Hebrew Christians
- This article should be merged with : Nazarene Judaism; Nazarene; Talmidaism; Nazarene Jews
Jewish Christians ("Hebrew Christians" or "Christian Jews") is a term which can have two meanings, an historical one and a contemporary one. Both meanings will be given below, from a Christian context.
The term "Jewish Christians" is often used by contemporary Christians in discussing early church history. All mainstream Christian groups today readily admit that Jesus, His apostles, and all or essentially all of his early followers were Jewish. Hence the 3,000 converts on the Pentecost following the Crucifixion described in Acts 2 were all Jews, albeit some likely to have been proselytes. The history recorded further in Acts shows all converts to Christianity to have been Jewish prior to the discussion of the conversion of the Roman officer Cornelius in Acts 10. The only division within the church was between Hellenistic and non-Hellenistic Jews (Acts 6). However, after the conversion of Corneilus and his acceptance as a Christian, there was now another group -- Gentile Christians. Much of the early discussion in the church, and much of its earliest dissension, was over the issue of whether Gentiles could enter the church directly without first having converted to Judaism, which became an issue largely between opposing groups of Christians who were ethnically Jewish. Those who felt that this conversion to Judaism was a requisite for church membership were eventually condemned by Paul as "judaizing teachers". This was related to a larger issue (which is still dicussed today) -- were Jewish converts to Christianity still in fact Jews themselves, or had their acceptance of Jesus as Messiah in contravention to the established
Jewish leadership caused them to have voluntarily ceased being Jews? If so, the term "Jewish Christian" is something of an oxymoron.
"Jewish Christians" today are persons who are ethnically Jewish but who have become part of a "mainstream" Christian group which is not predominantly based on an appeal to Jewish ethnicity or the Law of Moses. This term is used as a contrast to Messianic Jews, who are predominantly ethnically Jewish persons who have converted to a religion in which Christianity (often of a very evangelical nature) is generally engrafted into a Jewish context of faith and ritual which would, to outsiders at least, typically resemble Judaism more than Christianity. (Many Jewish leaders regard this movement, represented if not typified by groups such as "Jews for Jesus", as more of a threat to legitimate Judaism than the one posed by efforts to convert Jews to a more mainstream Christianity, which have been ongoing for centuries; "Messianic Judaism" is largely a phenomenon of the latter part of the 20th century. Others disagree and feel that cultural assimilation rather than any form of conversion is the greatest enemy now facing Judaism; some have stated that if current trends were to continue that in approximately a century and a half there would be no one left who was identifiably Jewish.)
