Recovering Jewish-Christian Sects and Gospels

The mystery of lost, apocryphal Jewish-Christian gospels has intrigued scholars for centuries. Scholars have also debated whether the Ebionites with their low Christology or the more “orthodox” Nazarenes are the genuine successors of the early Jerusalem church. This book provides a fresh assessment of the patristic sources and the scholarly theories on the number and contents of Jewish-Christian gospels. A new approach, the study of indicators of Jewish-Christian profiles, shows the artificial nature of the church fathers’ heretical discourse, bringing forth previously neglected connections between various Jewish-Christian movements. This book also challenges the widely accepted theory of three Jewish-Christian gospels bringing the Gospel of the Hebrews closer to its synoptic cousins—not, however, as a witness of the earliest Jesus traditions but as a post-synoptic composition.

Petri Luomanen, Th.D. (1996), University of Helsinki, is a University Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. He has published widely on the Gospel of Matthew, early Jewish Christianity and social-scientific studies of Early Christianity, including A Companion to Second-Century Christian “Heretics” (Brill, 2005; co-edited with Marjanen) and Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism (Brill, 2007; co-edited with Pyysiäinen and Uro).