Important Dates
31 May 2008 - 27 אייר 5768 by Huw
Over at the Daily Episcopalian, Derek Olsen continues his series on 7 Dates and Why They Matter for Anglican Faith. (part one is here). In the current writing he focuses on the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD.
At class on Wednesday night, Cam suggested also that 90AD was important: it’s the year of the Council of Jamnia. Now, although current scholarship has a debate about Jamnia (as recounted in the Wiki) we can agree that, sometime between 70 and 135 (the Bar Kokhba revolt) something happened, both to Judiasm as a whole and that odd sect of “fulfilled Jews” that became what we know of as the Christian Church.
What was it that happened? Don’t expect me to answer.
As I’ve blogged before, The Break - those 60 years - gives us nearly all the Christian Scriptures (even though they were not assumed to be “Scriptures” then). The give us the Jewish Canon - and the Christian form of it including the Apocrypha. That same time gives us the growing inculcation of Gentile ideas into this movement - and a growing Jewish fear of Gentile converts. At the end of the process, it’s as if two fraternal twins were adopted by warring clans and suddenly find themselves face-to-face across a battlefield.
But what the hell happened during the process?
