The Jerusalem Church after 70 CE

[John2]

Ben asked:

Do you think that Paul's enjoining women to silence in 1 Corinthians 14 is original? There are no manuscripts which support its total absence.

I think it is original since it also says, "They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they wish to inquire about something, they are to ask their own husbands at home; for it is dishonorable for a woman to speak in the church." which sounds like a reference to Gen 3:16:

To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

And it is in keeping with 1 Cor. 11:3 and 11:8-9:

But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man ...

For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man ...

I gather that this is seen to be in conflict with 1 Cor. 11:5, which says:

But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head--it is the same as having her head shaved.

But it is possible for someone to "remain silent" in the church and "speak" (and presumably pray and prophesize) only to themselves and God, given what Paul says about people who speak in tongues in 1 Cor. 14:27-28:

If anyone speaks in a tongue, two, or at most three, should speak in turn, and someone must interpret. But if there is no interpreter, he should remain silent in the church and speak only to himself and God.

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

I have some free time at work and found myself writing to Ben about the meaning of a couple of Greek words that Hegesippus uses and it seems to have led to the larger question of the location of "the Jerusalem church" after 70 CE so I thought I'd make it a thread.

Yesterday I read some things about the early Christians in Jerusalem. Just a question: Is it right that besides the Gospel and Eusebius not much can be said about the Christian history of Jerusalem before the empress Helen?

[John2]

Ben wrote;

Tertullian has no problem using "made of a woman" against those who denied the flesh of Christ in On the Flesh of Christ 20.2b-3a

Then that leaves the comment (according to Clark and Lieu) that "According to Jerome, "through" a woman [factum per mulierem] was a reading of the Galatians text that Marcion and other heretics espoused in order to deny that Jesus had real human flesh."

I haven't been able to find Jerome's commentary on Galatians online though. I saw something about it on Peter's blog that is interesting, but I haven't found anything to corroborate it yet.

Jerome confused Marcion and Valentinus, when he, writing down Origen’s Commentary on Galatians, remarked: “Diligenter adtendite, quod (apostolus) non dixerit: ‘Factum per mulieren‘, quod Marcion et ceterae haereses volunt, qui putativam Christi carnem simulant, sed ‘ex muliere‘, ut non per illam sed ex illa natus esse credatur” [Pay close attention, that he (the apostle) did not say: ‘Came through a woman‘, as Marcion and other heresies would have it, that the flesh of Christ was pretended to be, but ‘of a woman‘, that he should not be believed to be ‘through‘ her, but he was born ‘of‘ her]. Zahn renders it, dubiously, ἀπέστειλεν [sent out].

http://peterkirby.com/harnack-marcion-galatians.html

[John2]

KK wrote:

Yesterday I read some things about the early Christians in Jerusalem. Just a question: Is it right that besides the Gospel and Eusebius not much can be said about the Christian history of Jerusalem before the empress Helen?

If by Eusebius you include Hegesippus, then that alone would be quite a lot (and he's not much later than other early Christian writers), and I've come away with the impression that Hegesippus is an excellent source for Jewish Christian history up to the mid second century CE.

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

.
Thanks. I know there are these lists of bishops, but I think we get no real impression of the Christian life in Jerusalem. I think, on the contrary we have a little impression of the Christian school at Caesarea Maritima, but it seems that even Origen was not interested in the „earthly“ Jerusalem of his time and the Christian community there.

[John2]

KK wrote:

Thanks. I know there are these lists of bishops, but I think we get no real impression of the Christian life in Jerusalem. I think, on the contrary we have a little impression of the Christian school at Caesarea Maritima, but it seems that even Origen was not interested in the „earthly“ Jerusalem of his time and the Christian community there.

I don't think the list of the Jewish bishops of Jerusalem in Eusebius is from Hegesippus, and I don't get the impression that there was Jewish life of any sort in Jerusalem after 70 CE, except maybe c. 120 CE to 132 CE, when it was being rebuilt by Hadrian before the Bar Kokhba war, after which all Jews were barred from Jerusalem (and I'm not exactly sure when Jerusalem was resettled by Jews after that). And Hegesippus covers essentially everything of significance that happened to the Jerusalem Church (inside and outside of Jerusalem) between the mid first century CE and the mid second century CE. And I find that what he says is in keeping with the Gospel of the Hebrews/Matthew, the Letter of James, Revelation and, as Eusebius puts it, "other matters as taken from the unwritten tradition of the Jews."

I see the term "Jerusalem Church" like the Jerusalem Talmud. As Wikipedia puts it:

Naming this version of the Talmud after the Land of Israel rather than Jerusalem is considered more accurate by some because, while the work was certainly composed in "the West" (as seen from Babylonia), i.e. in the Holy Land, it mainly originates from the Galilee rather than from Jerusalem in Judea, as no Jews lived in Jerusalem at this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Talmud

And after Hegesippus (from the late second century CE to the fifth century CE) there are several accounts of Jewish Christians by Church fathers who considered them to be heretics, and as I take a fresh look at these sources I find that they answer some important questions, such as how/when/if Jesus "received Christ" or was "made God" (there appears to have been three camps).

[John2]

Ben wrote:

I think there probably is a literal element to this issue of naming the temple or the people after Yahweh. I think that these verses mean that, from God's perspective, the temple and the people will be rightly named "the temple of Yahweh" or "the people of Yahweh" (phrases which occur a number of times in the Hebrew scriptures). That is, the Lord will have given his blessing to the naming of these things after his own name, much like corporations give permission for their names and logos to be used in certain contexts.

That's what I think is going on in the Philippians Hymn to certain extent. Let's substitute Israel and Jerusalem for Jesus in it:

Therefore God exalted Israel/Jerusalem to the highest place and gave Israel/Jerusalem the name that is above every name, that at the name of Israel/Jerusalem every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Israel/Jerusalem is [of the] Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

I think the difference is that Paul takes the examples I gave further by saying that Jesus is Lord rather than "of the" Lord (as I added in brackets above so it would make sense).

It is hard for me to escape the most natural reading of Philippians 2.5-11, to the effect that the name is Jesus (verse 10) and that it is the "name above all names" (verse 9) precisely because of its etymology: "Yahweh saves," where Yahweh is the name above all names with which Jews would have been familiar. Jesus is definitely being given a special status here, but I am not sure it is kosher to accept this without also accepting the literal meaning of the text, which seems to be that the name Jesus was bestowed upon this figure as part of God's recognition of this status.

If we took the expression out of the Philippians Hymn, what would you say is "the name that is above every name"? Since there is only one option, how could it not be YHWH? If we allow for Jesus because of its etymology, why not Yehoshaphat (YHWH judges), for example? Is every name that is based on YHWH equal to YHWH?

[John2]

Another thing of significance about Jewish Christians that I'm getting from Hippolytus is this part from RH 7.22:

They live conformably to the customs of the Jews, alleging that they are justified. according to the law, and saying that Jesus was justified by fulfilling the law. And therefore it was, (according to the Ebionaeans,) that (the Saviour) was named (the) Christ of God and Jesus, since not one of the rest (of mankind) had observed completely the law. For if even any other had fulfilled the commandments (contained) in the law, he would have been that Christ. And the (Ebionaeans allege) that they themselves also, when in like manner they fulfil (the law), are able to become Christs; for they assert that our Lord Himself was a man in a like sense with all (the rest of the human family).

I'm already on board with Boyarin's idea that Christianity is a mixture of Davidic messianic expectation and Daniel's "one like a son of man," and I've seen arguments that this "son of man" refers to a divine being such as Michael (Dan. 12:1) or collectively to "the saints of the Most High" (Dan. 7:18, 21-22, 27). But maybe it wasn't either/or for Jewish Christians, since Jesus became (or received) Christ (i.e., the "son of man") "by fulfilling the law" and "they themselves also, when in like manner they fulfil (the law), are able to become Christs."

[Ben C. Smith]

It is hard for me to escape the most natural reading of Philippians 2.5-11, to the effect that the name is Jesus (verse 10) and that it is the "name above all names" (verse 9) precisely because of its etymology: "Yahweh saves," where Yahweh is the name above all names with which Jews would have been familiar. Jesus is definitely being given a special status here, but I am not sure it is kosher to accept this without also accepting the literal meaning of the text, which seems to be that the name Jesus was bestowed upon this figure as part of God's recognition of this status.

If we took the expression out of the Philippians Hymn, what would you say is "the name that is above every name"? Since there is only one option, how could it not be YHWH? If we allow for Jesus because of its etymology, why not Yehoshaphat (YHWH judges), for example? Is every name that is based on YHWH equal to YHWH?

In any other context, it would undeniably be Yahweh. But here it is at the name of Jesus that everyone shall bow, whereas in Isaiah it is at the name of Yahweh that everyone shall bow:

Isaiah 45.23: "I [Yahweh; refer to verses 18-19, 21] have sworn by Myself; the word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness and will not turn back, that to Me every knee will bow; every tongue will swear allegiance."

Where Yahweh once stood as the name of choice we now have Jesus.

So no, not every theophoric name involving the tetragrammaton makes its bearer equal to Yahweh. This Jesus Hymn identifies Jesus as a special case. It feels to me like the Hymn is making Jesus the fulfillment, as it were, of Isaiah 45.23: we thought we would be bowing to Yahweh, and that is true insofar as we are actually bowing to Yahweh-Saves (= Yehoshua/Jesus). And when Paul says that Jesus is Lord, I think he is saying that Jesus belongs in the spot occupied by "the Lord" in the LXX. Jesus is the avatar of Yahweh, perhaps (as later authors would have it) the visible form which visited humankind in the stories related by scripture as the "angel of the Lord" (compare the "angel of Peter" in Acts 12.14-15). When you think of Yahweh, the Hymn is saying, do not think of some mighty God and then of Jesus as a separate figure; they are one and the same.

Or so it seems to me.

(As Robert M. Price says in this context, "Yahweh Saves" can no more be a separate entity from Yahweh than Zeus Soter [= "Zeus the/is Savior"] is from Zeus.)

[John2]

Regarding "the name that is above every name" in the Philippians Hymn, I'm seeing it the way Fee puts it:

But what does Paul intend by the name that is above every name? There is something to be said for the name as referring to Christ's earthly name, Jesus. That. after all, is what is picked up in the next phrase, at the name of Jesus. If so, then Paul does not mean that he has now been given that name but that in highly exalting him, God has bestowed on the name of Jesus a significance excelling that of all other names.

More likely, however, especially in light of how the rest of the sentence unfolds, Paul is making a kind of twofold wordplay. First, the name as "that which is above every name" unmistakably echoes the Old Testament use of "the Name" to refer to God and his character. To honor God is to honor his name above all. At his exaltation the name above ... every name has been bestowed on Jesus. But not in its Hebrew form YHWH does Jesus receive the name, but by way of the Septuagint (LXX), in its Greek form kyrios ("Lord").

The fact that the LXX consistently translated the divine name as kyrios is substantial evidence that the habit of substituting adonai (Hebrew "lord") for Yahweh, which continues to this day in the Jewish community, goes back before the third century B.C.E. But this also makes for the happy situation that the earliest believers could use God's title, Lord, which also became God's "name" in the LXX, as their primary designation for Jesus. In so doing they expressed his equality with God but also avoided calling him Yahweh, which is reserved for God the father.

The result of the exaltation of Jesus is expressed in two coordinate clauses taken directly from the LXX of Isaiah 45:23, both of which stress that the whole of creation shall offer him homage and worship, presumably at his coming ... What Paul does is full of import: for the "to me" of Isaiah 45:23, which refers to Yahweh, he substitutes at the name of Jesus. In this stirring oracle (Is 45:18-24) Yahweh, Israel's Savior, is declared to be God alone, over all that he has created and thus over all other gods and nations. In verses 22-24 Yahweh, while offering salvation to all but receiving obeisance in any case, declares that "before me every knee will bow." Paul now asserts that at Christ's exaltation God has transferred this right to the Son; he is the Lord to whom every knee shall eventually bow ...

In the Jewish synagogue the appellation Lord had long before been substituted for God's "name" (YHWH). The early believers had now transferred that "name" (Lord) to the risen Jesus. Thus, Paul says, in raising Jesus from the dead, God has exalted him to the highest place and bestowed on him God's own name -in the Hebrew sense of "the Name," referring to his investiture with God's power and authority. At the same time, Paul's monotheism is kept intact by the final phrase, to the glory of God the father. Thus this final sentence begins with God's exalting Christ by bestowing on him the name and concludes on the same theological note, that all of this is to God the father's own glory.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4GkG ... me&f=false