Before the First Jewish–Roman War (66-73 CE), the mother Church of God at Jerusalem, was the seat of Judeo-Christianity. It served as the center of operations for the whole church. The Apostle James, a brother of Jesus of Nazareth, served as its overseer. His successor was his cousin, Simeon, the son of Cleophas. During this Judeo-Christian Period (31-73 CE), the cultural heritage of the Church of God remained decidedly of a Jewish nature. Judeo-Christians referred to their fellowship as the Church of God, presumably qehal’el, the contraction of qehal ‘elohim (“Congregation of God” or “Assembly of God”) in Hebrew, understanding it to be the company elect of God and determined by God to be the center and crystallization-point of eschatological Israel.
Following the First Roman War with the Jews, a number of Judeo-Christians, presumably members of the headquarters church who had fled the war, returned to Jerusalem, settled and built a small Christian synagogue near the crest of Mount Sion. This small Church of God, whose remnants lie on the southern part of Mt. Sion in the southwestern portion of Jerusalem, observed by Hadrian (Roman emperor from 117 to 138) and called by Theodosius I (Roman emperor from 379 to 395) the Mother of All Churches, was the seat of the Judeo‐Christian community at Jerusalem from 73-381 CE.
Known in the Jewish homeland as the Nazarenes, the early church at first included only Jews and exhibited many of the ideas, values, and characteristics of the indigenous population. Nevertheless, the teachings and beliefs found in this original Christianity differed vastly from those of the Jerusalem establishment and various first-century Judaisms, particularly in the customs or halakha (הֲלָכָה) of the Pharisees.
Some believe that pharisaic Jews added the birkat ha-mînîm to the Eighteen Benedictions of the Amîdah to curse and anathematize Judeo-Christians to drive these minim (heretics) from the synagogue in an effort to save Judaism (Manns, 1988, p. 26). It appears more likely, in light of the established pharisaic practice of legislating to guard against even minor transgressions of the Torah, that the birkat ha-mînîm was to serve as a barrier, or fence, of sorts to keep observant Pharisaic Jews within the fold rather than to keep minim out. If any Jew became a Judeo-Christian, he or she then became minim and subject to the daily curse by rabbinical Jews.
The Talmud records that it was Samuel the Lessor who composed the birkat ha-mînîm (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 29a). The Benediction in a Palestinian siddur (a Jewish prayer book) from the Cairo Genizah, a collection of some 350,000 Jewish manuscript fragments discovered in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in Old Cairo, Egypt, reads as follows:
For the apostates let there be no hope. And let the arrogant government be speedily uprooted in our days. Let the noẓerim and the minim be destroyed in a moment. And let them be blotted out of the Book of Life and not be inscribed together with the righteous. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who humblest the arrogant.
In his treatise Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearance in the Fourth Century, Ray Pritz, former director of the Bible Society in Israel, who writes and teaches study material at the Caspari Center for Biblical and Jewish Studies, argued that:
It was his [Rabbi Akiva’s] endorsement of a false messiah (and for Jewish Christians a rival messiah) which was the last straw which broke the ties of the notzrim [Nazarenes or Church of God] with rabbinic Judaism.
The period 74–136 CE was a time of transition from the Judeo-Christianity dominated by the apostles to that of the Greco-Roman Christianity of the second century. Arthur Stanley, in his Oxford lectures on the history of the Eastern Church, posed the issue. He wrote:
The first period is that which contains the great question, almost the greatest which Ecclesiastical History has to answer,—How was the transition effected from the age of the Apostles to the age of the Fathers, from Christianity as we see it in the next century, and as, to a certain extent, we have seen it ever since?
Stanley 1862:39
In his The Story of the Christian Church Jesse Lyman Hurlbut wrote:
For fifty years after St. Paul’s life a curtain hangs over the church, through which we strive vainly to look; and when at last it rises, about 120 A.D. with the writings of the earliest church fathers, we find a church in many aspects very different from that in the days of St. Peter and St. Paul.
Hurlbut 1967:33
By 74 CE the phenomenon of backing away from Jewish lifeways had slowed in the Jewish homeland due to cultural restraints but had accelerated in the Hellenistic Dispersion. Social intercourse and intermarriage among believers in the Hellenistic Dispersion integrated Jews and Greeks into a common cultural fold. This led to the rise of at least two distinct Judeo-Christian communities within the Church of God divided by cultural heritage and language — the Hebrews (Palestinians of Jewish ethnicity) and the Hellenists (non-Palestinians born in the Hellenistic Diaspora of mixed ethnicity).
We know there were large populations of Jews in Mesopotamia, Egypt and North Africa as well, with Judeo-Christians communities there, but little is known about them. The travels of the Apostle Paul in the regions of the Hellenistic Diaspora are well-documented in Acts and his epistles. But the New Testament records little about the travels of the Apostle Peter. As the apostle of the circumcision one would think he evangelized among the large Jewish populations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The epistle of 1 Peter places him in Babylon of Mesopotamia but we have no specific evidence of his traveling to Egypt.
Presumably, Christianity came into Egypt in 31 CE. Egyptian Jews (probably some from Alexandria) were in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:8-11). Some were witnesses to the events of the time and the gospel which they took back to Egypt. The apostles undoubtedly baptized some (Acts 2:38 NASB). Apollos was a Jew from Alexandria who knew the baptism of John (Acts 18:24-25 NASB). According to Eusebius (HE ii.16) John Mark was the first sent to Egypt, where he preached the gospel which he had written, and established churches in Alexandria.
In 50 CE, Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15:36-40 NASB) parted at Antioch of Syria. Barnabas was a Levite from the island of Cyprus and a cousin, not uncle, of John Mark. Barnabas went with Mark to Cyprus and he then traveled on to Alexandria. Travel and trade between Cyprus and Alexandria were well-established at that time. It would have been a natural route for Barnabas to take (see Edwards 1977, pp.134, 161.) The implication from the NT epistles is that John Mark spent some time with his cousin Barnabas evangelizing the Jews in Egypt and then became an aide to the Apostle Peter.
Moreover, the Land of Onias is the name given to an area in Ancient Egypt’s Nile delta where a large number of Jews had settled. The Land of Onias, which included the city of Leontopolis, was located in the nome of Heliopolis. While accounts differ on the details, it is known that the Jews of Leontopolis had a functioning Temple, presided over by kohanim of the family of Onias IV (for whom the “Land of Onias” is named). Like its predecessor the Jewish Temple at Elephantine (destroyed in the 4th century BCE), the Temple at Leontopolis was the only Jewish sanctuary outside of Jerusalem where Jews offered sacrifices. Realize that in the period 31-135 CE there were more Jews in Egypt than anywhere else in the world including Palestine. Why would Peter not evangelize them? If so, it suggests how John Mark became an aide to the Apostle Peter. They worked together with Barnabas in Egypt.
Josephus relates that after the First Jewish War (66-73 CE), the Roman emperor Vespasian feared that through this temple, Egypt might become a new center for Jewish rebellion and therefore ordered the governor of Egypt, Lupus, to demolish it. Lupus died in the process of carrying out the order; and the task of stripping the temple of its treasures, barring access to it, and removing all traces of divine worship at the site was that of his successor, Paulinus, which dates the event to ca. March – August 73.
Meanwhile, many followers of Jesus and the apostles, primarily Mishnaic Hebrew-speaking Jews, remained a Judeo-Christian community in Eretz Israel, referred to by Jewish outsiders as Nazarenes, marked by a tendency to preserve established traditions. The Hellenists became the Greek-speaking Church of God, the ekklesia tou Theou, in the Hellenistic Diaspora (or the Dispersion centered in Asia Minor) characterized by more tolerant views and less inclined to adopt or retain Jewish culture. These were the congregations in the general region first ministered to by the Apostle Paul and his associates.
Nevertheless, as a whole the cultural heritage of the Church during this Judeo-Christian Period (30-73 CE) remained predominantly of a Jewish nature. The period closed with the 73 CE collapse of the First Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE) against the Romans. By 69 CE Christianity had lost the literal “mother of all churches,” that being the headquarters congregation at Jerusalem and its synagogue, and witnessed the deaths of the Apostles James and Paul. From this point forward Christianity as a whole became increasingly divided in faith and praxis and nearly devoid of any centralized form of leadership or ecclesiastical authority.
While the Church of God at first developed into an extended Judeo-Christian community, oriented toward Jerusalem with most of its members ethnic Jews, in the post-war period (73-136 CE) its demographics shifted with Christendom separating into hundreds of independent groups. The absence of any universal form of centralized administration resulted in many competing and diversifying Christianities.
As the first Christian generation of Peter, Paul, John, James, and their second generation successors passed away, rising heresy within Judeo-Christianity challenged its doctrines and threatened its very existence. Post-73 CE writings in the New Testament indicate discouragement, disruption, and heresy as problems within Judeo-Christian congregations during the late first century (Jude, 2 Peter, Revelation, and John’s Gospel and his three epistles). The mother congregation at Jerusalem no longer served as the focal point of the greater church but functioned more-or-less as a center for local Hebrew-speaking Judeo-Christians known by Jewish outsiders as Nazarenes.
Nevertheless, a large Judeo-Christian population existed at Jerusalem until the time of the Bar-Kochba Rebellion. In spite of the great disappointment, which presumably accompanied the failed return of Jesus of Nazareth in the 66-73 CE period, they continued to increase and flourish. There is no reason to doubt that a line of Judeo-Christian bishops continued to serve the Palestine Judeo-Christian community well into the fourth century. The center of their activity was Christian Sion and the Judeo-Christian synagogue that became known as The Holy Church of God and the Church of the Apostles. Their community remained on Mt. Sion until seized by the orthodox Greco-Roman Christian authorities. As a result of the proceedings of the First Council of Constantinople, held in 381 CE, Roman emperor Theodosius I ordered the immediate surrender of all churches to the orthodox Greco-Roman bishops. He issued the edict July 30, 381, authorizing seizure of all Judeo-Christian synagogues and thereby ending any accommodation of Judeo-Christianity.
Revelation 2-3 tells of the spiritual conditions present in seven of the congregations of the Church of God in Asia Minor, along a Roman mail route, while under the oversight of Apostle John—Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. It was late in the 90s when John was released from exile at Patmos and he returned to Ephesus. There he completed Revelation and published it to the Church late in the Ephesian Era. Allowing time for the circulation of the manuscript and its call for repentance and for the people of God to repent suggests that it was well into the second century CE, about 135 CE, when God removed the Ephesian Era candlestick ending the first era of the biblical Church of God. For two nearly millennia, there were significant periods of overlap as one era faded and another came to prominence.
The Second Jewish–Roman War (132-135 CE), the Bar Kochba Revolt, facilitated the presence of Greco-Roman Gentile Christians in Roman Palestine both in regard to residence and pilgrimage. This fortuity, holds Franciscan archaeologist Bellarmino Bagatti, precipitated Gentile Christian contact with indigenous Judeo-Christians leading to conflict and motive to begin a religious war. According to Bagatti: “In fact some gentile Christians could not bear that their coreligionists should perpetuate, more than a century after the death of Christ, those Jewish rites which they, on reading St. Paul, believed had been juridically abolished. The Christians of Jewish stock, on the contrary, thought that it was wrong to abandon those rites, which neither Jesus nor the apostles, Paul excepted, had abrogated” (Bagatti 1971a:78). The defeat of Bar-Kokhba marked the conclusion of apostolic times and beginning of the Period of the Great Separation (CE 135-325) in Christendom.
Roman Emperor Hadrian decreed the city and territory of Colonia Aelia Capitolina, that is, Jerusalem, off-limits to all Jews:
From that time on, the entire race has been forbidden to set foot anywhere in the neighborhood of Jerusalem, under the terms and ordinances of a law of Hadrian which ensured that not even from a distance might Jews have a view of their ancestral soil”
This prevented Jews from resettling and building synagogues there. Michael Avi-Yonah reconstructed the decree as:
It is forbidden for all circumcised persons to enter or stay within the territory of Aelia Capitolina; any person contravening this prohibition shall be put to death.
While the sanctity of human life was a historic component in Jewish teaching the Judeo-Christian Church of God went further by rejecting any resort to violence against human beings. This required the rejection of the use of war and violence by its members. Throughout the Apostolic Age Judeo- Christians were pacifists. They took no part in war (see Bagatti 1971a:7; González 1984:53) which led to difficulty in the 66-73 CE and 132-135 CE Jewish attempts to free themselves from Roman rule.
By refusing to take part in the revolt Judeo-Christians appeared as traitors to traditional Jews but as loyalists by the Romans. The latter apparently rewarded Judeo-Christians with continuing access to Aelia Capitolina following the Bar Kochba Revolt but denied Jews access to the city under the pain of death.
This is explained by the fact that with the war a distinction was made between the Jews and the Judaeo-Christians, and that the decree of expulsion, promulgated by Hadrian, concerned only the Jews.
Bagatti 1971a:10
So concluded the first 100 years of biblical Christianity.
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