SCHONFIELD, HUGH JOSEPH

SCHONFIELD, HUGH JOSEPH (1901–1988), British writer and New Testament scholar. Born in London, he entered publishing in 1932, when he produced A New Hebrew Typography in which he devised a lower case alphabet for the printing of Hebrew. He first made his name as a biographer with Richard Burton: Explorer (1936) and Ferdinand de Lesseps (1937). He also published various historical works such as This Man Was Right: Woodrow Wilson Speaks Again (1943) and The Suez Canal in World Affairs (1952; revised ed. 1969).

Schonfield, however, owed his main reputation to a long series of works, often controversial, in which he dealt with primitive Christianity, whose Jewish roots he first emphasized in Besorat Mattai: An Old Hebrew Text of St. Matthew's Gospel (1927) and According to the Hebrews: A New Translation of the Toldoth Jeshu … (1937). In his History of Jewish Christianity from the First to the Twentieth Century (1936), Schonfield endeavored to revive the cause of the first-century Ebionite or "Nazarene" Church of Jerusalem, long silenced by the triumphant Gentile Church, and proclaimed the establishment of a "Jewish Christian independent religious communion" of Jews who believed in the messiahship of Jesus but remained separate from any Church denomination. To varying extents, the same approach characterizes Jesus: A Biography (1939), The Jew of Tarsus: An Unorthodox Portrait of Paul (1946), Saints Against Caesar: The Rise and Reactions of the First Christian Community (1948), and Those Incredible Christians: A New Look at the Early Church (1968).

A noted lecturer and broadcaster, Schonfield continued his research in The Authentic New Testament (1955), an original translation from the Greek, together with an introduction and notes relating the text to rabbinic sources, which became a bestseller. In this, as in other of his later works – such as Judaism and World Order (1943); The Song of Songs (1960), translated from the Hebrew with notes and an introduction; and A Popular Dictionary of Judaism (1962) – Schonfield stressed his Jewish identity and apparently retreated from his earlier wholehearted advocacy of Judeo-Christianity. He also wrote Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1956); A History of Biblical Literature (1962); The Passover Plot (1965), a reappraisal of the messianic initiative of Jesus; and The Politics of God (1970). The Pentecost Revolution (1974), an account of the "Jesus Party" up to the outbreak of the Jewish War against the Romans in 66 c.e., is a sequel to The Passover Plot. Schonfield was one of the most popular and controversial writers on early Christianity in modern Britain.

[Gabriel Sivan]