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The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies |
THE DECLINE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF JEWISH
CHRISTIANITY
Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past
(Princeton University Press; 1954; pp.
252-253).
The fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 marked the end of the
Jewish national state and the centralized religious organization of Judaism. It
also sealed the fate of Jewish Christianity. The church at Jerusalem had already
seen Stephen stoned . . . James the
son of Zebedee beheaded . . . and James the brother of the Lord thrown from the
pinnacle of the Temple, stoned and beaten to death with a club. Then at the time
of the Jewish war a revelation was received by the church to leave Jerusalem and
migrate to Pella in Transjordan. This was a Gentile city, hated by the Jews and
laid waste by them at the beginning of the war, but it offered refuge to the
Christians. Jewish Christianity survived here for a time, as did different kinds
of Jewish sects which also, for various reasons, had taken refuge east of the
Jordan, and Christian bishops of Pella are mentioned as late as the fifth and
sixth centuries A.D. But the land east of the Jordan was apart from the main
streams in which the history of the future was to flow. In the isolation of its
lonely deserts Jewish Christianity sank quietly into
oblivion.
The wider world was to be won by that true and universal Christianity which found no room for distinctions of Jew or Greek but saw all as one man in Christ Jesus . . . . It was Paul who recognized most clearly this universal character of Christianity and labored most effectively to put it into practice by launching a world-wide mission.
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