Читать книгу What is Christianity? - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 10

Jesus was a Jew, and Judaism is the source of many of the ideas and commitments that still characterize Christianity today. While the precise origins of Judaism are largely lost in the mists of history, the Hebrew scriptures assert that the Jewish people were called into existence by God and given a special role in the human story. The Hebrew scriptures include a vivid account of exodus from Egypt and conquest of Palestine, but the archaeological records from this time period (thirteenth century bce ) reflect a much slower and less dramatic progression of events that eventually gave birth to Israel and to Jewish religious consciousness. Whatever the process, it seems clear that by about 1000 bce an Israelite kingdom had been established in Palestine, with its religious life focused on rituals performed at the Temple in Jerusalem.

In 587 bce, Palestine was conquered by the powerful Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar II. Many Jews were exiled to Persia (now Iraq and Iran), and the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. Without a temple, Jews developed other mechanisms for preserving their faith, most notably the synagogue, a place where Jews could gather to pray and to discuss religious and moral matters. Jews started returning to Palestine around 540 BCE and promptly rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple, but synagogues remained in use as local meeting places for Jews wherever they lived. Several different dynasties conquered and ruled post-exile Palestine, but in the 140s bce a Jewish state was reestablished in the region. That kingdom was of relatively short duration; it was subsumed into the Roman Empire in 63 bce. From that juncture until 1948, Jews had no land they could call their own.

By the time of the Roman occupation, assorted groups of Jews had developed their own different ways of making sense of God, themselves, and their historical experience. Prominent Jewish sub-groups included the Pharisees, who stressed the law and personal piety; the Sadducees, who emphasized traditional temple worship; the Zealots, who were violently opposed to Roman rule; and the Qumran community that assumed the end of the world was near and that a final battle between good and evil was about to commence. The Samaritans, another quasi-Jewish group, claimed descent from two of Israel’s ancient tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh. In addition, an increasing number of Gentiles (non-Jews) were calling themselves God-fearers and adopting many of Judaism’s ideas and values without formally becoming Jews themselves.

This was the complex world of Jewish faith into which Jesus was born and which shaped the early Christian movement. Christianity retained many of the basic ideas and practices of Judaism. The synagogue morphed into the church, and the diversity of perspectives within Judaism prepared the way for the diversity of beliefs and practices that soon came to characterize the early Christian community. Imbedded in the matrix of first-century Judaism, Christianity emerged as a new and distinct religious movement led by a backcountry prophet named Jesus of Nazareth.