Judaized Christianity?

In search of new religious stirrings in the Holy Land, Reform Rabbi Herbert Weiner of Temple Israel in South Orange, N.J., paid 14 visits to Israel in the past 15 years. He found plentiful evidence of the much-advertised secularism of Israel. But he also found, he reports in The Wild Goats of Ein Gedi (Doubleday; $4.50), some startling examples of the influence of the Holy Land on Christian missionaries. Rabbi Weiner met:

P:J A Dominican priest named Father Bruno, whose dream it is to found a Roman Catholic institute for Jewish studies in Israel and who seeks Vatican permission to say his Mass in Hebrew and to hold the Mass on the Sabbath as well as on Sunday.

P: A pair of Protestant nuns from Darmstadt, members of an order that works with the Jews in repentance for Germany's crimes against them, who fasted on Yom Kippur and read selections from the Jewish prayer book. P: A Baptist minister, the Rev. Dwight Baker, who was worried about whether to encourage a group of Baptist converts from Judaism in their desire to continue obeying Jewish laws while still believing that Jesus was the Messiah.

The Baptists "didn't want to call themselves Christians, but preferred the name

Messianists." writes Weiner. "They insisted that they were still Jews, though they believed in Jesus as the Messiah, and some of them still wanted to keep Jewish laws like circumcision and the observance of kosher food. The result of such a development, Baker pointed out worriedly, would be the formation of a Jewish church within the church.''

Asks Rabbi Weiner: "Is it possible for the Christian faith to be dipped profoundly in the life and reality of modern Israel without undergoing some profound changes?" And he wonders if there might not be ''a kind of Christianity, a religious seed . . . acceptable to this soil?''

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