The Global Church Era · 1960s-present · Israel, N. America
Messianic Judaism
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
Jewish believers in Jesus are as old as the church, but the modern congregational movement is recent. From the 1960s and 1970s, Jewish believers began forming congregations that kept Jewish practice — Sabbath, festivals, Hebrew liturgy — rather than joining gentile churches. The Hebrew Christian Alliance of America, founded in 1915, renamed itself the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America in 1975, and the change of name was also a change of self-description. The Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations followed in 1979 and set out its position in a document called 'Defining Messianic Judaism' in 2005. Jews for Jesus, founded in 1973, took a more evangelistic shape. The movement's own writers have argued about what it is: David Stern's Messianic Jewish Manifesto appeared in 1988 and his Complete Jewish Bible in 1998, and Mark Kinzer's Postmissionary Messianic Judaism in 2005. It is argued about from outside in two directions at once, by Jewish communal bodies and in Christian debates over supersessionism.
Sources
- The movement's own institutional statements: the Hebrew Christian Alliance of America's 1915 statement of faith, renamed the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America's in 1975; the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations' 1979 doctrinal basis and later statements; and Jews for Jesus's publications from 1973 (Rosen) (primary)
- David Stern, Messianic Jewish Manifesto (1988), Complete Jewish Bible (1998); Mark Kinzer, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism (Brazos, 2005) (primary) — The movement's own theological range in print, from Stern to Kinzer.
- Jewish communal responses to the movement (counter-missionary literature; denominational positions) and Christian responses from the supersessionism debate (primary) — This material is genuinely contested from multiple directions, and both sides are represented on their own terms.
- Carol Harris-Shapiro, Messianic Judaism (Beacon, 1999); Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Messianic Judaism (2000); Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People (UNC, 2000) (secondary) — Three outside scholarly accounts, each written from a different position toward the movement.
- David Rudolph & Joel Willitts (eds.), Introduction to Messianic Judaism (Zondervan, 2013) (secondary) — Messianic Judaism's own scholarly base, distinct from the separate Hebrew Roots movement.
- Congregation and adherent counts: the MJAA/UMJC's own self-reports vs. scholarly estimates and the Pew 2013 US Jewish survey (reference) — The self-reported figures should be read as self-reports; the survey and scholarly estimates are more independently grounded, though who counts as Messianic Jewish is itself contested from both directions.