History
Pre-19th century
Efforts by Jewish Christians to proselytize Jews began in the first century, when Paul the Apostle preached at the synagogues in each city he visited.[35] However, early accounts of missions to the Jews, such as Epiphanius of Salamis' record of the conversion of Count Joseph of Tiberias, and Sozomen's accounts of other Jewish conversions, do not mention converted Jews playing any leading role in proselytization.[36] Notable converts from Judaism who themselves attempted to convert other Jews are more visible in historical sources beginning around the 13th century, when Jewish convert Pablo Christiani attempted to convert other Jews. This activity, however, typically lacked any independent Jewish-Christian congregations, and was often imposed through force by organized Christian churches.[37]
In the 15th and 16th century, Jewish Christians occupying professorships at the European universities began to provide translations of Hebrew texts. Scholars such as Paul Nuñez Coronel, Alfonso de Zamora, Alfonso de Alcalá,Domenico Gerosolimitano and Giovanni Battista Jona were actively engaged in spreading Jewish scholarship.[38]
19th and early 20th centuries
Main article: Hebrew Christian Movement
In the 19th century, some groups attempted to create congregations and societies of Jewish converts to Christianity, though most of these early organizations were short-lived.[39] Early formal organizations run by converted Jews include: the Anglican London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews of Joseph Frey (1809),[40] which published the first Yiddish New Testament in 1821;[41] the "Beni Abraham" association, established by Frey in 1813 with a group of 41 Jewish Christians who started meeting at Jews' Chapel, London for prayers Friday night and Sunday morning;[42] and the London Hebrew Christian Alliance of Great Britain founded by Dr. Carl Schwartz in 1866.[43]
The September 1813 meeting of Frey's "Beni Abraham" congregation at the rented "Jews' Chapel" in Spitalfields is sometimes pointed to as the birth of the semi-autonomous Hebrew Christian movement within Anglican and other established churches in Britain,[44] though the non-Anglican minister of the chapel at Spitalfields evicted Frey and his congregation only three years later, and Frey severed his connections with the Society.[45] A new location was found and the Episcopal Jew's Chapel Abrahamic Society registered in 1835.[46]
In Eastern Europe, Joseph Rabinowitz established a Hebrew Christian mission and congregation called "Israelites of the New Covenant" in Kishinev, Ukraine in 1884.[47][48][49][50][51][52] Rabinowitz was supported from overseas by the Christian Hebraist Franz Delitzsch, translator of the first modern Hebrew translation of the New Testament.[53] In 1865, Rabinowitz created a sample order of worship for Sabbath morning service based on a mixture of Jewish and Christian elements. Mark John Levy pressed the Church of England to allow members to embrace Jewish customs.[49]
In the United States, a congregation of Jewish converts to Christianity was established in New York City in 1885.[54] In the 1890s, immigrant Jewish converts to Christianity worshiped at the Methodist "Hope of Israel" mission on New York’s Lower East Side while retaining some Jewish rites and customs.[55] In 1895, the 9th edition of Hope of Israel's Our Hope magazine carried the subtitle “A Monthly Devoted to the Study of Prophecy and to Messianic Judaism”, the first use of the term "Messianic Judaism".[56][57] Hope of Israel was controversial; other missionary groups accused its members of being Judaizers, and one of the two editors of Our Hope magazine, Arno C. Gaebelein, eventually repudiated his views and, as a result, was able to become a leader in the mainstream Christian evangelical movement.[56] In 1894, Christian missionary[58] and Baptist minister[59] Leopold Cohn, a convert from Judaism, founded the Brownsville Mission to the Jews in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York as a Christian mission to Jews. After several changes in name, structure and focus, the organization is now called Chosen People Ministries[58] and has operations and staff in the US and 11 other nations.[60]
Missions to the Jews saw a period of growth between the 1920s and the 1960s.[3][61] In the 1940s and 50s, missionaries in Israel, including the Southern Baptists, adopted the term meshichyim (משיחיים "Messianics") to counter negative connotations of the word notsrim (נוצרים "Christians", from "Nazarenes"); the term was used to designate all Jews who had converted to Protestant evangelical Christianity.[11]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_Judaism#Pre-19th_century
No comments:
Post a Comment