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			| Atticus Grinch | 10-15-2003 01:30 PM |  
 Response to Atticus on the Early Church
 
	Quote: 
	
		| Originally posted by Fugee
 Atticus, you know a lot about a bunch of things but I don't think you've got it right on the early church.
 
 What are you smoking?  Co-equal with other Jewish political parties?  You want to talk about being the target of ire:  Before the Romans got into the game, the Jewish religious leaders were working hard to stamp out what they viewed as heresy by executing Christians.  And that's not just from the New Testament.  Josephus chronicles at least one instance of this.
 
 |  True, but when the Bar-Kokhba Revolt was put down, there was no Jewish hierarchy anymore.  Not only was the Temple destroyed (again!), but Jerusalem itself was off-limits.  Judaism was forced underground in the Roman Empire.  That doesn't mean the Jesus Movement shot to prominence; it means its contemporary competitors suffered a huge setback that leveled the playing field.
 
Co-equal doesn't mean it was respected; the Sadducees and Pharisees didn't get along either.  This was serious stuff at stake.  When I said "co-equal," I guess I meant that the Jesus Movement attained a status of its own when the rest of the Jewish community was scattered to the diaspora.
Raymond Brown  theorized that the Gospel of John was written by a community of disciples dedicated to the Apostle John who were expelled from their synagogue for their beliefs in approximately 100 C.E.  Consistent with their pain at losing their Jewish identity, they use a word found nowhere else in the Christian writings (aposynagogos ) three times in the Gospel (9:22, 12:42, 16:2).  Their Gospel (if Brown is to be believed) is also among the most virulently anti-Semitic.  They were getting their own licks in, the best way they could.
 
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		| The very early church wasn't about political parties.  It was all about the message of salvation.  I don't think it got political until the church was much more established as Christianity.
 
 |  I think you're taking "political parties" in too modern a sense.  I'm talking about the religious philosophies that were competing for the heart of Judaism.  I don't say this to minimize the Jesus Movement, nor to insult the bona fides of the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and others.  They were all looking for salvation, but they were in competition with each other for adherents and influence.  Thus, "parties."
 
I'm not going out too far on a historical limb to say that Jesus probably sought the total reform of the Israelite religion, not its destruction.  That's why the word "Messiah" is used; it couldn't have been coincidental that it resonated with uniquely Jewish expectations. |