The Temple in Early Christianity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
EYAL REGEV
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
The Temple

Influence on Early Christian Worship

2020 ◽  
pp. 377-391
Author(s):  
Paul F. Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Hebrew Scriptures ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Ritual Practices

This chapter traces the various ways in which the cultic language and imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures influenced and shaped the liturgical thought and ritual practices of early Christianity, from the first to the fourth century ce. At first, this was primarily through the metaphorical or spiritual application of such concepts as priesthood and sacrifice, but eventually there are indications of the beginnings of the adoption of a more literal correspondence between some elements of the Temple cult and aspects of Christian worship. Both corporate and individual practices of prayer are covered, including the use of the canonical psalms, as well as the appropriation of traditional ritual gestures and the emergence of Christian holy days out of biblical festivals.

Relating to Judaism, Experiencing the Sacred

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-313
Author(s):  
Eyal Regev
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Point Of Reference

This chapter examines how early Christian attitude toward the Temple changed and why. First-century early Christianity was a religious and social movement at the beginning of the process of identity formation. Its members had yet to determine who they were: what part of their identity was contiguous with Judaism and what part comprised all-new elements. During this process they undoubtedly looked to other non-Christian Jews as a point of reference. Literary engagement with the Temple granted the New Testament writers and their contemporary readers the opportunity to express their debt to Jewish tradition, while at the same time their distinctiveness from it. Moreover, this engagement enhanced their sense of being powerful, genuine, and sacred—that is, close to God. For them, the Temple is a means of experiencing the sacred in both old and new fashion, somewhere on the spectrum between what would later be termed “Judaism” and “Christianity.”

The Problem of the Antisemitic Comma between 1 Thessalonians 2.14 and 15

1989 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank D. Gilliard
Keyword(s):  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
The Temple

The importance of Paul's first extant letter to the study of early Christianity has clearly been demonstrated by the attention paid to just a small part of it, the ‘dreadful text’ of 1 Thessalonians 2.14–16, a ‘passionate, generalizing, hateful’ diatribe against the Jews for having killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and for interfering with Paul's mission to the Gentiles. Or so it has seemed to most historians, theologians, and exegetes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have studied the passage. Those early, stunning verses of Paul, written probably in 50 or 51 C.E. from Corinth to his recently founded church in Thessalonica, have proved especially embarrassing to Jews and Christians who, in post-Holocaust self-examination and post-Vatican II ecumenical spirit, have been trying to exorcise the demons of antisemitism. How could Paul, a proud Jew and Pharisee, so categorically condemn his own people? And how can so early and sweeping a condemnation be explained by scholars who argue that such virulent antisemitism did not in fact develop until the latter part of the century, after the destruction of the Temple and the council at Jamnia?

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