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.

Beyond Jewish Christianity: Ancient Social Taxonomies and the Christianity-Judaism Divide

This concluding chapter demonstrates how one can get around the problems created by Jewish Christianity by approaching the question of the origins of Christianity and the Christianity–Judaism division as a study in the production and dissemination of ancient social taxonomies. The central question from this perspective is neither the similarities and differences in culture nor even the social interaction among ancient Christians and Jews, but how early Jesus groups imagined themselves and their characteristic cultures in relation to Judeans and theirs. At what point did some Jesus groups begin to assert that Judeans and their distinguishing culture were, per se, “other” and to reify that difference by postulating a distinction between Christianism and Judaism? Whatever its various social consequences, how widespread was this taxonomy before its imperial adoption in the centuries after Constantine? Through an examination of a few exemplary cases, a significant distinction can be observed well into late antiquity between Jesus groups who made sense of their social experience with reference to such a notion of Christianism and those who did not; between those who came to differentiate a new “us” from the Judeans and the Nations alike, and those for whom Judeans and the Nations remained the primary division.

Apostolic vs. Judaizing Jewish Christianity: The Reclamation of Apostolic Authority in Post-Baur Scholarship

This chapter shows how Ferdinand Christian Baur's more traditionally minded critics, in an effort to turn back his assault on apostolic and canonical authority, combined the disparate models of John Toland and Baur into new and more complex taxonomies of Jewish Christianity. This resulted in the notorious problems of definition and terminology that have plagued the category ever since. Underlying the varying details of these new accounts of Jewish Christianity was a common counternarrative that restored the integrity and authority traditionally accorded to the apostolic and canonical spheres by revising Baur's theory at two critical junctures. First, the apostles, while superficially similar to Paul's “Judaizing” opponents in outward practice, were said to have been aligned with Paul, not with those opponents, in essential religious principle. Second, the “Judaizers” were said to have quickly become a nonfactor in the development of the early Catholic Church and thus to have had virtually no meaningful influence on the New Testament.