Atticus, you know a lot about a bunch of things but I don't think you've got it right on the early church.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
The essential validity of that point is drowned in the hyperbole in which it is stated. There was no
seperate thing called "Christianity" for probably 150 years or so after the death (or not-death, natch) of the man who came to be called Jesus. /QUOTE]
Don't know whether the faith was called Christianity, but the followers of Jesus were called Christians much earlier. Flavius Josephus (~37 A.D. to 100 A.D.) was a Jewish historian. His description of Jesus noted that his followers were called Christians. Tactitus and Suetonius, early 2nd Century A.D. historians also refer to them as being called Christians. And Pliny the Younger (62?-c.113 AD) wrote a letter to the emperor discussing his treatment of "Christians."**
Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch However, the Jesus-cult was probably coequal with the other Jewish political parties of first century Judea by about 135 C.E. --- so you would talk about the Essenes, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Jesus Party (using whatever term was then used) as being movements within Judaism. The destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. pretty much ended the Sadducees, who had been dominant to that point, and the defeat of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt in 135 probably catapulted the Jesus Party to a position of equality in the now-underground Jewish religion.
The fact that the Council of Jerusalem allowed the Jesus Party to recruit members without requiring adherence to dietary laws or circumcision (which was a taboo form of human mutilation among the Hellenistic residents of the Mediterranean region) gave the Jesus Movement a recruiting edge over other sects within Judaism. The foremost surviving competitor, Pharisaic/Rabbinic Judaism, was thus the target of the Jesus Movement's ire, and explains the latent or patent anti-Semitism of the early Christian church, where "Pharisee" is a synonym for "any non-Christian Jew."
There was a thing called Christianity then, but it looked too much like any other form of then-existing Judaism to consider it a Church.
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What are you smoking? Co-equal with other Jewish political parties? You want to talk about being the target of ire: Before the Romans got into the game, the Jewish religious leaders were working hard to stamp out what they viewed as heresy by executing Christians. And that's not just from the New Testament. Josephus chronicles at least one instance of this.
The very early church wasn't about political parties. It was all about the message of salvation. I don't think it got political until the church was much more established as Christianity.
**N.B. if you thought the New Testament was the only historical evidence for the existence of Jesus as a historical person.
Fu(Christianity Timmy)gee
Edited to note that I have never heard anyone call someone a Jewess, much less a Jewess girl.
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