JEWS FOR JESUS: Michael Pahl points to an interesting article by a Rabbi Marc Howard Wilson on Jews for Jesus in Jewcy Magazine (formerly Jewsweek):

A deceptive name -- a deceptive assertion
Were they to make themselves known not as "Jews for Jesus," but as "Jews Who Have Chosen to Practice Gentile Christianity," the results might be equally lamentable, but the honesty would be refreshing.

My interest here is sociological. The controversy over Jews for Jesus reflects in some ways the controversies between Jews, Jewish-Christians, and gentile Christians in the early centuries CE. I've been thinking about these conflicts for some time because of the implications they have for understanding the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. They show that there was not necessarily a hard and fast distinction between Jews and Christians in antiquity, but rather a continuum between Torah-observant Jews and non-observant gentile Christians, with both Jewish-Christians and gentile Judaizing Christians fitting somewhere on the continuum in-between. (Something of the same continuum exists today, as the Jews for Jesus movement demonstrates.) If we have an OT pseudepigraphon that contains both (Torah-observant) Jewish ideas and also Christian ideas, how can we tell (or can we tell) if it was written by an observant Jew and edited by a gentile Christian or written by a Jewish-Christian or a Judiazing gentile Christian? Often, we can't. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the paradigmatic example of such a text. We know that the author(s) used Jewish sources (Aramaic Levi, Hebrew Naphtali) but we don't know what else they used or what they were making up themselves.

I discuss some of these issues in my online piece "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?", in which I support Jonathan Z. Smith's "polythetic" approach as the most useful etic methodology for unraveling the problems. This 2002 conference paper is a short and now out-of-date summary of chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? You can read much more on the subject in the book when it comes out, I hope in the fall (shameless self-promotion alert). I don't discuss the Jews for Jesus movement in the paper or the chapter, but I would evaluate it polythetically as a borderline case, one which has some features of the category Judaism and accepts itself as belonging to the category, but which is rejected from the category by (I believe) all other groups who class themselves in the category. It's a nice example of how complicated religious movements and their interrelationships can get in the real world.

UPDATE (23 June): A reader writes to point out that Jews for Jesus is only one segment of the "Messianic Jews" movement, which movement comes in a wide variety of levels of observance and not all of whom proselytize Jews. Fair enough. I was using Jews for Jesus as a specifice example of an interesting point on the continuum, one of many such points between strictly Torah-observant Judaism and non-observant gentile Christianity. And a one-dimensional continuum is itself is a fairly simplistic way of conceptualizing the situation.

UPDATE (25 June): More here.