The Movements of the Jerusalem Church During the First Jewish War

1973 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara C. Gray

Under the leadership of James the Lord's brother the Christian Church at Jerusalem was probably the most influential of all existing Christian communities. It could boast a system of internal organisation under authoritative resident leaders; it was an important missionary centre, despatching apostles and recalling them, or sending advisors to them when they were in difficulties. Neither the prestige nor the destiny of the Jerusalem Church were the immediate concern of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and it is Hegesippus who keeps us informed of its progress. The stability of that Church was apparently shattered shortly after the death of James, when the Jews revolted against the Romans and ‘immediately Vespasian attacked them’. We hear no more about the Jerusalem Church directly from Hegesippus until he tells of a meeting convened to elect a successor to James, and Eusebius tells us that this meeting took place after Jerusalem had been taken in A.D. 70.

1974 ◽  
Vol os-24 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Jean Skuse

Let us recognize at the outset that we are talking about a complex picture. Any generalization about “all missionaries” or “missionaries as a whole” is likely to be erroneous. We would also recognize that the role of mission is changing, and is constantly being re-examined in the light of new understandings and challenges. We would also admit that it is unlikely that there is a single motivation - that what drives people in different directions depends on so many of life's circumstances. And yet we need to examine our motives very carefully, to identify some as clearly being the wrong motives and to ask the question which was submitted to me for this paper: “How can we get ‘turned-on’ to do God's work today? Why is a Christian compelled to share what he/she knows of what God has done in Jesus Christ?” A motive, of course, is any consideration which moves the will, that which drives us to certain actions, and directs us towards particular goals. Motivation depends so much on the goal and vice versa. The two are almost inseparable. “Mission” or “missions” refer to the special task to which an individual or groups is destined. The usual connotation in the Christian Church involves being sent out by God or the church charged with responsibility for such functions as preaching the gospel, teaching the Word, healing the sick, proselytizing the heathen, and introducing the appropriate rites and ceremonies to accompany these functions. These are the traditional tasks of mission. We talk too of partnership in mission, sharing Christian communities, of involving ourselves in the secular processes. Our missionary motivation is intimately bound up with our understanding of what mission is all about. If we see mission as extending the Christian Church this will call forth one kind of motivation. If it is to be involved in the raising of the level of humanness of all God's creatures the motivation will be different.


Author(s):  
Christopher Stroup

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book. It argues that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts. When one reads Acts with an eye to the writer's ethnic reasoning, it becomes clear that Luke did not represent Jews as a static group but instead presented Jewish identity in multiple, hybrid, and complex ways that allowed for the identification of Christian non-Jews as Jews. Luke also employs the ethnic, religious, and civic aspects of Jewish identity to privilege those Jews (and non-Jewish Jews) who follow Jesus. If Acts marks all Christians as Jews and Christian communities as Jewish communities, then the concept of “Christian universalism” should be understood as a particular form of “Jewish universalism.” The chapter then reflects on the use of ethnic reasoning and the challenge of anti-Judaism in the interpretation of Acts today.


1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-154
Author(s):  
L. Gregory Bloomquist

AbstractIn this article I suggest ways in which rhetorical analysis can complement sociological analysis of early Christianity. On the basis of a universally acknowledged saying of Jesus ("blessed are you poor"), I suggest that those who use social scientific perspectives need to clarify more accurately the levels of data from which they are working (i.e., when they are working with probably early material, possibly the words of Jesus himself, and when they are working with the later elaboration of the traditional material) and to identify the rhetorical value of each level. I then show how, contrary to sociological analysis that depicts Jesus as merely proclaiming reversal, the historical Jesus proclaimed a reversal that had already happened but one that was away from God's intended order: what the historical Jesus was calling for was a future restoration to a state that existed before the reversal. Attention to the rhetorical nature of his follower's use of this proclamation, however, shows that when the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Lukan Acts of the Apostles uses the language of reversal and restoration, he now does so to describe what was happening not primarily vis-à-vis "the world" but in their own, now Christian communities. Jesus' message of reversal of the fate of the poor becomes in this way the Lukan message of the apostolic governance of that reversal, that is, the broker's (the apostolic leadership's, after the model of Jesus) dispensation of the patron's (God's) resources.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 229-246
Author(s):  
Claudiu Marius Ciascai

The unity of the Church from everywhere has always been of major concern for the early Christians. They understood this unity as an existing and tangible experience, and not as a remote perspective hidden in the uncertainty of the future. Besides, they believed that the unity of the Church can assure the cohesion between the Christian communities, and the communication inside the Christian community was, in its turn, the essential condition that provided the support for, the consolidation and the development of the ecclesiastic unity. The Fathers of the Church have understood the importance of keeping and supporting the unity and the stability inside the Church, in order to provide an efficient Christian mission everywhere in the world. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the evolution and complexity of the ecumenical dimension of the ecclesiology of Irenaeus of Lyon, one of the most representatives of the Fathers of the Church, during the early centuries. He understood the power of the dialogue and the pastoral mission, and he preached not only for the early Christians, who, at that time, found themselves surrounded and confused by different inaccurate doctrines, but also for the pagans. He preached to those pagans the message of Jesus Christ’s Gospel of love.


Author(s):  
Ashraf Alexandre Sadek

After traveling through the Sinai, the Holy Family, according to tradition, walked from east to west through the Nile Delta. The various written and oral traditions mention eight place names associated with this journey in the Delta: Tell Basta, Musturud/Mahamma, Bilbeis, Daqadus, Samannud, Burullus (St. Damiana), Sakha (Bikha Issous), and Wadi al-Natrun. This chapter examines whether the memory of the coming of the Holy Family has had an impact on the development of Christian life in the Nile Delta. To this end, it draws for each site a parallel between the traditions of the Holy Family and the history of Christian communities on this site; this should enable us to measure, to some extent, the impact of the Holy Family traditions on the history of the Christian Church in the Nile Delta.


1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Jenkins

In the early nineteenth century, many private, well-to-do persons collected rocks, minerals, fossils, insects, skeletons, animal skins, Indian artifacts, and so on, for their aesthetic appeal or mystical connotations. Their fragmentary and miscellaneous collections incited wonder and admiration in those privileged to see them while communicating a narrative of the prestige, esoteric knowledge, and adventurous spirit of the collector. Referring to aesthetic and mystical, rather than scientific criteria, collectors juxtaposed a seemingly incongruous hodge-podge of objects in their cabinets—armadillos and ostrich eggs, quartz crystals and rattlesnake rattles, for example. These collectors sought to celebrate the stability of their belief systems through the commonly understood marginality of the strange freaks and curiosities that sparked their imaginations. The rare, abnormal, bizarre, and the old were especially valued.


2015 ◽  
pp. 168-220
Author(s):  
Алексей Иванович Сидоров

Публикация представляет собой продолжение очерка по истории становления первохристианской Церкви. Исследование основано на свидетельствах первоисточников и привлечении широкого спектра мнений отечественных и зарубежных специалистов по истории Древней Церкви. События проповеднической деятельности апостола Павла, возникновение разногласий в первохристианской общине и последовавший за ними Апостольской Собор, который утвердил необязательность соблюдения ветхозаветных постановлений, рассматриваются в контексте появления в среде первых христиан так называемых «эллинистов». Последние вывели проповедь Евангелия за пределы Палестины, а апостол Павел и его сподвижники основали христианские Церкви во многих частях «ойкумены». Кроме того, повествуется о кончине святого Иакова Праведного и судьбе Иерусалимской Церкви, деятельности апостола Петра и Иоанна, как и прочих апостолов, вплоть до завершения апостольского периода в истории древней Церкви. This publication is a continuation of the essay on the history of the formation of the early Christian Church, based on first-hand evidence and engaging a wide range of views of domestic and foreign researchers of early Church history. Both the results of Paul’s preaching, the emergence of differences among early Christians, and the subsequent Apostolic Council, which approved some sort of compliance with the regulations of the Old Testament, are all considered in the context of the emergence among early Christians of the so-called «Hellenists», who brought the preaching of the Gospel beyond Palestine, while Paul and his associates founded Christian communities in many parts of the «Oecumene». Moreover, the article tells the story of the death of St. James the Just, and the fate of the Church of Jerusalem. It describes the activities of Apostle Peter and John, as well as the other apostles, up until the end of the apostolic period in the history of the ancient Church.


1982 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 605-613
Author(s):  
P. S. Conti

Conti: One of the main conclusions of the Wolf-Rayet symposium in Buenos Aires was that Wolf-Rayet stars are evolutionary products of massive objects. Some questions:–Do hot helium-rich stars, that are not Wolf-Rayet stars, exist?–What about the stability of helium rich stars of large mass? We know a helium rich star of ∼40 MO. Has the stability something to do with the wind?–Ring nebulae and bubbles : this seems to be a much more common phenomenon than we thought of some years age.–What is the origin of the subtypes? This is important to find a possible matching of scenarios to subtypes.


1999 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 309-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Fukushima

AbstractBy using the stability condition and general formulas developed by Fukushima (1998 = Paper I) we discovered that, just as in the case of the explicit symmetric multistep methods (Quinlan and Tremaine, 1990), when integrating orbital motions of celestial bodies, the implicit symmetric multistep methods used in the predictor-corrector manner lead to integration errors in position which grow linearly with the integration time if the stepsizes adopted are sufficiently small and if the number of corrections is sufficiently large, say two or three. We confirmed also that the symmetric methods (explicit or implicit) would produce the stepsize-dependent instabilities/resonances, which was discovered by A. Toomre in 1991 and confirmed by G.D. Quinlan for some high order explicit methods. Although the implicit methods require twice or more computational time for the same stepsize than the explicit symmetric ones do, they seem to be preferable since they reduce these undesirable features significantly.


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