Discovering The Jewish Jesus

                  Discovering The Jewish Jesus

                          

                  Discovering The Jewish Jesus

Jewish Christians, also Judeo-Christians, were the original members of the Jewish movement that later became Christianity.^[1] In the earliest stage the community was made up of all those Jews who accepted Jesus as a venerable person or even the messiah, and was thus equivalent to all Christians.^[1] As Christianity grew and evolved, Jewish Christians became only one strand of the Christian community, characterised by combining the confession of Jesus as Christ with continued adherence to Jewish practices such as Sabbath observance and observance of the Jewish calendar, observance of Jewish laws and customs, circumcision, and synagogue attendance, and a direct genetic relationship to the earliest Jewish Christianity.^[1]
The term "Jewish Christian" appears in historical texts contrasting Christians of Jewish origin with Gentile Christians, both in discussion of the New Testament church^[2][3] and the second and following centuries.^[4] It is also a term used for Jews who converted to Christianity but kept their Jewish heritage and traditions.
Alister McGrath, former Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, claims that the 1st century "Jewish Christians" were totally faithful religious Jews. They differed from other contemporary Jews only in their acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah.^[5]
However as Christianity grew throughout the Gentile world, Christians diverged from their Jewish and Jerusalem roots.^[6][7] Jewish Christianity, initially strengthened despite persecution by Jerusalem Temple officials, fell into decline during the Jewish-Roman wars (66-135) and the growing anti-Judaism perhaps best personified by Marcion (c. 150). With persecution by the orthodox Christians from the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, Jewish Christians sought refuge outside the boundaries of the Empire, in Arabia and further afield.^[8] Within the Empire and later elsewhere it was dominated by the Gentile based Christianity which became the State church of the Roman Empire and which took control of sites in the Holy Land such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Cenacle and appointed subsequent Bishops of Jerusalem.
It has been argued that few Jews joined the Christian movement in the first century and that the movement probably never exceeding 1,000 Jewish members at any one time during the first century. Furthermore the size and importance of the Christian movement in general during the first century tends to be exaggerated by most scholars. By the end of the first century the total Christian population is estimated to have been only 7,530.^[9] The term "Jewish Christians" in the 3rd and 4th centuries can refer to groups such as Ebionites, Nazarenes and other groups, and related to these groups are quotation fragments of non-canonical gospels referred to as the "Jewish-Christian Gospels".

                  Discovering The Jewish Jesus