I stumbled upon the same issue today. Any change of publishing a full jdk8 hibernate-core artifact merged with hibernate-java8 ? I think this is the fastest way to correct this issue. OSGI users will have to resort to something like this anyway which means custom made dependencies .

I'm of course not fully aware of the implications of what I'm asking, probably this means more work than I think. Perhaps I'm I missing some other way to solve this at least till a another solution is adopted ?