I see no direct forum locale to post this question to so I put it here. Maybe someone will move it for me.
Tangental to some of my Lenten readings this question occurs to me: given that there is no direct reference in the Canon to the destructions of 70AD, do we have such references in the extra-biblical church writings, particularly the ante-nicene body of work? I don’t know a convenient way to search this since to my knowledge the public domain ante-nicene works have not been digitized in a consistent format that would permit such search. Maybe Logos will get around to it.
Anyone give me some help here? I’m familiar with Josephus but what I’m after is how the community of faith viewed the epic events, in hindsight.
There’s an article about it here: pre-trib.org/articles/view/u … -jerusalem
He quotes extensively from Irenaeus and Tertullian but also less extensively from others including Clement of Alexandria and Origen.
Everything I can find seems to be from Preterist sources, sorry about that (I have no opinion either way at the moment but would have been good to find a non-preterist view for balance!)
superb! what a godsend. I feel like a cat in fresh sand…
not to try your patience too much, but if you know of any Jewish sources I should be grateful for those also.
I got Josephus… more interested in the rabbinical/scribal perspective - those who narrowly survived.
There aren’t any surviving contemporary Jewish sources I’m aware of other than Josephus. All Talmudic references are handing down oral tradition at several stages of removal (even in the earliest Talmudic sources, aside from things like the Aramaic Targums that may predate the NT canon but naturally don’t have much to say about the fall of the Temple–which was not something expected by any Jews other than the Qumran group perhaps, aside from Christian Jews.)
The fact that the NT canon only talks about the Temple destruction in vague and/or technically inaccurate prophetic terms, compared to the early Patristics, is strong evidence of their 1st century composition and probably even pre-70 (although some may date to within the start of the Jewish War.)
Checking Edersheim (a Jewish convert from the late 19th century, and still regarded as a world-class expert on Temple information, whose Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah is still a fine source of much critically careful material despite his occasionally zealous tone, including much cross-referencing between the Gospels and the Talmud), I find on page 774, in a paragraph comparing his introduction of Jesus’ Mount of Olives Final Warning to the Talmudic “Sorrows of the Messiah”–which is mostly about the sorrows coming upon Israel and Jerusalem in the time approaching the coming of the King Messiah:
Relatedly, warnings about the destruction of the Temple at all only appear in the Synoptics; they do not appear in the Epistles, nor in GosJohn (despite its strong Jewish inter-group disputation format), nor in Acts (which is very strange as GosLuke has many, but which must accurately reproduce even Jewish Christian expectations after the ministry of Jesus), nor even in RevJohn where one might have most expected it. Despite the warnings from Jesus reported in the Synoptics, early Christians must not have generally expected the Fall of the Temple, and from what we know of how the Jews treated the few lone voices suggesting the fall beforehand (including Jesus of Nazareth–although we also know there were other even more serious problems for them in His case , but also Jesus the-somewhat-crazy-rabbi-whose-other-name-I-forget nearer the time of the start of the War who was persecuted for warning about the oncoming fall of the Temple) non-Jewish Christians weren’t either. Even in RevJohn, despite all the hellish things that happen, Jesus shows up at the last minute to save Jerusalem and the Temple from oppressive pagan tyrants (abominating the Temple) and invading pagan armies. It is Rome that is destroyed, not Jerusalem and the Temple (although I do recognize some topical overlap between Rome as the New Babylon and OT denigration of Jerusalem in parallel terms with Babylon, which may be an implied critique in RevJohn.)
I appreciate that light from Edersheim.
One of my current readings is the late Raymond Brown’s Anchor Bible Gospel of John. He makes a pretty convincing case that John was edited/finished post-Temple, but in fairness it is not a huge point of his work in these volumes. I’m not qualified to critique one of his main pegs, which is that the writer/author is concerned with an apologetic concerning the ‘beloved disciple’ having passed away by the time of the writing, along with some internal evidence of the writer looking back upon Jerusalem as it ‘was’, though he does not attempt an airtight case of that. At any rate, yes, John would have been the pick of the litter to have reflected upon the import of such an event. I would put the writer/scribe of the letter to Hebrews second… or 1b, and I have tried mightily to torture the text to confess of such, but I can’t make the case.
I’ll spend more time searching along this line - the supposed “flight to Pella” as proxy for what I inquire about. the above brief does touch a few of the topics that Pritz illuminated more thoroughly. I guess I can’t fault scholars of the past too much; after all, if it wasn’t important enough for the canonical and extra-canonical fathers to comment on, why bother?
I’m not actually against a 90s final edit/public release of GosJohn, but I don’t think much changed from any workprints (so to speak) being used locally or by teachers in the meanwhile. (Ditto for a wider-scale re-release of RevJohn in the 90s.)
But then, I have a pet theory that the “John” of GosJohn (and of RevJohn, maybe of the epistles, too, and maybe even the author of EpistHebrews) is actually John Mark, acting as a referred compositor for apostolic reminiscences (including ApostJohn, much as Mark had done for Peter), but adding in more of his personal story along the way. People accidentally conflate him with ApostJohn and/or with another elder in Asia Minor named John, and ding.
you would be stimulated by Raymond Brown’s discussion of who the source of John is. I find his espose fascinating and thought/study-provocative.
I must admit that Brown’s disputation of Johnanine source for Hebrews is awfully sound - based on the Lenten/Passion perspective for the most part.
back to the original issue: I just find a “lightswitch” transition from Jewish-christian-led church to Gentile/Hellenist-led church at midnight on the first day of 71AD to be implausible. ain’t happening. Jerusalem is the mother church, not Rome.
[anyone know of full-blown scholarship on Acts 15?]
thank you for the stimulus!! blessings to all at this season
Yes I think I’ve read somewhere that RB’s authorship theories on GosJohn are a little unusual. But I don’t have his commentary directly, so I have to pick up remarks secondhand from other sources. (Most recently from Keener.)
Speaking of “full-blown scholarship” “Acts 15” and “Keener”: scripture geeks like myself are eagerly awaiting the first of two volumes of Keener’s forthcoming Acts commentary (the original draft of which clocked in at 8000 pages), which should be released this summer. (Mine is preordered. I doubt he’ll get to Acts 15 in the first volume, though…)
The only other commentary I have on Acts in my library (aside from some Patristic work) is Hemer’s historical analysis. Great work, but not the total kitchen sink topical commentary Keener’s will be.
good grief! I thought the days of thousand-page commentaries were history. I thought Brown was windy doing a “Layman’s” commentary via the Anchor series [some of which are hardly layman fodder] - 500 pages per volume 2-vol on John. That now seems trivial
I often refer to Acts 15 and the ‘first council’ as having all the elements necessary for faith and practic. the church goofed in later centuries bolting on one law after another, introducing doctrinal novelties to “augment” the gospel, and taking up the sword against one another etc. And here we are now with thousands of denominations and not a few of them completely abandoning scripture as their one/only guide
Well, to be fair the scriptures were not the one and only guide for the early church, either.
It’s true that they still had Moses and the Prophets, but they also listened to this guy who had risen from the dead. Or rather, they listened to people who had listened to Him. That’s how we got some new scriptures, for example. The Acts 15 church sure didn’t have those, but they had something better that all subsequent generations rather lacked, and of which the surviving New Testament is the next best thing.
(Which also explains why apostolic teaching authority was and is considered so important in Catholic and High Protestant churches.)
yep - its why I have such a fixation on ante-nicene times. its not their Systematic Theology that is so important - they didn’t have such obvously… lots of conflict, lots of variations, but those closest to the first events understood a few things very very very well and it shows up in the breadcrumbs they left.
It was a really informative trek for me, earlier in lenten season, to work on developing for my own devotional use a daily guide of sorts; a practical practic. So I went back to the origins of the Cursus… the daily offices, though initially I did not setout to make a “poor man’s divine office”. it really is a blessing to see the humble but consistent roots from which that/those practices sprung [and the simple act of signing, btw]- and pretty well attested-to. so being a westerner i set about to do violence to it all to make it portable, memorable, personal, and meaningful. Like so many ornaments of the faith, the Divine Office went from humble/personal in the beginning, to institutionalized/elaborate/complex over a relatively brief span of time so it became almost ONLY/Exclusively institutional in practice. its like a microcosm of so many things that went astray, despite some very good intentions. *
, but also Jesus the-somewhat-crazy-rabbi-whose-other-name-I-forget nearer the time of the start of the War who was persecuted for warning about the oncoming fall of the Temple) non-Jewish Christians weren’t either. Even in RevJohn, despite all the hellish things that happen, Jesus shows up at the last minute to save Jerusalem and the Temple from oppressive pagan tyrants (abominating the Temple) and invading pagan armies. It is Rome that is destroyed, not Jerusalem and the Temple (although I do recognize some topical overlap between Rome as the New Babylon and OT denigration of Jerusalem in parallel terms with Babylon, which may be an implied critique in RevJohn.)
But I don’t have his commentary directly, so I have to pick up remarks secondhand from other sources. (Most recently from Keener.)
I doubt he’ll get to Acts 15 in the first volume, though…)
The Acts 15 church sure didn’t have those, but they had something better that all subsequent generations rather lacked, and of which the surviving New Testament is the next best thing.