Evangelical Protestants, Jews, and the Epistle to the Hebrews in midnineteenth-century Britain*

Abstract

Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer review
On 14 May 1867, the Reverend Charles Schwartz (1817–1870) of the Free Church of Scotland delivered his inaugural address as the president of the Hebrew-Christian Alliance at Willis’s Rooms in London. He looked forward to a time in which the nation of Israel accepted Christ as their Messiah and would be “changed from a persecuting Saul into a professing Paul; and if what Paul achieved by the grace of God in bringing to the Gentiles the knowledge of Christ is marvellous in our eyes, what will it be if a whole nation of Pauls, as it were, shall proclaim to the astonished world the crucified and glorious Saviour.”
Conversion did not entail for Schwartz, as it did for many nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, a rift with Judaism