On the Jewish Context of Early Christianity




By Chorbishop Joseph (Anglican Vicariate)

The Christians Inherited the Temple and the Priesthood – At the time of Christ and the Apostles, Jewish worship was in a state of complexity that the Old Testament fails to clarify. There were three levels of religious activity simultaneously occurring in which worship was maintained, the ritual feasts and fasts were kept, and the sacrificial offerings were made in the newly restored temple. This temple had been rebuilt, after its desecration and destruction by the Roman victory over Judea, by the half-Jewish, Rome-appointed “king” of Israel, the infamous Herod Antipas. Worship in the Rebuilt Temple of Herod was managed by high priests and priest of the Maccabean Clan, who had brought independence and a renewed sense of the immediacy of the Jewish claim to the Covenant with God during and after the conquest of Antiochus Epiphanies, but, who had become polluted with Greek Culture and accommodation, first to the Seleucid Kings and then to the Herodian Family after the subjugation of Israel by Rome. This ruling party of politically connected priests called themselves “Sadducees” and, while holding the moral teachings of Judaism, denied the spiritual reality behind them (thus, as Gospel says, “denying the resurrection of the dead”). In response to the political situation and the relative isolation in which the priests carried out their ritual duties, the Babylonian Captivity’s tradition of the Synagogue became an invaluable part of Jewish life, making up for the lack of real contact and practical interface between the “High Priests” and the governing Sanhedrin with the religiously faithful and oppressed among the common people. (Williston Walker, The History of the Christian Church, p. 12-14) Christ and His Apostles were Temple-going Jews. Christ’s only angry episode was connected to His love of the Temple. Christ called it “a house of prayer”, thus proving that the Temple, while corrupt, was still valued by Christ in a unique way as a part of the experience of God worshiping Himself in the Incarnation! (Matthew 21:13)

Very early on in the Christian tradition, Christ came to be identified with the role of the High Priest. The universal scheme of the Book of Hebrews is to show the fulfilling and the continuing of the Hebrew Covenant in Heaven and on Earth, with Christ as both sacrifice and priest, a “Priest After the Order of Melchizedek” (Genesis 14:18-20 and Hebrews 5:6). Only when Christ’s role in the heavenly temple worship was established could the liturgical continuation of the tradition that God revealed to Moses occur within the “newness” that Christianity brought to the world, bringing over the old categories with new and clarified definitions. Thus, the Church could see Christ’s Words of Institution on earth as a reflection of His Heavenly Work of Redemption, and by tying both of these together through the agency of the Holy Spirit, see the Eucharist as an entrance into a heavenly reality. The “Symbolon” was therefore a “bringing together” of the realities, the true meaning of the word, and not a “figure standing for the absence of something else” (Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “The Eucharist”, p. 39). With this paradigm established as the true meaning of the Lord’s Supper, it followed that Bishops and Presbyters were functioning in the role of Christ in their service of the Church and in their celebration at the Holy Table, and were thereby serving as new priests, as “Priests after the Order of Melchizedek”! This was the process that we see occurring very early on, in both the theological explanations of Christ’s work as sacrifice within the Pauline epistles, and also within the New Testamental realization of the Jewish Temple worship reflecting a heavenly reality through the experience of the Revelation of St. John, Hebrews, and the visions that the Early Church reported in such works as the Shepherd of Hermas. This realization of the continuity of the Temple and of the Priesthood, proven in the institution of the Lord’s Supper itself (“this do in anamnesis of me”), provided the Church with the rationale behind its sacramental self-concept – an awe and awareness that its celebration of Christ’s sacrifice had truly cosmic qualities, and that Christ’s claims to Presence within the Bread and Wine were thus to be believed and held as self-evident truth. When St. Ignatius and St. Polycarp refer to the Eucharist, they speak of it in a sacramental light just a few years after the passing of the Apostles. It was not a “corruption” of the biblical Jewish worldview by mysteriological paganism due to Constantine’s conversion and the establishment of a “state church”, but the ancient foundation of the Church’s own faith (such state-oriented church is not even possible without losing claim to the “Kingdom that is to come”, the essence of what the Body of Christ truly is). None of this would have been possible without the sense that the Jewish Temple Worship and the Sacrifice that God Himself had instituted with Adam, Abraham, and Moses, had passed directly into the work of Christ, and was now made available through the Broken Bread and the Uplifted Cup of Communion, the “New Covenant” of Christ’s Blood. 
The Christians Inherited the Corporate Reading of Scripture in the Synagogue – The primary reason for the creation of Synagogues in the Babylonian captivity was for the catechisis of the Jewish people and for a continued life of prayer and worship in the absence of the sacrificial and liturgical expression that God had mandated in the Law of Moses. Preaching and teaching in the Synagogue support to the ministry of a priesthood that was relatively uninvolved with the administration of Jewish life, and was carried out by certified “Teachers of the Law” (Matthew 23:23) from rabbinic schools that had connections with the Sanhedrin. The most famous of these teachers in the Christian tradition Gamaliel, who was not only a Pharisee, but also a highly influential member of the Jewish Sanhedrin (The Mishnah records that he was the “Head Elder”). It was by his recommendation that the Apostles were spared persecution by the Pharisees at the start of the Apostolic Ministry (“…if this be of God” he said in Acts 5:39-39), and it was by his careful tutelage that Christianity received its most dynamic and irreducible Father, St. Paul, who, as Saul of Tarsus, studied the Law under the aged Rabbinic master (Acts 22:3), learning to become a “keeper of the law, a Pharisee of Pharisees” (Acts 23:6) under his watchful gaze! Paul, not of priestly lineage and thus excluded from “official service”, was groomed to be a Rabbi in the Synagogue, the place where most of the real worship, reading, and training was carried out in the Jewish world. The Synagogue not only acted as the training ground for such dynamic leadership as St. Paul, but it was also the place where the Early Church spread and made converts. The Book of Acts tells us that the Apostles went to the Synagogue to pray, read scripture, and make proselytes.
The Christians Inherited the Traditions of the Independent Rabbis – The Rabbinic Tradition had a form of “fellowship meal” focused on the encouragement and resolution of disciples upon a full keeping of the Law, called the “Haburah”, a meal that had special meaning as it brought together the ritual keeping of the Law as it was passed down from Moses, and the Jewish Calendar of Feast Days. This view of the origin of the Lord’s Supper was expounded in “The Shape of the Liturgy” by Dom Gregory Dix, based upon the Jewish records of the Mishnah’s Berakoth (Jerome Kodell, “The Eucharist in the New Testament”, p. 39). This theory would see Christ’s practice of Eucharistic observance with his Apostles as founded upon a pre-existent tradition within Rabbinic Judaism, which was the commemoration of the Law by independent, travelling Rabbis within the context of a meal with their disciples. It thereby extends the Rabbinic practice directly into the Early Church and insists on its practice as a part of the innate self-recognition and continuation of Jewish roots within the Church.
This view, however, was extensively contradicted by the widely received theories of Joachim Jeremias in “The Eucharistic Words of Jesus”, which focuses on the Synoptic Gospel’s record of the Last Supper as already reflecting a contemporary Eucharistic usage from the Early Church that had broken into different local usages by the time of the writing of the Gospels. (IBID, p. 23) The benediction of prayers over wine and bread as a form of “Anamnesis” was a common feature within the Passover, and its inclusion was based upon one of need, and not upon the remembrance of a Rabbinic practice; the early Eucharist also included aspects of the “Todah”, the “thank-offering” of blessed bread, wine, and a sacrificial animal, which was eaten to partake of the sacrifice and participate in the Covenant of God. Kodell write’s in his “The Eucharist in the New Testament”, “With the Todah as pattern, the Lord’s Supper is the thank offering of the Risen Lord in which we participate. The saving death of Jesus is remembered, and salvation is proclaimed in the raising of the “cup of salvation” (Ps 116:14). The old covenant was established in a blood ceremony and so was the second. To share the meal of the sacrificial animal and the bread-offering renewed one’s union with the God of the Covenant. To share the bread and the cup of the Lord’s Supper renews ones share in the new covenant in Christ.” (p. 50) This view insists that the Eucharist was the synthesis of all of the blessings and ritual meals within the Jewish Tradition, and thus, stands above them and represents the entire Jewish experience of the Covenant.
Christianity in the time of the Didache, around 90AD, maintained these Jewish cultural categories, with Apostles forming a “priestly” core in which the power was invested (quickly to be transferred to the bishops whom they ordained), the meetings being led by “Rabbis” or “Elders” (presbytery) who were certified by the Apostles (originally in Jerusalem and later in Antioch) as trustworthy teachers, and a class of wandering “prophets” and “teachers” being allowed to travel from church to church. This situation was stable, as long as the orthodoxy of the traveling teachers was maintained, and thus we have the Didache’s exhortations to try the faith and claims of teachers who came unannounced and whose identities were unknown.
The Christians Inherited the Concept of Monastic Communities – While we are unclear as to the full extent of the influence it exerted upon early Christianity, the discovery of the writings of the Essenes mentioned by Josephus and Philo through the Dead Sea Scrolls shines light on the Jewish practice of celibacy and asceticism (Walker, p. 15). This discovery also sheds light upon the presence of dedicated ascetics, Simeon and Anna, in the temple (Luke 2:25-37), the narrative of the “Dedication of the Theotokos to the Temple” from the “Protoevangelion of St. James”, and upon the immediate appearance of the “Order of Virgins and Widows” in the 1st Century Church. While Christianity would recontextualize the process and logic behind the practice of monastic ascesis, its formal existence within Judaism can now be proven.
The Christians Inherited the Socio-Political Conflict - It has been conclusively proven by contemporary scholarship that the meaning of the Messiah’s coming had not been understood in political terms as the necessity of the establishment of a Jewish Kingdom by the Jews who had first heard these prophecies. They were, by in large, still thinking of the relationship between God and His People in terms of covenant, understanding Abraham, Moses and David to have already established the political and religious unit that the prophets were charged with caring for in, by the spiritual burden given by God. Thus, were probably more inclined to think of the Messiah as a symbol for the Jewish People as a whole, with various leaders functioning in the role of the “anointed one” from time to time. This definition is still taught by contemporary Judaism, which holds little, if any, hope in the coming of a literal, permanent Messiah. Only in this time of political unrest and religious idealism, before the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the discontinuing of Temple worship, was the expectation of the Messiah as a real human person at its zenith. Into this expectation came the person of Christ!
Roman power and order, with an amazing amount of tolerance and freedom of religion, was the cultural climate of the Jewish world in the times of Christ. (IBID, p. 3) The Jews, however, were not happy with the “Yoke of Rome”, and the major irritations to Jewish sensibilities were the concessions of those in authority to the Roman Law, the secular social participation of Hellenized Jews from Alexandria in the public forum, and the fact that these “Hellenes” did not keep the full of the Law, but focused instead on the moral and philosophical principles of Judaism as a completion of the Greek quest for philosophical truth, complemented by their cultural involvement with the Greek traditions of the bath, the gymnasium, and the university. (IBID, p. 12) All these were symbols of the victory of the Hellenic mentality, and impurities that the Zealots, a subgroup within the Pharisees, could not allow. There was a mentality within Roman polity, however, the idea of “Pax Romana” - esteem for law, order, pragmatism, and extremely fair and even-handed governance - that early Christian saints and theologians were very attracted to and repeatedly address as an icon of the Kingdom to come. St. Justin Martyr, Origen, and Tertullian all capitalized upon this openness for discussion and respect for logical argumentation to make their case for Christianity clear, thus leaving behind a record of apologies, and simultaneously giving us insight into the situation surrounding the Roman use of power. Rome became, in the writings of St. Augustine, the ultimate icon of the Kingdom of God. (St. Augustine, “The City of God”, et al)
While the Gospel was presented to the “Lost sheep of the House of Israel” by Christ, who did not undertake a mission to Hellenized Jews or Gentiles during the extent of His own ministry, it was this “Greek” Jewish contingency which was to become the primary population to respond His message of God’s universal love, rejection of the legalism of the Pharisees, and a renunciation of the secular pragmatism of the Sadducees. With the speculation of Philo of Alexandria (BC20-42AD), a great Jewish philosopher in the Greek Tradition, teaching that God had created everything through a delegated “Logos” or “Sophia” (referring to the Hebrew Tradition in the Proverbs in which “Wisdom” is co-existent with God and the creator of the world), and the testament of St. John’s Gospel of Christ as the “Logos”, the universal moral teachings of Judaism in a Greek context were contextualized.  The wide acceptance of Greek philosophy by the Hellenized Jewish Population was the primary impetus for the further acceptance of the Christian Narrative of a transcendent and universal Messiah, not of political liberation, as expected by Zealots and Pharisees, but of spiritual and physical renewal, by those who were otherwise alienated from their own Jewish Tradition. (IBID, p. 16) It is fair to say that without the Greek cultural contribution, the Roman Empire, and a displaced Jewish diaspora trying to make sense of their own narrow tradition in the midst of a broad-minded Greek culture, Christianity would have never taken root and flourished as it did. Christ, truly, came “in the fullness of time”!
The Christians Inherited an Anathema from the Synagogue - Common worship in the temple and an attempt to subsidize the synagogue with household Eucharist, the “Breaking of Bread” that the Book of Acts depicts as going on daily from house to house. Within the Book of Acts, cultural difficulties between the Hellenized Jews and the Rabbinic Jews already visible, straining the fabric of the Early Church. All of the great controversies occur around this central contradiction between James and Peter and Paul and Timothy. Final break comes with the universalization of the Christian faith for Gentiles under St. Paul and the destruction of Jerusalem in 66AD, but we know that “Judaizers” continued to teach the Christian message in a strictly Jewish context for some time after this era, both from St. Paul’s own writing and those from St. Jerome’s account of the “Ebionites”. These are substantiated by various other references in the “Historia Ecclesiasticus” by Eusebius of Caesarea.  
The greatest single instance that determined the full context of the split, however, was not a Christian rejection of Jewish worship, but by the Rabbinic Council of Jamnia in 90AD, in which Christians were anathematized as heretics and disallowed from the gathering of the Synagogue. The curses on Christians that were formulated in this council still resound in Orthodox Jewish Synagogues on Hebrew holy days until this day. This final expulsion forced the Christians to create their own system of worship, based off of the Temple, Synagogue, and the House Eucharist. The continued similarities and cultural interrelation of these two groups is obvious in the discovery of the church and synagogue of Dos Europos (covered in a sand storm in the late 3rd century), in which we have some of the best archeological evidence of the use of icons within early churches, but also, surprisingly, within Jewish synagogues as well!
The Christians Inherited a Liturgy that Reflects All Aspects of Jewish Tradition - This transition from Synagogue to Church is seen in the immediate appearance of the three-part liturgy that reflects all aspects of these Jewish liturgical features in a Gentile context. This is clearly illustrated in the Didache’s liturgical structure, in the Liturgy of St. James, and the Liturgy of Addai and Mari, and all point to the practice of the Synagogue transferred into the “Liturgy of the Word” and the psalmody of the Temple and the concept of Temple Sacrifice transferred both to Matins and the “Liturgy of the Eucharist”, thus preserving the Jewish practice by the earliest Christian communities by the creation of a new “Liturgy of Time” (“Introduction to Liturgical Theology”, p. 69). This liturgical concept can be seen as both an eschatological completion of creation, understood to be outside of time in its communion with heavenly realities and a fulfillment of the purpose of creation, and also the process of the redemption of time and the created order, just as the Jewish liturgy had always been focused on time as a lineal process or rectification with God, leading the world up to the end of all things. It was therefore a part, a “foretaste”, of the consummation and that which leads up to the final consummation, the Last Day and the transformation of the created order by the presence of Christ’s Incarnate glory in the Eighth Day, the unending age of the Kingdom! Therefore, the biblical narratives of the Old Testament found in Creation, Fall, Covenant, and Peoplehood was transferred into the increasingly Gentile constituency of the Church. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann says, in his seminal understanding of the origins of the liturgy, “…Comparative study of early Christian worship and the liturgical forms of Judaism, although it is by no means finished, leaves no doubt about the formal dependence of the former upon the later… The newness of Christianity could not be felt and experienced in any other way than in relation to the old, to that which it was fulfilling and consummating, to that which it was renewing.” (IBID, p. 55 & 60)

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