From Jewish to Gentile

The combined expression “Jewish Christian,” made up of two seemingly contradictory concepts, must strike readers not specially trained in theology or religious history as an oxymoron. For how can someone simultaneously be a follower of both Moses and Jesus? Yet at the beginning of the Christian movement, in the first hundred years of the post-Jesus era, encounters with Jewish Christians (also called Judeo-Christians) distinguishable from gentile Christians were a daily occurrence both in the Holy Land and in the diaspora. During his days of preaching, Jesus of Nazareth addressed only Jews, “the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 10:5; 15:24). […]