Christian Hebraist

A Christian Hebraist is a scholar of Hebrew texts who approaches the works from a Christian perspective. The main area of study is that commonly known as the Old Testament to Christians (and Tanakh to Jews), but Christians have occasionally taken an interest in the Talmud and the Kabbalah.

The discipline has long been a site of Jewish–Christian intellectual interaction. The early church fathers got their knowledge of Hebrew traditions (Masoretic, Midrashim and Aggadah) from Jewish teachers. That is seen especially in the exegesis of Justin Martyr,^[1] Aphraates, Ephraem Syrus and Origen of Alexandria. Jerome's teachers are even mentioned by name such as Bar Ḥanina (Hananiah). In the Middle Ages, Christian converts from Judaism provided a key source of Hebrew education, as native Christians rarely learned the language. As the Renaissance and Enlightenment proceeded, the discipline increasingly came to investigate extrabiblical texts, and eventually became a branch of philology.