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During the inter-war period, from CE 70-130, Christianity became increasingly Greco-Roman as more and more Gentiles became Hellenistic Christians. At this time about one out of every four Christians in the Diaspora were of Gentile descent. The Hellenistic form of Judeo-Christianity, albeit challenged by the rise of splinter and dissident groups, remained a significant force in the East. It was especially vigorous in Asia Minor with its substantial Jewish population.
The messages to the seven congregations in Asia Minor set forth in the book of Revelation supply some evidence of the nature of these Judeo-Christian congregations about CE 96 (see Revelation 2 and Revelation 3). These messages show congregations embroiled in controversy instigated by Gnostic teachers and dissidents known as the Nicolaitans (Revelation 2:6, 2:15). Gnostics denied the incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth by arguing that the body of Jesus only appeared to be human, but in fact was not. William Barclay sums up what is known about the Nicolaitan movement as well as anyone. In his view:
They were almost certainly people who argued on these lines. (a) The law is ended; therefore, there are no laws and we are entitled to do what we like. They confused Christian liberty with unchristian license. They were the very kind of people whom Paul urged not to use their liberty as an opportunity for the flesh (Galatians 5:13). (b) They probably argued that the body is evil anyway and that a man could do what he liked with it because it did not matter. (c) They probably argued that the Christian was so defended by grace that he could do anything and take no harm. (Barclay 1976:67-68.)
Moreover, Greco-Roman Christianity in the West began to take on a significantly different character. Contributing factors include:
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the remoteness of the western church from Jerusalem and its Judeo-Christian authority figures and leadership, and its leaders reliance on the swelling assumption that Peter and Paul vested the church at Rome with its own doctrinal truth and authority; |
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the lower and more dispersed Jewish population in the western part of the Roman empire, a minimized acculturation in Judeo-Christian values, and an overall absence of even an elementary understanding of basic Jewish traditions and the essentials of Judeo-Christianity by both clergy and the laity; |
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a rapidly expanding belief system based upon dreams, hearsay (oral traditions), philosophy, politics, superstition, and visions; |
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a tendency to be more tolerant of adapting Christianity to facilitate local cultural conventions thereby providing greater cultural continuity to Gentiles; |
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a moving away from the legalistic ideas of the Jews and the idealism of the Greeks toward a more utilitarian approach to religion including the christianizing of pagan customs, ideas, festivals, and holidays through diffusion; |
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the adoption of an independent authoritarian approach, vested in the clergy and particularly in the overseers, and centralization of authority in the bishops; |
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gentilization, in general, and the lack of continuity inherent in a youth-centered religion reflecting the high mortality rate of an empire wherein one�s life expectancy at birth was less than 30 years; and |
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the embracing by the leading clergy of the ethnocentric, condescending, and elitist attitudes of imperial Romans toward the ideas and culture of non-Latins such as Greeks and Jews. |
These differences were evident at the beginning of the second century. The ca. CE 96 letter from the Church of God at Rome sent by bishop Clement (bishop, CE 88-97), to the Church of God at Corinth reflected a Roman advocacy of independence and authoritarianism for the clergy (Richardson 1970:43-73; Pagels 1979:34-35; Johnson 1976:56). Moreover, Eusebius reports that the Roman bishop Sixtus I (CE 115-25?) forbad the Judeo-Christian practice of observing the Christian Passover on Nisan 14, and taught instead the celebration of the day of Resurrection at the close of the pascal season on the Lord�s-day, that is, on Sunday (Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 3.5; Boyle 1955:86. 5.24; Boyle 1955:210). This Lord�s-day, seen increasingly by Gentile Christians as the day of the risen Lord and the gift of the Holy Spirit, is now known as Easter Sunday. As the Apostolic Period came to a close, troubles in the form of periodic persecution, the rising influence of gnosticism, factions and heresies, and the separation of Judeo-Christians from the Jews and from Gentile Greco-Roman Christians in the East and West unsettled Judeo-Christianity.F1
Following the death of the apostle John, usually reported as occurring in CE 96, Judeo-Christians continued in relative obscurity in Asia Minor, Syria, Judea, and elsewhere. From a contemporary scholarly perspective, Judeo-Christianity seems to have just disappeared�perhaps indicative of their recorded history and literature becoming lost, or even destroyed as Greco-Roman Christianity emerged as orthodox, took control, and sought to eliminate all opposition through ethnic cleansing. Elaine Pagels makes this point. She wrote that the:
...efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical 'blasphemy' proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them (Pagels 1979:xxiv.)
"Even regarding the Nazarenes," wrote Bagatti in a revealing understatement, "who had many contacts with the gentile Christian church, we have only few details, because our historians have completely neglected to hand down the doings of those separated Christians" (Bagatti 1971a:30).
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. In the Levant there were a variety of divergent Judeo-Christian groups and outright Jewish Christians such as the Ebionites.
The mother congregation at Jerusalem no longer served as the focal point of the greater church, but functioned more as a regional center for Hebrew-speaking Judeo-Christians known locally by Jewish outsiders as Nazarenes. There is no direct evidence to suggest that these Hebrew speaking Judeo-Christians of the Levant ever referred to themselves as Nazarenes during apostolic times.
As the Judeo-Christian and Gentile Christian movements separated, during the Period of the Great Separation (CE 135-381),F2 the name Nazarene came to refer to Mishnaic Hebrew speaking Judeo-Christians in the Levant. Relying on Epiphanius, Bagatti holds that Epiphanius, in reference to the first half of the 4th century, "vouches for the desire of these Christians of Jewish race not to be called Christians or Jews but Nazarenes" (Bagatti 1971a:13; cf., Epiphanius Panarion 29.7.1-8; Klijn and Reinink 1973:173). Ray Pritz points out that the term applied to the entire Church of God in the early days of the community.
It is important to note that the name Nazarenes was at first applied to all Jewish followers of Jesus. Until the name Christian became attached to Antiochian non-Jews, this meant that the name signified the entire Church, not just a sect. So also in Acts 24:5 the reference is not to a sect of Christianity but rather to the entire primitive Church as a sect of Judaism. Only when the Gentile Church overtook and overshadowed the Jewish one could there be any possibility of sectarian stigma adhering to the name Nazarene within the Church itself. This should be borne in mind when considering the total absence of the name from extant Christian literature between the composition of Acts and 376, when the panarion was written. (Pritz 1992:15.)
By CE 70 the messianic Jews known as Ebionites were a wholly separate sect and Hellenistic Judeo-Christians continued to admit more and more Gentiles into their fellowships. Moreover, Eusebius, writing ca. CE 385, reported that a large Judeo-Christian population existed at Jerusalem until the time of the siege of Hadrian (Eusebius Demonstratio Evangelica 3.5; Klijn and Reinink 1973:139). He listed 13 bishops, following Simeon son of Clopas (bishop, ca. 63�ca. 98), as serving this Judeo-Christian community but this appears rather unlikely (Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 3.5; Boyle 1955:86. 4.5; Boyle 1955:130-131). Refer to Table 2 for a list of early bishops of the major church sees as reported by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (Boyle 1955:479-480).
Depending on how one reckons the time of death of Simeon there followed a 28 to 35 year period during which, according to Eusebius, there were thirteen successive Judeo-Christian bishops. This permits only an average of two to three year terms for thirteen bishops, during a period of little or no persecution or turmoil, which is too little to be taken as normal. The implication is that Eusebius either confused the sees and inserted bishops for adjacent localities into the list or that some bishops were coadjutors (Bagatti 1971a:53).
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Jerusalem
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Greco-Roman Bishops at Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) from CE 135 |
Bishops at Rome |
Bishops at Antioch |
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Taken from Boyle 1955:479�480 |
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There is no reason to doubt that a line of Judeo-Christian bishops continued to serve the local Judeo-Christian community well into the fourth century. Why did Eusebius not list any Judeo-Christian bishops after the founding of Aelia Capitolina? The sense of his writing is that the ardent Nicene saw Judeo-Christian bishops as true Christians, orthodox, only through Judas but not thereafter. To his orthodox mind the episcopal throne of James passed to the Gentile bishops which was the history he proceeded to develop.
According to Bagatti:
the Jews. (Bagatti 1971a:10.)Reading Eusebius one gets the impression that the Judaeo-Christians left the city forever, but such was not the case, because things that happened later, when examined, show us that they were still in their old surroundings. From which it is established that the Judaeo-Christians, after having left the city for a time, returned very quickly. 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
This growth, particularly the influx of Gentiles into the Hellenistic churches, and the loss of the last members of the first Christian generation, poised Christianity for the emergence of many nascent Christianities (Pagels 1979:xxii, 7; Stark 1996:140). The rise of new independent Christian groups, rife with heresies from the Judeo-Christian point-of-view, and protracted fragmentation characterized this time. Justo Gonz�lez holds that as to the Hebrew-speaking branch of Judeo-Christianity:
...the ancient Jewish church, rejected by both Jews and Gentiles, found itself in increasing isolation. Although by A.D. 135 a number of Jewish Christians returned to Jerusalem, their relationship with the rest of Christianity had been almost completely severed, and leadership had passed to Gentile Christians.... When, in later centuries, Gentile Christians deigned to write a few words about that forgotten community, they would speak of its heretics and its strange customs, but they would have little of positive value to say about that church, which faded out of history in the fifth century. (Gonz�lez 1984:22.)
As Jews, Judeo-Christians, Gentile Christians, and Christianized Gentiles separated, the meeting places of Greco-Roman congregations lost, or more precisely abandoned, the sense of synagogue. The culture of the early Church during this transitional period, CE 70-135, particularly outside Eretz Israel, marked by the decline of Jewish lifeways and the evolving of a new diverse Greco-Roman Christian way of life, emerged as neither distinctly Jewish nor pagan Gentile. Its character, reflecting the new reality of Greco-Roman Christianity, became that of a separate religion within the cultural framework of Hellenistic Judaism (Frend 1984:137). But, as seen by rising Greco-Roman Christianity, particularly in the Latin west, which increasingly viewed itself as orthodoxy, influenced by both dissident teachers and the syncretism of the times, Judeo-Christianity followed the antiquated way of recalcitrant Jews and their followers in resisting progressive change and the lead of the Spirit of God.
The war of CE 135 facilitated the presence of Gentile Christians in Roman Palestine both in regard to residence and pilgrimage. This fortuity, holds 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 CE 135 Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the course of the Bar-Kokhba RevoltF3 marked the conclusion of apostolic times and beginning of the Period of the Great Separation (CE 135-325) in Christendom.
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F1I Peter, Jude, John�s gospel and letters, and Revelation all deal in part with rising dissident Christianity.
F2The Period of the Great Separation (CE 135�381) consists of the 250 years it took for the Church of God to splinter and polarize into two wholly opposing factions�Judeo-Christians (primarily of Jewish roots) and so-called Orthodox Christians (primarily of Gentile pagan stock). This interval could just as well be CE 70�325. Certainly the nature of the Christianity of first century took a significant turn with the First Jewish War (CE 66-70) and the complete physical destruction of Jerusalem. Moreover, the CE 325 date of the Council of Nicea is a convenient benchmark because the Council adopted legislation formally separating the two groups. From then on the Orthodox denounced Judeo-Christians as heterodox. In the alternative the outer boundary is CE 381 when, as an outcome of the Council of Constantinople I, Roman emperor Theodosius I issued the confiscatory edict disfranchising the heterodox who were to surrender their churches, such as the Church of the Apostles on Mt. Sion, to the orthodox forthwith.
F3The Bar Kokhba revolt (CE I32-135) brought the Jewish community in Palestine to near annihilation. Dio reported that "very few of them in fact survived. Fifty of their most important outposts and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out. Thus nearly the whole of Judea was made desolation... (Dio Cassius Roman History 69.14.1-2; Cary 1969:449, 451).This brought a shift of the center of Jewish thought from Jamnia north to Galilee.
Page last updated: 12/13/04 07:22 PM .
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