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What readership do you hope it will find?

I hope, of course, that Jewish believers themselves will find this interesting. As with all other believers, it is important to know one's heritage and to see that we are not something that came late in history. And for some periods of this history, the question of how earlier Jewish believers expressed their Jewish identity could be of great interest for Jewish believers today.

What insight do you gain from looking at church history from this angle?

When you look, for example, at a theological author in the first five centuries, more or less, it's always assumed that this author was a Gentile believer unless proved otherwise. The burden of proof is always on the scholar who claims that this could possibly be a Jewish believer.

I think we are going to, in some sense, normalize the Jewish believers as important members of the church and important contributors to church history.

Today some Jewish believers keep a very high Jewish profile and emphasize that they are Jewish. They bind together in messianic communities. At the same time, there are a lot of Jewish believers who are Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, so to speak, mainline church believers.

Our hunch is that this was very much the same situation in the old church. There may have been Jewish believers who were not making a big deal of their being Jewish and were simply members of mixed communities with both Jewish and Gentile believers.

We have this picture in the list of greetings of Paul in Romans 16. Obviously he is greeting some Jewish and many Gentile believers without making any distinction between them. They were probably living rather peacefully together in a mixed community. This category of Jewish believers is not very conspicuous precisely because they didn't wave their Jewish flags all the time.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Skarsaune is the chief editor of the Caspari Center's History of Jewish Believers in Jesus project.

InterVarsity Press has more information on the book, including the full text of its introduction and first chapter.

In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity is this month's selection for CT's Editor's Bookshelf. Elsewhere on our site you can:

Read an extended review; by David Neff

Buy the book online

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10