Conclusion

Hebraism has to do with the changing relation between Christianity and Judaism, between the New and Old Testaments, made possible by the cultural phenomenon of different contents coexisting within a symbol, for example, Israel. This concluding chapter provides a summary of the characteristics of Hebraism as a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or ‘Old Testament Christianity’, including patriotism. The chapter further situates Hebraism within the analysis of the axial age. In doing so, the distinctiveness of religion is taken up, as well as the place of pluralism in cultural history that requires the distinction between unity and uniformity. The chapter also discusses the place of sovereignty in Hebraic culture.

Hebraism

This chapter examines Hebraism as the ‘third culture’, distinct from Greek and Roman Christianity, as a kind of Jewish Christianity. Hebraism, as a current of intellectual history, is expressed in the work of the Christian Hebraists of early modern Europe, the quintessential example being John Selden. Hebraism’s focus on life in this world led to the problems of how life should be organized through law, the territorialization of tradition, and the paradoxical national monotheism of the ‘new Israel’. A different interpretation of the Old Testament emerged, influencing the relation between the Old and New Testaments. The theological, political, legal, and social characteristics of Hebraic culture are clarified.

Hebraism in Religion, History, and Politics

This work is an investigation into Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within the history of Christendom. Its aim is to determine what Hebraism means or should mean when it is used to refer to a culture or characteristics of a culture. In tracing those characteristics that arose in the changing relation between a doctrinally orthodox Christianity and the nation of a ‘new Israel’, sovereignty, and their legal anthropology, Hebraism refers to the development of a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or an ‘Old Testament Christianity’. It represents a ‘third culture’ in contrast to the cultures of the Roman or Hellenistic empires and Christian universalism. While the initial formulation of Hebraism as a cultural category was by Matthew Arnold, an earlier approximation is found in the work of John Selden, with considerable refinements by several scholars in the twentieth century. The categories of Hebraism and Hebraic culture provide a means by which to examine differently the history of religion and the history of early modern Europe.

Jewish Christianity

This book argues that the concept of Jewish Christianity represents an enduring legacy of Christian apologetics. Freethinkers of the English Enlightenment created the category of Jewish Christianity as a means of isolating a true and distinctly Christian religion from the Jewish culture of Jesus and the apostles. The book shows how a category that began as a way to reimagine the apologetic notion of an authoritative “original Christianity” continues to cause problems in the contemporary study of Jewish and Christian antiquity.