The Invention of Jewish Christianity: From Early Christian Heresiology to John Toland’s Nazarenus

Abstract

This chapter explains why Irish freethinker John Toland, in eighteenth-century London, began to reclassify groups long categorized as heresy as “Jewish Christianity.” More specifically, it argues that Toland invented an incarnational model of Jewish Christianity as the centerpiece of a freethinking reappropriation of Christian apologetic historiography. By the end of the nineteenth century, above all because of the influential work of the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, the concept had become a given within the emerging field of historical-critical scholarship on early Christianity. The chapter then looks at Toland's reconstruction of early Christianity, published under the title Nazarenus in 1718. Toland composed Nazarenus not merely as an account of early Christianity, but as an account of true Christianity. The category “Jewish Christianity” was a by-product of Toland's attempt to divert the authorizing power of Jesus and the apostles from traditional orthodoxy to his own enlightened humanism.