Thursday, 8/29/13
Our Gospel today tells us of the
death of St. John the Baptist, but if you don’t mind, I would like to take up
the theme of the Gospels from Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week. In them
Jesus was criticizing the Scribes and the Pharisees for being sticklers for unimportant
regulations. I would like to sketch out the historical reasons for Matthew’s attacking
the Pharisees on these points.
For the first forty years of Christianity,
most Christians were Jewish people who continued with all the practices of
their Jewish religion. Then, after the year 60 A.D. a group of Jewish terrorist
took to ambushing Roman military patrols, killing them off with short daggers
called shikas. After successful raids
those Shickaries found safety by
holing up in Jerusalem.
In the year 69 A.D., all other
ways of getting at the Shickaries failing, the Roman Senate commissioned
General Titus to destroy Jerusalem and its temple. While his men were carrying
out the destruction, a leading Pharisee got in touch with Titus, convincing him
that the Pharisees had always been Rome’s true friends, and that inside Jerusalem’s walls the Shickaries
were killing off Pharisees and their families.
General Titus let the Pharisee
families come out from Jerusalem to settle at a place called Jamnia on the
coast of the Mediterranean.
After word of the temple’s
complete destruction reached the Pharisees in Jamnia, then began asking
themselves how a temple-people could survive as a religion without their temple.
After the year 75 A.D., they began saying that the core of their religion was
strict adherence to each and every kosher
law.
On seeing that the Christian Jews
were violating kosher by eating with
unclean non-Jewish Christians, the Pharisee authorities decreed that no one
could be both Christian and Jewish. They were claiming that Jesus had been out
to destroy the law and the Prophets.
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