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As a result of the First Jewish War, CE 66-70, many Judean Christians, seeking safety, escaped the destruction of Jerusalem by scattering throughout the Near East. It appears that a number of Jerusalem's Judeo-Christian community relocated to Pella, a city of the Decapolis, located east of the Jordan River. Eusebius, writing in his Ecclesiastical History some 250 years after the fact, following an anti-Judaic invention, believed the Jerusalem congregation departed the city just before the war.
In the Panarion Eusebius added:
Eusebius apparently based his opinion on Ariston of Pella (L�demann 1980:165-166 following A. Schlatter; Koester 1989:92) although most writers credit the Memoirs of Hegesippus. John A. T. Robinson, for example, summarized the matter as:
The apologist Ariston was a Judeo-Christian writer, ca. CE 150, belonging to the congregation of Pella (Baus 1990:208; Quasten 1950:195f; Koester 1989:92). Hegesippus was an orthodox writer, ca. CE 180, who traveled about collecting evidence and recording traditions with an orthodox construction thereby linking "�correct� tradition and succession with order and unanimity" (Johnson 1976:53). The conditions described by Josephus suggest a gradual migration starting in CE 64. In any case, some suggest the flight of the last remaining members of the Jerusalem congregation may have been on the Feast of Pentecost in CE 69. The details as recorded by Flavius Josephus were:
In all fairness, the earthquake may have led many to say "Let�s get out of here!" without their being Jerusalem Christians. This statement, in context, is more consistent with the normal reaction of Jews on the Temple platform experiencing a frightening earthquake in the dark. The evidence is certainly not conclusive. When Jerusalem's Christians relocated to Pella, because of the Jewish war with Rome, they continued to consider themselves the Jerusalem congregation. The congregation served as a center of Judeo-Christianity under the leadership of Simeon. Its chief elder was still "bishop of Jerusalem" the pastor of the Jerusalem Judeo-Christian community in exile. (For more information see The Jerusalem Congregation.) The Greek verb used by Eusebius is metokismenon, meaning migrated, and so translated in the Loeb (Lake 1959:200-201) and Penguin (Williamson 1965:68) editions. The popular perception that the mother congregation "fled" is a hermeneutic based upon Jesus� prophecy about the end of the age in Matthew 24:16-21. While direct evidence of the presence of Judeo-Christian refugees at Pella is wanting, Bellarmino Bagatti, in his The Church from the Circumcision, argues the probative value of the circumstantial evidence of a coin minted at Pella, in imitation of coins minted at Caesarea, with the inscription Judaea capta (Jewish captives) as a record of the advent of these refugee Jews in Pella (Bagatti 1971a:8). Gerd L�demann, in a thoughtful analysis of the flight to Pella tradition, sought to falsify it suggesting that the tradition was an invention of Jewish Christians at Pella aiming to link their origins back to an apostle and the original Jerusalem congregation in order to legitimate their form of Jewish Christianity (L�demann 1980). Murphy-O'Connor, who sees a constant Christian presence in Jerusalem/Aelia in the 70�135 period, argues that the flight to Pella tradition is a myth and that there was no break in the Christian presence in Jerusalem (Murphy-O�Connor 1994:304). Craig Koester carefully reconsidered L�demann�s contentions and argued that the Pella tradition more likely recalls first-century events based upon independent traditions preserved in Epiphanius (see Epiphanius Panarion 29.7.7-8; 30.2.7) and in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (see Recognitions of Clement 1.37 and 1.39; Pseudo-Clement 1986:87�88; Koester 1989:97-103). The historicity of the matter remains unresolved.
Page last updated: 12/13/04 07:22 PM .
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