The Fall of Jerusalem and the Parting of the Ways

Nero's fire

The 60s were a terrible decade for both Christians and Jews. In July of AD 64, a great fire destroyed much of the city of Rome. Rumors spread that the emperor Nero had started it to clear space for a new palace. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero looked for scapegoats and found them in the Christians, "a class hated for their abominations." Christians were arrested and killed in horrible ways. Some were wrapped in animal skins and torn apart by dogs, and others were set on fire to light Nero's gardens at night.

This was the first time the Roman state singled out Christians as a separate group. It shows that by the 60s Romans could tell Christians apart from Jews. Peter and Paul are traditionally believed to have died in this persecution. The persecution was local to Rome and did not last long, but it set a dangerous precedent (see Persecution and Martyrs).

The Jewish War

Meanwhile, Judea was boiling over. Corrupt Roman governors, heavy taxes, clashes between Jews and Gentiles, and the growing influence of revolutionaries all pushed toward war. In AD 66 a governor seized money from the Temple treasury. Riots broke out, the Roman garrison in Jerusalem was massacred, and the revolt became full-scale war.

Rome responded with overwhelming force. The general Vespasian reconquered Galilee. (Among the captured Jewish commanders was Flavius Josephus, who switched sides and later wrote the history of the war.) When Nero died in 68, Vespasian left to become emperor himself, leaving his son Titus to finish the job.

In AD 70, after a siege of several months, Jerusalem fell. The city was starved, and rival Jewish factions fought each other inside the walls. The Romans burned the Temple, Herod's magnificent rebuilding, and it was never rebuilt. Josephus claims over a million died, almost certainly an exaggeration, but the slaughter was immense. Survivors were sold into slavery. In Rome, the Arch of Titus still shows soldiers carrying off the Temple's great seven-branched lampstand. The last rebels held out at the desert fortress of Masada until 73 or 74.

The parting of the ways

Judaism reborn

For Judaism, the loss of the Temple was a catastrophe like the exile six centuries earlier. Sacrifice, the center of worship commanded in the Torah, was now impossible. The Sadducees and the priesthood lost their reason to exist. The Essenes and the revolutionaries were destroyed.

The group that survived and rebuilt was the heirs of the Pharisees, the rabbis ("teachers"). According to tradition, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai ben Zakkai was smuggled out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin and received Roman permission to found a school at Yavneh (Jamnia) near the coast. There and elsewhere, the rabbis reshaped Judaism around Torah study, prayer, the synagogue and the home. Their discussions eventually produced the Mishnah (c. 200) and the Talmud. Rabbinic Judaism, in other words, and Christianity were both born out of the crisis of the first century. They were, as some scholars put it, two children of the same mother.

What happened to the Jerusalem church?

The church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the 300s, records a tradition that before the siege the Christians of Jerusalem received a warning and fled across the Jordan to Pella. Whether or not this is exact, the Jerusalem church never regained its central role. Leadership of the movement passed to the Gentile churches of cities like Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria and Rome.

Groups of Jewish Christians, who believed in Jesus while continuing to keep the Jewish law, survived for several centuries, especially east of the Jordan and in Syria. Later writers called them "Ebionites" or "Nazarenes." But they were squeezed from both sides. Gentile Christians considered them half-Jewish, and Jews considered them heretics. Eventually they disappeared. Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that this was a real loss. A form of Christianity close to Jesus' own Jewish world vanished, and later Christians largely forgot that their faith had once been a Jewish movement [check].

The parting of the ways

Historians call the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism "the parting of the ways." There was no single moment of divorce. It happened at different speeds in different places, over perhaps a century or more. Several factors drove it:

• Gentile majority: As more Gentiles joined who did not keep the Jewish law, churches looked less and less like synagogues.
• Christian claims about Jesus: Worship of Jesus as Lord and Son of God seemed to many Jews to compromise the oneness of God.
• The war: Christians did not join the revolt, and some saw the Temple's destruction as God's judgment for rejecting Jesus. Jews saw Christians as having abandoned the nation in its hour of need.
• Synagogue discipline: Around the 80s or 90s, according to many scholars, a prayer was added to synagogue worship cursing "heretics." It may have included Christians, though its date and meaning are debated. John's Gospel speaks of believers being "put out of the synagogue."
• A second revolt: In 132–135 Simon bar Kokhba led another rebellion, hailed by some as Messiah. Jewish Christians could not support a rival messiah. Rome crushed the revolt, renamed Judea "Syria Palaestina," and rebuilt Jerusalem as a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, banning Jews from entering it.

By the early 100s, Christian writers like Ignatius of Loyola of Antioch were clearly distinguishing "Christianity" (a word he was among the first to use) from "Judaism."

A bitter inheritance

Sibling quarrels can be the most bitter. Some New Testament passages, written in the heat of this separation, speak harshly of "the Jews" or the Pharisees. In their original setting these were arguments within a family. Read centuries later by a powerful Christian majority, they were turned into weapons against a vulnerable Jewish minority. Later Christian writers developed a "teaching of contempt." It held that the Jews had been rejected by God, were collectively guilty of Christ's death, and were condemned to wander. This teaching fed discrimination, expulsions and massacres in medieval Europe, and it formed part of the soil in which modern antisemitism grew.

Only after the Holocaust did most churches seriously confront this legacy. The Catholic Church's declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) and many Protestant statements rejected the charge that Jews are collectively guilty for Jesus' death and affirmed God's continuing covenant with the Jewish people (see The Second Vatican Council).

Christians reading the catastrophe

How did Christians interpret the destruction of the Temple? The Gospels record Jesus predicting that "not one stone will be left upon another" (Mark 13). Many scholars think Mark was written around the time of the war, and that Matthew and Luke were written after it, shaped by the memory of the siege. Christians increasingly saw the Temple's destruction as confirming their belief that Jesus' death was the final sacrifice, which made the Temple's sacrifices unnecessary. The Letter to the Hebrews develops this theme at length, presenting Jesus as the great high priest of a better covenant.

The loss of the Temple also pushed both Christians and Jews toward their Scriptures. For rabbinic Judaism, the study of Torah replaced sacrifice. For Christians, the reading of Scripture and the Eucharist became the center of worship. Both communities, in different ways, became religions of the book and the gathered congregation rather than of the altar in Jerusalem.