This is a guest post by Pratt Hokanson
Last night I was reading a semi interesting book, “Saint Saul : a Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus” by Donald Akenson and he was making the point that after the temple destruction in about 70 AD, the Jewish religion of the time was gutted. The Essenes, the Sadducees, the Zealots et al disappeared, leaving remnants of the Pharisees to rebuild a religion without the central temple. He lumps Christianity in with the Pharisees and sees rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as two compteting Pharisaic bodies that somehow managed to survive.
But it struck me that it is clear from Acts that the post resurrection
Christians continued to attend the temple. We have record of Peter,
James, John, Paul, arguably Stephen and Luke, all attending the temple after the resurrection, even after Pentecost. Can anybody give me a clue what they were doing there? Did they not understand that blood sacrifice was finished? Was it not yet finished? Were they just doing missionary work? In Acts, it seems Paul was there worshipping, not preaching.
Paul had clearly taught the Corinthians that the Temple in Jerusalem was at least not as important, if not totally unimportant now that the spirit was available to all so that one could essentially live a sacral life based on following the spirit instead of attending the temple.
How did the loss of the temple affect the early church, if at all?
If the apostasy can be pushed back that early, did the loss of the temple
affect the apostasy? Or perhaps it was the loss of Jerusalem, and not the temple per se, and the General Conferences that were periodically conducted there that pushed the apostasy forward?