History of The Term
The earliest use of the term "Judeo-Christian" in the historical sense dates to 1829 in the missionary journal of Joseph Wolff, and before that as "Judeo Christian" in a letter from Alexander M'Caul dated October 17, 1821. The former appears in discussions of theories of the emergence of Christianity, and both are used with a different sense from the one common today. "Judeo-Christian" here referred to Jewish converts to Christianity.
The term "Jewish-Christian" had been used in this sense as early as 1785 in Richard Watson's essay "The Teaching and Witness of the Holy Spirit", and "Jewish Christian" (as an adjective) as early as 1644 in William Rathband's A Briefe Narration of Some Church Courses. "Jewish–Christian" is used in 1841 to mean a combination of Jewish and Christian beliefs, and by 1877 to mean a common Jewish–Christian culture, used in the phrase "the Jewish–Christian character of…traditions".
Early German use of the term judenchristlich ("Jewish-Christian"), in a decidedly negative sense, can be found in the late writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who emphasized what he saw as neglected aspects of continuity between the Jewish world view and that of Christianity. The expression appears in The Antichrist, published in 1895 and written several years earlier; a fuller development of Nietzsche's argument can be found in a prior work, On the Genealogy of Morality.
The term is also used in the United States as part of American civil religion since the 1940s to refer to standards of religious ethics said to be held in common by Judaism and Christianity, for example the Ten Commandments or Great Commandment.
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