The following is a reproduction of my 1997 doctoral dissertation demonstrating that modern “Messianic Jewish Congregations” are actually evangelical Christian congregations, not Jewish.
As such it represents my perspective in 1997 before my return to a Jewish way of life in 1999. Please see my Wanderings 1967-2025 for context.
Both the 2000 print version and 2012 ePub are available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Messianic-Jewish-Congregations-Business-Gentiles-ebook/dp/B0097GFOTK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0
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Messianic Jews see themselves as having a different if not separate history from the Gentile Church. As the “Who Sold This Business to the Gentiles” story indicates, Messianic Jews believe that “something has happened” to bring about this different history. In an effort to understand that “something” some Messianic Jews have attempted a reconstruction of the history of the Jewish Church.
By far the most exhaustive and scholarly attempt was made by the British Jewish Christian scholar, Hugh J. Schonfield, in his The History of Jewish Christianity. He would later write The Passover Plot: New Light on the History of Jesus, in which he denies the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus and he fails to mention his own previously held faith. Nevertheless, his History of Jewish Christianity is the best scholarly attempt at a reconstruction of Jewish Church history.
Since the Holocaust of World War II, which was likely responsible for Schonfield’s disillusionment, numerous Christian scholars have begun to pay attention to the Jewish roots and origins of the Church. Jakob Jocz’s The Jewish People and Jesus Christ represents the first and best of these. In 1981 he published The Jewish People and Jesus Christ After Auschwitz as a sequel to his first work. Here he notes the revived interest by Gentile and Jewish scholars alike in the Jewish origins of Christianity and the Jewishness of Jesus:
The most remarkable development in Jewish culture is the increasing acceptance of Jesus the Jew. There is a genuine effort made to incorporate the Nazarene into the history of Jewish spirituality, not as the Christ of the Church but as a teacher in Israel. Therefore, the question, “Who is Jesus?” is repeatedly asked and answered in a variety of ways. The question regarding Jesus raises the problem of the “normalcy” of rabbinic Judaism. The discovery of the Qumran literature in the Dead Sea caves opened new insights into the structure of religious life at the time of Jesus. Until that discovery it was taken for granted that Pharisaic Judaism was the normative religion in Israel. The Church therefore was seen as an offspring of the Synagogue. Jewish (and even Christian) writers frequently speak of Christianity as the daughter of Judaism, meaning rabbinic Judaism. But the recently recovered facts contradict such a position. Judaism at the time of Jesus was by no means a homogeneous entity. There were many sects in competition with each other, none normative. This is an important point in assessing the status of ancient Hebrew Christianity. The claim to “Jewishness” cannot be sustained anymore as a prerogative of rabbinism. On historic grounds it will be difficult to substantiate the claim the Hebrew Christians have abandoned Judaism. Rather, they have opposed rabbinic Judaism with their own brand, as did the monks at Qumran.
More recent interest by Rodney Stark, Steven Wilson, and Howard Clark Kee is beginning to reveal the variety of Judaisms and Christianities that existed during the first century C.E. Rabbinic Judaism and Pauline Christianity then would represent the “winners” in the struggle for survival from historical trauma and religious persecution in the first century of this era.
Though socio-historical works like that of Stark and Kee are interesting, they offer little in the way of concrete documentation or substantive historical analysis of the early Jewish Church. To-date there has been no exhaustive scholarly history that can supplant the work done by Schonfield. Recent attempts by Arnold Fruchtenbaum and David Rausch rely heavily on Schonfield and his familiarity with Jewish-Christian sources and materials.
. . . CONTINUE READING CHAPTER 2
Messianic Jewish Congregations - Table of Contents
Wandering Jew - Table of Contents
