The Legacy of Christian Apologetics in Post-Holocaust Scholarship: Jean Daniélou, Marcel Simon, and the Problem of Definition

This chapter examines central developments in the study of Jewish Christianity in the post-Holocaust era. It explores how Christian apologetic assumptions—and the interpretive problems they generate—continued to shape discussions of Jewish Christianity, and treatments of Jewish and Christian antiquity more generally, even as Christian theology became increasingly marginalized in critical scholarship. The tone was set when French scholars Marcel Simon and Jean Daniélou produced their own fresh analyses of Jewish Christianity—each, however, based on fundamentally different definitions. Simon defined it strictly with reference to Torah observance. Daniélou's iteration, on the other hand, was formulated along the lines of what Albrecht Ritschl had called judaistisches Christenthum : “the expression of Christianity in the thought-forms of Later Judaism.” Over the next half-century, analyses of Jewish Christianity coalesced largely around one or the other of these two approaches.