The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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John2
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

Post by John2 »

I was curious about Munck's argument and Kim notes that he:
...presumes that the Jewish-Christians of Pella were not originally from the Jerusalem community, but were just part of a local post-AD 70 Jewish-Christian group.

https://books.google.com/books?id=zstVI ... la&f=false


And Barrett notes that he:
...thinks the story a fiction -the city [Jerusalem] could not be destroyed while any of the righteous remained in it [in Eusebius' account].

https://books.google.com/books?id=qUmvA ... la&f=false
I agree with both of these scenarios. The latter one is in keeping with my earlier statement that Eusebius created the Pella Flight idea:
...to support the doctrine that Jerusalem had to be free of Christians so that "the royal city of the Jews and the whole land of Judea were entirely destitute of holy men [and] the judgment of God at length overtook those who had committed such outrages against Christ and his apostles, and totally destroyed that generation of impious men," as he puts it. I think this was his motivation for creating the Pella flight tradition ...
And the former one is in keeping with what I said above, that:
I suspect that there were already Jewish Christians living outside of Jerusalem and Judea for as long as there had been a "new covenant in the land of Damascus" or people who "went out of the land of Judah to sojourn in the land of Damascus," as the Damascus Document puts it. And I suppose that this relocation process could have started long before the war and lasted all the way to the end of it and even after.
In this scenario there would have been Jewish Christians who relocated to this region from "the land of Judah," so some (most?) of them would have presumably been "not originally from the Jerusalem community."
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

Post by John2 »

And I see that Bourgel notes that Strecker:
...claimed that this tradition was unknown to Hegesippus, for Eusebius, who usually cites Hegesippus by name when quoting his statements, does not mention him in his account of the migration to Pella.

https://books.google.com/books?id=rPfOW ... la&f=false
This is in keeping with what I said earlier, that:
...if he [Eusebius] got the Pella flight information from him [Hegesippus] then he is strangely silent about it, even though he says that Hegesippus "wrote of many other matters."

So I'm starting to not only suspect that Eusebius did not get this information from Hegesippus, it doesn't appear to even be based on the "flee to the mountains" sayings in Mk. 13/Mt. 24/Lk. 21, which would seemingly be appropriate, since he says that the message came to the Jerusalem Church "by a revelation, vouchsafed to approved men there before the war," and he then goes on to mention (or allude to) only Daniel regarding the abomination of the desolation and Josephus regarding the fall of Jerusalem ... How easy would it have been for him to say in this case, like he does above, "Hegesippus, whose words we have already quoted in various places, is a witness to this fact also."
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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From what I can see on Google books I can't tell if Luomanen ties his Pella Flight scenario to Jesus' sayings in Mk. 13/Mt. 24/Lk. 21, but in any event it would be odd to picture Jesus telling his followers to flee to the mountains to avoid the destruction of Jerusalem only for them to wind up in Pella just before it was attacked (and by Jews, no less!) in 66 CE.
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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Can anyone find me any articles or books by J.L. Teicher? He was an early proponent of the idea that the DSS were Jewish Christian, and he seems harder to track down than Roth.
The Jewish author J.L.Teicher (who is one of the few who argues that the Teacher of Righteousness is Jesus) writes in The Journal of Jewish Studies, 1951, that he thinks the scroll writers were Ebionites or Nazarenes and that they had migrated to the Damascus area when Jerusalem was destroyed. He cites historical evidence, again from Epiphanius, saying that both groups were "... started after the destruction of Jerusalem ... in consequence of Christ's injunction to leave the city and to emigrate in view of the impending siege". Eventually they settled in Coele-Syria, which could mean "the Land of Damascus" mentioned so often in the scrolls.

http://www.shareintl.org/archives/M_eme ... eacher.htm
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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The articles by Jacob L. Teicher, the first editor of the Journal from 1948 to 1956, to which the quote below refers, appear to be:

The Dead Sea Scrolls—Documents of the Jewish-Christian Sect of Ebionites
JJS 1951 | vol. 2 | no. 2 | pp. 067–099

The Damascus Fragments and the Origin of the Jewish Christian Sect
JJS, 1951 | vol. 2 | no. 3 | pp. 115–143

http://www.jjs-online.net/contents/sear ... ume:/fpage:

Unfortunately, unless you can get a copy of these journal publications via Inter Library loan, you must pay US$20 per article, or be a subscriber:

Individuals: print copy only: £60.00 / $125.00; print copy + online: £80.00 / $170.00

I don't know if this is related, but he also published Ancient Eucharistic Prayers in Hebrew (1961).

Divorah Dimant, in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective (2012), said of him:
... Jacob Leon Teicher, lecturer in rabbinics, who, as editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies, contributed an article to his own journal in which he argued that the Scrolls belong to the Jewish Christian Ebionites and that the Teacher of Righteousness should be identified with Jesus.67 He maintained his position in several other studies, arguing not least that Josephus’ Essenes had never existed; rather Josephus’ descriptions of them are a composite picture “the main traits of which are derived from the observations made by an outsider of the early Christian communities. Hence the undeniable similarity between the Essenes, the early Christians and the sect of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”68

67 Jacob L. Teicher, “The Dead Sea Scrolls—Documents of the Jewish-Christian Sect of Ebionites,” 2 (1950-1951): 67-99.
68 Jacob L. Teicher, “Priests and Sacrifices in the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Question of Method in Historical Research,” JJS 5 (1954): 93-99 (99).
In an article by Emanuel Tov in Current Research and Technological Developments on the Dead Sea Scrolls (1996), page 66 footnote 58, says
Teicher linked the X sign, which according to him was used especially with reference to passages of messianic content in the Isaiah scroll, with the Christian abbreviation X of Χριστός. See Jacob L. Teicher, "The Christian Interpretation of the Sign X in the Isaiah Scroll,” Vetus Testamentum 5 (1955): 189-98.
Apparently, although a lecturer in Rabbinics at Cambridge, all which he wrote was contained in Journals, especially the Journal which he edited. There may be an overlap with what R. Eisenman has to say about James the Just, so check out his two (huge) books on the subject.

DCH
John2 wrote:Can anyone find me any articles or books by J.L. Teicher? He was an early proponent of the idea that the DSS were Jewish Christian, and he seems harder to track down than Roth.
The Jewish author J.L.Teicher (who is one of the few who argues that the Teacher of Righteousness is Jesus) writes in The Journal of Jewish Studies, 1951, that he thinks the scroll writers were Ebionites or Nazarenes and that they had migrated to the Damascus area when Jerusalem was destroyed. He cites historical evidence, again from Epiphanius, saying that both groups were "... started after the destruction of Jerusalem ... in consequence of Christ's injunction to leave the city and to emigrate in view of the impending siege". Eventually they settled in Coele-Syria, which could mean "the Land of Damascus" mentioned so often in the scrolls.

http://www.shareintl.org/archives/M_eme ... eacher.htm
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

Post by John2 »

Thanks for the link and info, DC. Those are tantalizing article titles. Too bad I can't see them without paying for them, so I probably won't get to.

I'm also interested in seeing an article by another early proponent of the idea that the DSS (or at least the Damascus Document) were Jewish Christian, George Margoliouth, called The Sadducean Christians of Damascus, which appears to be excerpted here in an article by Moore from 1911 (before the other DSS were discovered).
Mr. Margoliouth presents his complete hypothesis as follows:—

The natural and apparently inevitable conclusion of the whole matter, therefore, is that we have here to deal with a primitive Judaeo-Christian body of people which consisted of priests and Levites belonging to the Boëthusian section of the Sadducean party, fortified—as the document shows—by a considerable Israelitish lay element, besides a real or contemplated admixture of proselytes. They acknowledged, as we have seen, John the Baptist, as a Messiah of the family of Aaron, and they also believed in Jesus as a kind of second (or, perhaps, as pre-eminent) Messiah whose special function it was to be a “Teacher of Righteousness.” Paul they abhorred; and they strove with all their might to combine the full observance of the Mosaic Law, as they understood it, with the principles of the “new covenant,” again as they understood it. On the destruction of the Temple by Titus, finding that it would not serve any good purpose to linger in Judaea, they determined to migrate to Damascus, intending to establish their central organization in that city, and to found communities of the sect in different parts of the neighboring country. It was at this juncture that the manifesto, bearing as it does unmistakable marks of personal touch, was composed by a leader of the movement.

https://jupiter.ai/books/PD5D/


While I have some issues with the details here (as I do with Eisenman, and, from what I can so far tell anyway, Teicher), it's nice to see that someone from so long ago entertained the possibility of a Jewish Christian connection to the Damascus Document.

Margoliouth's reference to priests is interesting since I want to bring up Hegesippus and Epiphanius' accounts of James as being a priest (or at least priest-like). I don't understand why this strikes people as a fantasy. Even in Acts Jewish Christians are presented as having daily meetings at the Temple, being concerned with rituals, and attracting priests to the movement.
Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts (Acts 2:46).
One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer—at three in the afternoon (Acts 3:1).
Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah (Acts 5:42).
So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith (Acts 6:7)
And James is presented as being particularly concerned with sacrifice.
There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law ... The next day Paul took the men and purified himself along with them. Then he went to the temple to give notice of the date when the days of purification would end and the offering would be made for each of them. (Acts 21:23-26).

Then it presents all of Jerusalem rioting because Paul was thought to be polluting the Temple (which is one of the "three nets of Belial" that trapped Israel in the Damascus Document).
When the seven days were nearly over, some Jews from the province of Asia saw Paul at the temple. They stirred up the whole crowd and seized him, shouting, “Fellow Israelites, help us! This is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against our people and our law and this place. And besides, he has brought Greeks into the temple and defiled this holy place.” (They had previously seen Trophimus the Ephesian in the city with Paul and assumed that Paul had brought him into the temple.)

The whole city was aroused, and the people came running from all directions. Seizing Paul, they dragged him from the temple, and immediately the gates were shut. While they were trying to kill him, news reached the commander of the Roman troops that the whole city of Jerusalem was in an uproar. He at once took some officers and soldiers and ran down to the crowd. When the rioters saw the commander and his soldiers, they stopped beating Paul.

The commander came up and arrested him and ordered him to be bound with two chains. Then he asked who he was and what he had done. Some in the crowd shouted one thing and some another, and since the commander could not get at the truth because of the uproar, he ordered that Paul be taken into the barracks. When Paul reached the steps, the violence of the mob was so great he had to be carried by the soldiers. The crowd that followed kept shouting, “Get rid of him!” (Acts 21:27-36).


So even in Acts Jewish Christians at least have a strong attachement to the Temple and its rituals and attracted "a large number of priests."

This is in keeping with what Hegesippus says about James' death.
And while they were thus stoning him [James] one of the priests of the sons of Rechab, the son of the Rechabites, who are mentioned by Jeremiah the prophet, cried out, saying, ‘Cease, what do ye? The just one prayeth for you.’ And one of them, who was a fuller, took the club with which he beat out clothes and struck the just man on the head. And thus he suffered martyrdom. And they buried him on the spot, by the temple, and his monument still remains by the temple.
And whether he is right or wrong, Epiphanius thought that this Rechabite priest was Simon bar Clophas (who Hegesippus says was Jesus' cousin and the second bishop of Jerusalem).
In Epiphanius, Hær. LXXVIII. 14, these words are put into the mouth of Simeon, the son of Clopas; from which some have concluded that Simeon had joined the order of the Rechabites; but there is no ground for such an assumption. The Simeon of Epiphanius and the Rechabite of Hegesippus are not necessarily identical. They represent simply varieties of the original account, and Epiphanius’, as the more exact, was undoubtedly the later tradition, and an intentional improvement upon the vagueness of the original.

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf20 ... .xxiv.html
And I noticed some discussion on a recent thread about the identity of John, an early "witness" who is said by Polycrates in EH 5.24 (whether he is right or wrong) to have been a priest.
... and, moreover, John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, and, being a priest, wore the sacerdotal plate.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3200&p=70710&hilit= ... arp#p70710


So there is at least a strong priestly and/or pro-Temple "vibe" about Jewish Christians even in Orthodox writings, which in my view is supported by Hegesippus.
He [James] alone was permitted to enter into the holy place; for he wore not woolen but linen garments. And he was in the habit of entering alone into the temple, and was frequently found upon his knees begging forgiveness for the people, so that his knees became hard like those of a camel, in consequence of his constantly bending them in his worship of God, and asking forgiveness for the people.
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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Another interesting thing is Acts 23:12-21.
The next morning some Jews formed a conspiracy and bound themselves with an oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. More than forty men were involved in this plot. They went to the chief priests and the elders and said, “We have taken a solemn oath not to eat anything until we have killed Paul. Now then, you and the Sanhedrin petition the commander to bring him before you on the pretext of wanting more accurate information about his case. We are ready to kill him before he gets here.”

But when the son of Paul’s sister heard of this plot, he went into the barracks and told Paul. Then Paul called one of the centurions and said, “Take this young man to the commander; he has something to tell him.” So he took him to the commander. The centurion said, “Paul, the prisoner, sent for me and asked me to bring this young man to you because he has something to tell you.”

The commander took the young man by the hand, drew him aside and asked, “What is it you want to tell me?” He said: “Some Jews have agreed to ask you to bring Paul before the Sanhedrin tomorrow on the pretext of wanting more accurate information about him. Don’t give in to them, because more than forty of them are waiting in ambush for him. They have taken an oath not to eat or drink until they have killed him. They are ready now, waiting for your consent to their request.”
As a commentary to Acts 23:12 on the bible hub says:
This was a common form of an oath, or curse, among the Jews. Sometimes they only vowed abstinence from particular things, as from meat, or wine. But in this case, to make the oath more certain and binding, they vowed abstinence from all kinds of food and drink until they had killed him. Who these were - whether they were Sadducees or not - is not mentioned by the sacred writer. It is evident, however, that the minds of the Jews were greatly inflamed against Paul; and as they saw him in the custody of the Roman tribune, and as there was no prospect that he would punish him, they resolved to take the matter into their own hands.

http://biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/23-12.htm
And this vow seems similar to Hegesippus' statement about James:
... he drank no wine nor strong drink, nor did he eat flesh.
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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John2 wrote:Can anyone find me any articles or books by J.L. Teicher? He was an early proponent of the idea that the DSS were Jewish Christian, and he seems harder to track down than Roth.
I know it's not much use to your interest, but I'd strongly urge you to forget about Teicher's flirtation with an Ebionite interpretation of the DSS. He was writing in 1951 when people like Solomon Zeitlin (fine scholar) were proposing all sorts of scenarios for the scrolls, Zeitlin a mediaeval context. They were early days: few scrolls had been unearthed and carbondating was just getting off the ground (lucky to get the ball in the right ball park). We know now that the Habakkuk Pesher—which would have been one of the few texts Teicher had available to him—carbondates to the first century BCE, a fact that kills all the christianizing wackoes, Eisenman, Theiring, etc.
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John2
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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spin wrote:
We know now that the Habakkuk Pesher—which would have been one of the few texts Teicher had available to him—carbondates to the first century BCE, a fact that kills all the christianizing wackoes, Eisenman, Theiring, etc.
I'm just curious about Teicher, is all.

Regarding carbon dating in general and the DSS, I take into account, like Magness, that "every date returned by the lab has a plus/minus range":
A type of radiocarbon dating called accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) has the advantage of being the only "scientific" method listed here (in other words, the date is provided by a laboratory). However, it has the disadvantage that every date returned by the lab has a plus/minus range (this is a margin of statistical error). There is a 67 percent chance that the date provided by the lab falls within the plus/minus range ... Conversion of these dates to calendar years requires calibration because of past fluctuations in the level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. Calibration can increase the range of a radiocarbon date. For these reasons, radiocarbon dating is most useful in cases where there are no other methods of dating, such as prehistoric sites in Europe or Native American sites in the United States. It is less useful at a site like Qumran, where we have other, more accurate methods of dating available. On the other hand, radiocarbon dating has been used effectively on some of the scrolls and linens from the caves around Qumran. In this case, radiocarbon dating is useful because these objects do not have a stratigraphic context (that is, they come from caves instead of from a series of dated layers at an archaeological site). Radiocarbon dating confirmed the second century B.C.E to first century CE date that paleographers ... had already suggested for the scrolls (a date consistent with the pottery types found with the scrolls in the caves).

https://books.google.com/books?id=NnpvX ... ge&f=false
And as noted in the Dead Sea Scrolls In Context (2011):
The lower calibrated radiocarbon ages of the Community Rule (1QS) and Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab) around the turn of the millennium and the Common Era, however, could even indicate a date towards the end of the Qumran settlement and the First Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE).

https://books.google.com/books?id=xM7En ... ng&f=false
So I see carbon dating as useful but not necessarily definitive. In the big picture then, I think any first century BCE to first century CE scenario that makes sense of what the pesharim say is fair. I enjoyed talking with you about yours here a few years ago, for example, and even started a thread to flesh it out more.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=679&hilit=menelaus
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Re: The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

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Regarding Jewish Christians and the priesthood, I suspect that the priestly, pro-Temple "vibe" I get from them may have something to do with Naziritism. As Hegesippus says about James:
He was holy from his mother’s womb; and he drank no wine nor strong drink, nor did he eat flesh. No razor came upon his head ...
This is similar to what is said of Samson in Jud. 13:5, for example:
You will become pregnant and have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb.
And as Neusner noted:
... to whom is the Nazirite comparable? ... the Nazirite turns out to be like the priest in particular, since he or she accepts some of the disciplines of the priesthood -the sector of the priesthood ready to serve at the altar. The Nazirite has to keep himself or herself suitable for service at the altar and at the climax of the vow, the hair cutting and the offering attendant thereon, he or she is as much like a priest as a lay Israelite or as a woman ever can be.

https://books.google.com/books?id=W9NHh ... ts&f=false


And as Ashley notes:
It is interesting that both the high priest's diadem and the Nazirite's hair are called nezer (lit. "consecration"). Both the diadem and the hair are special marks of the wearer's consecration to Yahweh.

https://books.google.com/books?id=6hBSc ... em&f=false
And as Lange notes, John (the one I mentioned above, whoever he was) and James were said to wear a diadem.
The statement of Polycrates of Ephesus (Euseb. iii.81; v.24), that John, being of the family of the high-priest, continued, while an Apostle, to wear the high priest's diadem among the Jews, we consider, like the similar statement of Epiphanius respecting James the Just ... a symbolical mode of expressing the preeminent authority of John among the early Christians ...

https://books.google.com/books?id=QgdKA ... us&f=false
So perhaps the diadem said to be worn by James and John refers to their "nezer" or hair (lit. "crown").

http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5145.htm

In any event, a Nazirite is "like the priest in particular," as Neusner noted.
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