The term Judeo-Christian groups Judaism and Christianity, either in reference to Christianity's derivation from Judaism or due to perceived parallels or commonalities shared between those two religions.
The term is used, as "Judæo Christian", at least as far back as in a letter from Alexander M'Caul dated October 17, 1821. The term in this case referred to Jewish converts to Christianity. The term is used similarly by Joseph Wolff in 1829, referring to a style of church that would keep with some Jewish traditions in order to convert Jews.
Use of the German 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 concept of "Judeo-Christian values" in an ethical (rather than theological or liturgical) sense was used by George Orwell in 1939, with the phrase "the Judaeo-Christian scheme of morals." It has become part of the "American civil religion" since the 1940s, and is now the most common usage of the term "Judeo-Christian", at least in the United States.
Christianity inherits the notion of a "covenant" from Second Temple Judaism, in the form of the Old Testament. Two major views of the relationship exist, namely New Covenant theology and Dual-covenant theology. In addition, although the order of the books in the Protestant Old Testament (excluding the Biblical apocrypha) and the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) differ, the contents of the books are very similar.