Jewish-Christianity

This paper presents an introduction to a new Hungarian translation of the Didache as an early representative of the Jewish-Christian tradition. In reviewing current trends in research, we have looked more closely at the interpretative frameworks used by Jonathan Draper and late David Flusser. At the same time, the direction of our research was grounded by an earlier study by Tibor Ruff, who interpreted the New Testament's relationship to the Torah as based on Northop Frye's "close reading" method. In this study we applied this method for both the Didache and the New Testament, as considered to be essentially contemporaneous with each other. As a conclusion, we can mostly agree with the final conclusions of the two prominent scholars that the community of the Didache can essentially be characterized as opponents of the Pauline charismatic Christian movement as in the book of Acts. However, our study has not confirmed their conclusion that this type of Jewish-Christianity is identifiable with the ’mainstream’ Jewish-Christian community represented by Peter and James in the book of Acts. Instead, our textual analysis suggests that the community represented by the Didache is much more a representative of earlier Jewish traditions on an essentially Old Testament basis, based on its formal language, its genre-specific features, its theological content. Its language is noticeably different from the “spiritual koine” of the New Testament. By using Gyula Rugási’s terms, the two texts are essentially the product of two completely different spiritual streams, i.e. the New Testament belongs to the “world of inspiration/revelation”, whereas the Didache is the representative of the spiritual paradigm of “tradition”. In this sense the Didache, as a representative of tradition creates a bridge between the late Old Testament Jewish and early Catholic traditions.

Where does the Epistle of James come from ? The usual objections against its genuineness as it stands can be removed, not by scrutinizing its content, but by studying the outstanding personality of James the Righteous, « brother of the Lord », who was expecting the Messiah to come soon. A leader or « bishop » of the Nazoreans, he was renowned in Judea. In spite of his remaining strictly Jewish, he was able to discern the importance of the mission of Peter and Paul, but without joining it. Legally killed by a Sadducean high priest, he was deemed to be a martyr, as the accounts given by Josephus and Eusebius show. Thus he became a major character in Acts, both on the stage and in the background. His fame grew well beyond the Nazorean faction, and one of the DSS styles him as a « Teacher of Righteousness ».

El objeto principal de esta obra es estudiar la evolución del pensamiento político judío en la época del Segundo Templo hasta Juan el Bautista. Se analizan los orígenes del hasidismo y sus implicaciones políticas a la luz de un análisis de los textos de Qumrán libre del prejuicio historiográfico y filológico de la biblioteca sectaria, desechado por las últimas investigaciones arqueológicas. En este sentido, se refuerza la hipótesis que identifica al Maestro de Justicia de Qumrán con Onías III. Se replantea el origen de saduceísmo, fariseísmo y esenismo con la misma libertad de análisis que proporciona la liberación del prejuicio de la biblioteca sectaria. Y, finalmente, se estudia el origen del celotismo y del movimiento bautista.

La 'Historia de la Salvación' es una fuente judeocristiana muy antigua que fue interpolada en las Recognitiones, una novela cristiana atribuida a Clemente de Roma. Consiste en una síntesis revisionista de la Historia bíblica desde la Creación hasta los primeros momentos de la expansión del cristianismo en el Imperio Romano. Se trata de un género común en el siglo I, pero frente a las Antigüedades Judaicas de Flavio Josefo y al anónimo Libro de los Jubileos, que siguen el judaísmo ortodoxo. esta Historia nos muestra el punto de vista de la secta judeocristiana, la de los partidarios de Santiago, el hermano de Jesús, y de Simeón ben Cleofás, su primo. En esta fuente Jesús no es considerado el Hijo de Dios, sino el Profeta de la Verdad. Además, a su muerte no aparece el episodio de la resurrección.

Originally a Masters of Divinity Thesis for which the author was awarded Honors in Church History, this book traces the development of Jewish Christianity from its beginnings in the earliest Christian communities through its apparent disappearance in the fourth or fifth century. The author’s thesis is that within the diversity which characterized the Jewish Christianity of the early Church, there existed at least one Jewish Christian sect whose theology stood within the acceptable boundaries of orthodoxy of the greater Church, that this sect existed through at least the fifth century, at which point it was declared heretical by the Church Fathers and eventually died out despite the fact that it remained within the bounds of orthodoxy and considered itself a part of the greater Church.  The thesis also suggests that the increasing antipathy of the Church toward Jewish Christianity was the result of a variety of interrelated influences operating over several centuries. Some of these influences included the changing demographics of the Church and the accompanying clash of cultures; the increasing isolation of Jewish Christianity from the predominantly Gentile Church; power struggles between competing Christian communities in Palestine, as well as Rome’s interest in asserting its primacy; theological and pastoral concerns, which were well-intentioned but which resulted in increasingly narrow views of orthodoxy and orthopraxis; as well as outright anti-Jewish feelings.

The question raised by this meeting seems straightforward: Is there a Jewish-Christian influence at the core of the most primitive Islam, as several former and recent scholars have argued (sometimes in very different ways)?  However, straightforward questions do not necessarily admit straightforward answers – for example because they can be quite ambiguous. Therefore, the path to a putative answer might be full of pitfalls and meanders – and I want to explore here some of them. They pertain to words and formulas included in the question itself, namely “Jewish-Christian,” “influence,” and “most primitive Islam.” This paper will show why these notions raise serious conceptual, epistemological and methodological difficulties.

This paper suggests that 6th-century Yemenite Christianity should be taken into consideration as a relevant, if hitherto often neglected, factor that may help to explain both the emergence of Islam and its South-Arabian component. It also explores the extent to which the interactions between the Christians and the Jews of pre-Islamic Yemen may be said to be of especial relevance to understand the Christology of the Qur’ān. Lastly, it contends that this represents a better approach to deciphering the Jewish and Christian roots of emergent Islam than the hypothesis of a “Jewish-Christian” influence upon the latter.

I gave this paper at the Garaventa Center of the University of Portland in 2010.  This is a slightly updated version of the chapter they published in the conference anthology in 2011.  It is the heart of my autobiographical philosophy I'm currently writing and hoping to finish during my sabbatical this fall.  Comments appreciated.

In der Apostelgeschichte werden tausende von jüdischen
Gläubigen erwähnt. In dieser Zeit gab es viele Judenchristliche
Gemeinden in der römischen Welt. Aber was passierte mit
diesen Gemeinden und den Gläubigen? Wie verlief ihre weitere
Geschichte? Was glaubten sie und was lehrten sie? Diesen und
anderen Fragen geht diese Ausarbeitung nach. Dabei wird überblicksmäßig
die Geschichte der Judenchristen von der Antike bis in die Moderne dargestellt. So wird auch die Geschichte der
modernen Messianisch-jüdischen Bewegung kurz und bündig
nachgezeichnet.

This study uncovers a hitherto undiscussed criticism of the apostle Paul in the Clementine Homilies. The apostle Peter's farewell address in Homilies 11 contains swipes at Paul's farewell address in Acts 20. Thus the Homilies not only rejects Paul, but the greater Paulinism represented by the book of Acts.

The intersection between the Eastern European rabbinate and Russian religious thought has yet to be addressed adequately in academic scholarship. A key example of this intersection was Rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov (1865-1941), a maverick rabbi and intellectual whose fascinating writings are all but neglected. This article focuses on the influence of the Russian "God-Seekers" on Alexandrov’s thought and on the common ground that underlies that influence. The article also examines how Alexandrov used the God-Seekers’ idea of the neo-religious Übermensch to advance his own individualistic and anarchistic ideas, and how those ideas took shape in Alexandrov’s later writings.

The four aspects I wish to examine are:

1. Ethnic – how are we to understand the nature of the Jewish people, and the nature of our continuity with our people as Jewish believers in Yeshua? What are the types of Messianic Jewish identity?
2. Ecclesial and Ecumenical – How are we to understand the role of Jewish believers within the Church – what form and function does Messianic Judaism play within the Church? What does it bring to the table of the communal life of the Body of Christ, in its catholicity?
3. Evangelical and Ethical – what is the Good News that Jewish Christianities and Messianic Judaisms bring to the Church and to Israel? How are they to live this out in their corporate identities – how is the Torah renewed in Yeshua to be lived out as demonstration of God’s character of holiness, justice and love?
4. Eschatological – what is the role of Jewish Christianity as an eschatological sign of God’s faithfulness to His people Israel and of his purposes for all nations and all Creation?

In 1964, the remains of a large house were discovered in the Israeli city of Beth-Shean/ Beth-Shan (also known as Scythopolis). Once excavated, the mid-5th century CE house was found to contain many interesting artifacts, but none as fascinating as a large, elaborate mosaic and two inscribed column lintels. The meanings of the words and images found in the mosaic have spawned several theories, but it is our contention that the theories about the inscriptions in the mosaic must be viewed in light of an intriguing inscription found on one of the column lintels. Unfortunately, of the two major studies published since the initial publication of the house's discovery, neither attempts to address the column lintels. The current article seeks to rectify this situation and reexamines the previous theories and the mosaic inscriptions in light of the inscription from one of the column lintels. The result is a series of conclusions that, it is hoped, help to clarify certain important points regarding the House of Leontis Kloubas.

This article offers a new way to explore the category of “Jewish Christians,” by examining how two fourth-century Syrian authors, namely John Chrysostom and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilist, each respectively made sense of Jesus’s harsh treatment of a suffering Roman Syrian woman, first recounted in Mark 7:24–30 and Matthew 15:21–28. In the biblical retellings of the story, when a distraught gentile mother approaches Jesus to solicit his aid in alleviating the torments of her demon possessed daughter, Jesus does not respond with the alacrity one would expect. Instead, he utterly humiliates her, insinuating that she was less than a human, no better than a dog. My analysis reveals that while the former distanced Jesus’s actions from his Jewish ethnicity, the latter suggests the woman received Jesus’s aid only after she becomes a “Jew” herself. Since the two authors lived in chronological and geographical proximity to one another, I suggest that their different exegetical responses shed light onto the dynamic manner in which Christian and Jewish identity formation played out in the Roman Syrian context, thereby complicating past assumptions that the parting of the ways between these two religions occurred in a manner that was unilinear in character and global in scope. The evidence suggests instead that, in Roman Syria at least, efforts to draw the boundary between who was a Jew and who was a Christian constituted a long and involved process, insinuating that—at least in this geographical context—these two designations were not fixed entities even as late as the fourth century CE.

La Epístola de Santiago es la primera de las Epístolas Universales o Católicas del Nuevo Testamento acorde al orden en que aparecen las llamadas “columnas de la iglesia” (Santiago, Pedro y Juan) en la Epístola a los Gálatas del Apóstol Pablo (Gal 2:9). Le siguen la Primera y Segunda de Pedro, Primera, Segunda y Tercera de Juan y, por último, la Epístola de Judas.

La autoría, y la datación, de este escrito es, como ha sido dicho, “uno de los más intrincados y debatidos territorios en el estudio de los orígenes del Cristianismo”.

Con todo, “...los estudiosos están de acuerdo en que Jacobo, el Hermano del Señor es el más probable autor de la carta”. Desde esta aseveración, como señala Timothy Johnson, “erudito e historiador estadounidense del Nuevo Testamento”, su redacción habría tenido lugar en algún momento de la Palestina judeocristiana entre el año 35 al 62 d. JC.  De hecho, hasta podría ser “el más temprano producto literario de la iglesia cristiana”, el “escrito cristiano más antiguo”,    un cristianismo que, al igual que Jesús “en Su humana persona”, era “judío” y por ello no pretendía sino que se cumplieran, verdaderamente, “la ley o los profetas”.

Believing in supernatural is a part of being human. As such there are about 4,300 religions in the world. These can be broadly classified into Abrahamic religions originating in West Asia, Indian religions originating in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), East Asian religions originating in in East Asia, and  Afro-American religions originating in Central and West Africa. More than half of the world population is monotheists believing in Islam (1.8 billion), Christianity (2.4 billion), or Judaism (0.015 billion). On the other end of the pole are the pantheists who shares in the concepts of dharma, karma, and reincarnation and practice either Hinduism (1.2 billion) or Buddhism (0.52 billion).

Considering that all of these religions belong to humans and there are some common strands among them called humanity, the author explored if there is any commonality among all the religions and if there is any difference what kind of differences are there. His analysis suggests that most of the scriptures have three elements: the Universal Revelations, the Culture Specific Revelations, and materials introduced by the religious establishments. Since the Quran has been maintained in pristine form, it has only two elements: the Universal Revelations and the Culture Specific Revelations.

The Universal Revelations e.g. God, accountability, life after death, Salah, Zakah, fasting, ritual sacrifice, facing Qibla, and etc. are the same in concept in most of the scriptures, but differ in detail either because of the cultural differences or due to material introduced by the religious establishment in the scripture. The Culture Specific Revelations are all based on the principle of social justice. The source of both the Universal Revelations and the Culture Specific Revelations is the Source Book (Umm-ul-Kitab).

This paper provides an English version of the paper published in German, "Die Didache". It provides an analysis of the theology of the Didache under the traditional categories: God the Father, Christology, the Spirit, Eschatology, Ecclesiology. It contends that the Didache constitutes a form of messianic Judaism which "remains firmly within the confines of first-century Judaism". Within these parameters it contests control of the religious and social sphere with the Pharisees in the same field.

Though offering a rich representation of religious syncretism
in late antiquity, the First Apocalypse of James has been disregarded by scholars of Gnosticism since its discovery in 1945. Only recently, with the discovery of the Al Minya (Tchacos) codex and the second, more complete copy of James are we finally in a position to fully appreciate the complex interplay of religious traditions represented in the text. This paper will step outside of the comfort zone of gnostic scholarship and explore how the author of the First Apocalypse of James made use of Christian apocryphal and Jewish Pseudepigraphal traditions. I will show how these traditions were combined to create a syncretic narrative that was then used in a Valentinian Christian context as late as the mid fourth century.
Although this is only a small part of the picture, it will serve
as a demonstration of the continued co- mingling of Christianity
and Judaism well beyond the points of departure posited in recent scholarship.

This paper examines the hypothesis of a Judeo-Christian origin of Islam, and rejects it, especially because the notion of Judeo-Christianity is too vague to be usable in a relevant way, and because the parallels between Islam and the Judeo-Christianity can receive less speculative and more realistic explanations.

A strange quotation from Clement of Alexandria's now lost Hypotyposeis, preserved in the Areopagite material within the writings of Maximus Confessor/John of Scythopolis, claims that Luke the Evangelist wrote the Jewish-Christian dialogue Jason and Papiscus. This information seems so fantastic that several scholars have attempted to explain away the attribution through the composition of various hypotheses. The most popular of these was published by Johannes Ernest Grabe in his Spicilegium SS Patrum in 1698. Despite being cited by scholars from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, Grabe's hypothesis has never been the subject of a detailed investigation. Two conclusions result from an investigation of his hypothesis: Grabe's claims of textual corruption are unfounded; and it seems clear that Clement actually did claim Lukan authorship for Jason and Papiscus.

At the margin of the historiographic debate on the attitude of the Holy See in confrontation with Anti-Semitism that was propagated in the 30s by totalitarian Nazism and Fascism, the question about the relation between Pius XI and the Roman Curia in the last months of his pontificate continues to invoke interest of scholars everywhere. The image of a mostly isolated Pope whose collaborators seemed everything but acting sensible - lest hostile - and his prophetical call, was in fact in the center of interest of many scholars who researched in this field. There are numerous questione that remain unanswered that can be reduced to two themes: on the one hand the will of Achille ratti to distance himself from the traditional catholic anti-Judaism, on the other hand the difference of the aged and sick pope and the secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, who would become his successor on the Throne of Peter.