The Christ Party in the Corinthian Community by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), one of the founders of modern New Testament scholarship, is now available in English for the first time. In this ground-breaking work, Baur argued for a diversity of views in the earliest strata of the Christian tradition that shaped the modern study of Paul in lasting ways. Baur's work revealed a tension between Pauline, gentile Christianity, on the one hand, and Petrine, Judaizing Christianity. In addition to Baur’s essay, this edition includes the first English translation of Ernst Käsemann's introduction to Baur's Historisch-kritische Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament. Even if some of Baur's concrete historical results have been surpassed by subsequent scholarship, this book offers a compelling glimpse of the critical method and piercing insight into one of the shapers of modern biblical study.

This focused collection of essays by international scholars first uncovers the roots of the study of ancient Jewish Christianity in the Enlightenment in early eighteenth-century England, then explores why and how this rediscovery of Jewish Christianity set off the entire modern historical debate over Christian origins. Finally, it examines in detail how this critical impulse made its way to Germany, eventually to flourish in the nineteenth century under F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School. Included is a facsimile reproduction of John Toland’s seminal Nazarenus (1718), which launched the modern study of Jewish Christianity. The contributors are F. Stanley Jones, David Lincicum, Pierre Lurbe, Matt Jackson-McCabe, and Matti Myllykoski.