Reborn Jewish Christianity: Messianic Jews and Hebrew Catholics

Messianic Judaism is a significant and important recent modern movement of Jewish Christianity, Jews who accept Jesus as Israel’s promised Messiah, which combines the Jewish and Protestant Christian traditions, including all the common Christian fundamentals, in an attempt to restore the lost Jewish cultural expression of Christianity which was practiced by all the first Christians, who were Jews. Within the Catholic Church there is a similar Association of Hebrew Catholics, which there is talk of eventually re-establishing as a formal “Hebrew Rite” or “Jewish Rite” of the Catholic Church, since the Catholic Church since Vatican Council II is in the process of shedding its Second Millennium Roman Rite dominance and re-discovering its Undivided First Millennium ideal as a truly Universal (Catholic) Communion of different culturally-based orthodox Christian Sister Churches, Eastern and Western. The Undivided Catholic Communion included the Jerusalem Church which at the 4th Ecumenical Council was named a Patriarchate specifically in honor of the original, culturally Jewish Christian Church centered at Jerusalem which brought the Gospel of Jesus to all the surrounding Gentile cultures centered in Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and Byzantium/Constantinople, which were also named Patriarchates or Church Provinces of the one Catholic (Universal) Christian Church of the Undivided First Millennium. Although the original “Jewish Rite” (specifically Jewish cultural expression) of Christianity died out after the 135 AD destruction of Jerusalem and the scattering of the Jews by the Pagan Romans, it was not at all (as many Gentile Christian readers mistakenly assume) ended earlier by the Acts 15 Council of Jerusalem which simply stated that Gentiles did not need to become Jews in order to be Christians. As demonstrated in So That The World May Believe Volume I Chapter 3: The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Ideal of Christian Unity in Diversity, Acts 16:1-5 and Acts 21:17-26 prove that Jewish Christians remained culturally Jewish Christians after the Acts 15 Council just as Gentile Christians started developing their own distinct legitimate cultural expressions of Christianity (which became the Syrian, Egyptian, Roman and Greek Gentile Christian culturally-based ‘Sister’ Churches which together with the initially Jewish Jerusalem Church were known as the “Pentarchy” of Early Church Patriarchates or Provinces which together (at the Early Ecumenical Councils) clearly articulated and established the common fundamentals of traditional orthodox Christianity amid the turmoil of the early Christian controversies with heretics. Much more on the place of the Jewish Rite Christianity which is being newly re-established in our time will be found in various books published on this website (notably in The Bible’s ‘Big Picture’ and So That The World May Believe Volume I: Rediscovering the Early Church’s Unity in Diversity).