the Gospel of John as a historical document and his solution of the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels to each other, with Matthew given priority as a source for reconstructing the teaching of Jesus. It then examines Baur’s interpretation of the interaction between Jewish Christianity and Pauline or Gentile Christianity, arguing that Paul is presented as a thinker deeply influenced by Judaism. The introduction concludes with an analytic summary of the Lectures.

According to a standard narrative both in Jewish studies and in early Christian studies, ancient Christian writers redefined “messiah” or “Christ” immediately and entirely, so that early Christian Christology ceased to have anything at all to do with Jewish messianism. In this chapter it is argued that this standard narrative is wrong, that there are numerous strands of early Christian Christology, orthodox as well as heterodox, in which the “Christness” of Christ—the notion of his being anointed with some unguent, by some agent, for some purpose—persisted as a puzzle to be solved and an opportunity to be exploited. The fate of messiah Christology in early Christianity is, in fact, a complicated affair. It did not remain what it had been at the beginning, but neither did it vanish altogether. The ghost of the messianic movement surrounding Jesus of Nazareth haunted early Christian Christology for centuries to follow.

This chapter argues that Baur created a dichotomy between Judaism and Hellenism, despite the fact that Baur rarely used the term “Hellenism” and focused instead on the differences between Jewish Christians and Gentile or Pauline Christians, based principally on evidence in the Pauline epistles. The author believes that Baur reduced a complex variety of Jewish and Hellenist positions in the first century CE to a simple dichotomy following a Hegelian theory of opposition, and that the Baurian view influenced New Testament scholarship for nearly a century. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to a thorough analysis of the concepts “Jewish” and “Hellenistic” and proposes an alternative history of development. It states that Baur is guilty of prejudices characteristic of nineteenth-century orientalism.

This chapter assesses Baur’s foundational article on “The Christ Party in the Corinthian Church” (1831) as well as his major work, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845, 1866–7). Paul was not only the first but also the most important of the apostles, because it was he who shifted the focus, after the crucifixion, from the teaching of Jesus to the person of Christ by interpreting the death of the Messiah as essential to his mission. This began the process of broadening the initially Jewish conception of the Messiah to include Gentiles. This chapter explores these issues with exegetical expertise and theological insight. It illuminates Baur’s theological approach to history, evaluates his argument for the authentic Pauline epistles (Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans), and explores Paul’s theological framework as presented by Baur (Christianity as the religion of spirit, truth, and freedom).

The first wave of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha reached Eritrea and Ethiopia in the wake of the Christianization of the Aksumite kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century of our era. Their Ethiopian acculturation was a part of the process of translating the ensemble of the Scriptures, including “apocryphal” texts, from Greek originals into Gǝʿǝz, or Classical Ethiopic. As a result, the pseudepigrapha were copied for centuries in the same manuscripts as other biblical texts. After a long period of relative isolation, the re-establishing of regular relations with Egyptian Christianity, in the thirteenth century, led to a complete re-examination and revision of Ethiopian Scriptures and other religious texts. The pseudepigrapha were scrutinized, discussed, edited, eventually newly translated from the Arabic or, in a few cases, abandoned. The theological debates about the status of some of these texts played a major role in their active preservation in Ethiopian culture.

In the 1824 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel’s discussion of the ontological proof leads directly into the metaphysical concept of God and his account of Christianity reconstructed from the concept. In this move from Logic to Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the absolute idea becomes absolute recognitive spirit. The focus shifts from the logical categories per se to categories of spirit, i.e. from philosophical to theological trinitarianism (Section 1). Hegel criticizes the rationalist rejection of trinity as a contradictory concept: three does not equal one. He criticizes the mathematical categories employed in the rationalist critique: abstract identity, atomism, and non-contradiction. These categories prevent the understanding from grasping the unity in difference that living things contain and resolve, and that are found in higher, richer spiritual formations, e.g. life, love, mutual recognition, personhood, and God. Thus, for the rationalist, three persons in one God do not add up and cannot be understood. Hegel’s dialectical reconstruction and defense of triunity exhibits his sui generis concept of the unio mystica as the speculative concrete that is universal singularity, the true supersensible realm that embraces love, mutual recognition, personhood, ethical life, and God (Sections 2, 3, and 4). In Section 5 the focus is on the singularity (Einzelheit) of the concept in its theological differentiation. The logic distinguishes only immediate singularity and universal singularity. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion identifies the former as being-for-one-only, i.e. as evil, and differentiates universal singularity as being-for-others, into an account of reconciliation, including incarnation, kenotic Christology, trinity, and God as spirit in his community. This is developed in Hegel’s analysis of the cultus (Sections 6 and 7). Hegel treats kenosis as divine self-differentiation and sustaining of relation, in which God remains God. Hegel’s God, like the Jewish God, is not inert, but rather is purposive activity. God’s purpose can only be God himself. However, God’s purposive activity includes self-communication, and the “soil” in which God’s purpose is to be realized is finite spirit as such. God is his own purpose—the purpose being that he should be recognized and venerated as God. Hegel’s self-communicating God is no lifeless solitary, but the primordial anti-solipist in search of community with others. To be sure, this search includes suffering and even the death of God. Hegel adopts the Lutheran tradition that the death of God is rather the death of death. The incarnation reveals not only divine–human unity, but also that human nature is present within God himself. This becomes the basis of Hegel’s account of divine consolation and sympathy in Section 8. He develops the thesis of divine consolation through a comparative analysis of ancient Greek fate piety and the consolation afforded by the Christian religion. Christianity is a synthesis of the Jewish view that God is for thought alone, and the Greek view of the beautiful humanity of God—both freed from their limitations. Christian consolation is grounded in the trinitarian subjectivity of God that includes particularity (incarnation) within itself. Thus finite personhood is not to be abstractly negated but recognized, validated, and preserved. Hegel criticizes traditional conceptions of divine immutability and impassibility, and affirms that there is negation, suffering in God. Section 9 brings the study to a close with an examination of the relation between divine personhood and the concept of spirit. For Hegel, these terms, while related, are not fully convertible, because personhood retains an abstract unity that must be overcome, and spirit is just this overcoming. In God personhood is both posited and resolved. The resolution of personhood is spirit, which is the central inclusive concept of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—i.e. God existing as community.