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Clivedurdle · 03-08-2008, 06:37 AM

http://www.britannica.com/bps/topic/578206/synagogue

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in Judaism, a community house of worship that serves as a place not only for liturgical services but also for assembly and study. Its traditional functions are reflected in three Hebrew synonyms for synagogue: bet ha-tefilla (“house of prayer”), bet ha-kneset (“house of assembly”), and bet ha-midrash (“house of study”). The term synagogue is of Greek origin (synagein, “to bring together”) and means a place of assembly. The Yiddish word shul (from German Schule, “school”) is also used to refer to the synagogue, and in modern times, the word temple is common among some Reform and Conservative congregations.

The oldest dated evidence of a synagogue is from the 3rd century BC, but synagogues doubtless have an older history. Some scholars feel that the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC gave rise to synagogues after private homes were temporarily used for public worship and religious instructions.

Other scholars trace the origin of synagogues to the Jewish custom of having representatives of communities outside Jerusalem pray together during the two-week period when priestly representatives of their community attended ritual sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Whatever their origin, synagogues flourished side by side with the ancient Temple cult and existed long before Jewish sacrifice and the established priesthood were terminated with the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in AD 70. Thereafter, synagogues took on an even greater importance as the unchallenged focal point of Jewish religious life.

Literature of the 1st century refers to numerous synagogues not only in Palestine but also in Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, and Asia Minor. By the middle of that century, all sizable Jewish communities had a synagogue where regular morning, afternoon, and evening services were held, with special liturgies on the sabbath and on religious festivals.

Modern synagogues carry on the same basic functions associated with ancient synagogues but have added social, recreational, and philanthropic programs as the times demand. They are essentially democratic institutions established by a community of Jews who seek God through prayer and sacred studies. Since the liturgy has no sacrifice, no priesthood is required for public worship. Because each synagogue is autonomous, its erection, its maintenance, and its rabbi and officials reflect the desires of the local community.

In contrast, the architecture and liturgy of churches has been priest led, with the central ritual being a reenactment of a human sacrifice. Churches have not obviously been places of study - were members generally taught to read and write, were they democratic?

I must seriously question whether xianity is developed from Judaism. In reality it looks a completely different Persian Roman philosophy, a factory for saving souls.

DCHindley · 03-08-2008, 08:10 AM

I'll have to agree that critics of early Christian history have not been very good at explaining how Christianity of the 2nd century developed from it's self-claimed Jewish roots.

I think you will find that "priest led" orientation of Modern Christianity is a development from the 4th century, after Constantine and his successors actively sought to replace pagan priesthoods with a Christian one loosely based on its older model of overseers (bishops), servants (deacons) and elders (presbyters/pastors).

However, the process of relating these offices to pagan priesthoods was going on even before that, say in the 3rd century CE. Probably the origin for that is related to the development of individual Christian churches as voluntary associations in antiquity. Voluntary associations, especially the more humble ones, often tried to imitate the grandeur and forms of the more sophisticated associations of the elite classes. These included the state sponsored cults (based on Greek and Roman myths) and the true mystery religions with their priesthoods (Eleusinian and Dionysian). The best book I can recommend on this is a collection of essays named Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-Roman World (or via: amazon.co.uk) edited by John Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (1996).

I personally see the early Jesus cult (Jewish Messianic, village and town and not Greek or Roman city oriented, especially the gentile associates and proselytes they had in tow) crossing paths with the Paul movement (gentiles from Greek cities who had an affinity for Judaism but were not in a position to convert, and were even discouraged from such a step by Paul himself, and with NO JESUS CONNECTION), sometime after the Jewish revolt of 66-70 ce).

These groups were both reeling from the after-effects of that war, but had a certain appeal to one another. The former-gentile wing of the Jesus cult had renounced their Jewish conversions and converted the messianic Jesus into the concept of Jesus as a divine savior/redeemer figure. The closest analogue I can think of is Mandaeism, which developed out of a synthesis of Jewish influenced baptist cults and gnostic dualism. It's not a direct comparison, but a similar development.

Paul's congregations, already operating as voluntary associations of the Greek/Roman type, and finding themselves being held at arms length by the Jewish synagogues that once welcomed them as associates, and perhaps wanting to distance themselves a bit from Judaism, found the divine savior/redeemer myth of the gentile oriented Jesus cult an appealing or at least acceptable substitute for the Judaism they formerly admired, and they assumed a form of mystery cult.

In the process of integration, the Paul group may have interjected a bit of mystery cults of pagan fame, with their priesthoods, etc. On the other hand, a certain amount of the use of the term "priest" for Christian leaders is also being read into the texts of Clement of Alexandria and Origen by commentators of more recent time (last 500 years), based on what they were familiar with in the Roman Catholic Church.

DCH

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Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

<a href="http://www.britannica.com/bps/topic/578206/synagogue">synagogue</a>

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in Judaism, a community house of worship that serves as a place not only for liturgical services but also for assembly and study. Its traditional functions are reflected in three Hebrew synonyms for synagogue: bet ha-tefilla (“house of prayer”), bet ha-kneset (“house of assembly”), and bet ha-midrash (“house of study”). The term synagogue is of Greek origin (synagein, “to bring together”) and means a place of assembly. The Yiddish word shul (from German Schule, “school”) is also used to refer to the synagogue, and in modern times, the word temple is common among some Reform and Conservative congregations.

The oldest dated evidence of a synagogue is from the 3rd century BC, but synagogues doubtless have an older history. Some scholars feel that the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC gave rise to synagogues after private homes were temporarily used for public worship and religious instructions.

Other scholars trace the origin of synagogues to the Jewish custom of having representatives of communities outside Jerusalem pray together during the two-week period when priestly representatives of their community attended ritual sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Whatever their origin, synagogues flourished side by side with the ancient Temple cult and existed long before Jewish sacrifice and the established priesthood were terminated with the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in AD 70. Thereafter, synagogues took on an even greater importance as the unchallenged focal point of Jewish religious life.

Literature of the 1st century refers to numerous synagogues not only in Palestine but also in Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, and Asia Minor. By the middle of that century, all sizable Jewish communities had a synagogue where regular morning, afternoon, and evening services were held, with special liturgies on the sabbath and on religious festivals.

Modern synagogues carry on the same basic functions associated with ancient synagogues but have added social, recreational, and philanthropic programs as the times demand. They are essentially democratic institutions established by a community of Jews who seek God through prayer and sacred studies. Since the liturgy has no sacrifice, no priesthood is required for public worship. Because each synagogue is autonomous, its erection, its maintenance, and its rabbi and officials reflect the desires of the local community.

In contrast, the architecture and liturgy of churches has been priest led, with the central ritual being a reenactment of a human sacrifice. Churches have not obviously been places of study - were members generally taught to read and write, were they democratic?

I must seriously question whether xianity is developed from Judaism. In reality it looks a completely different Persian Roman philosophy, a factory for saving souls.

Clivedurdle · 03-09-2008, 04:40 AM

Quote:

The Pharisees were not primarily a political party but a society of scholars and pietists. They enjoyed a large popular following, and in the New Testament they appear as spokesmen for the majority of the population. Around 100 BC a long struggle ensued as the Pharisees tried to democratize the Jewish religion and remove it from the control of the Temple priests. The Pharisees asserted that God could and should be worshiped even away from the Temple and outside Jerusalem. To the Pharisees, worship consisted not in bloody sacrifices—the practice of the Temple priests—but in prayer and in the study of God’s law. Hence the Pharisees fostered the synagogue as an institution of religious worship, outside and separate from the Temple. The synagogue may thus be considered a Pharasaic institution since the Pharisees developed it, raised it to high eminence, and gave it a central place in Jewish religious life.

From Britannicca Pharisees.

Does this give another reason for writing the gospels? To deliberately undermine the Pharisees?

The political views of Jesus are to say the least confusing in relationship to the views at the time. Xianity does seem to be following the temple sacrificial tradition, by making it a ritual sacrifice, fascinatingly of a human - completely anti judaic thinking!

Clivedurdle · 03-09-2008, 04:55 AM

Quote:

the offering of the life of a human being to a deity. The occurrence of human sacrifice can usually be related to the recognition of human blood as the sacred life force. Bloodless forms of killing, however, such as strangulation and drowning, have been used in some cultures. The killing of a human being, or the substitution of an animal for a person, has often been part of an attempt to commune with a god and to participate in divine life. Human life, as the most valuable material for sacrifice, has also been offered in an attempt at expiation.

There are two primary types of human sacrifice: the offering of a human being to a god and the entombment or slaughter of servants or slaves intended to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. The latter practice was more common. In various places in Africa, where human sacrifice was connected with ancestor worship, some of the slaves of the deceased were buried alive with him, or they were killed and laid beneath him in his grave. The Dahomey instituted especially elaborate sacrifices at yearly ceremonies related to the cult of deceased kings. Excavations in Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient Middle East have revealed that numerous servants were at times interred with the funerary equipment of a member of the royal family in order to provide that person with a retinue in the next life. The Chinese practice of burying the emperor’s retinue with him continued intermittently until the 17th century.

The sacrificial offering of humans to a god has been well attested only in a few cultures. In what is now Mexico the belief that the sun needed human nourishment led to the sacrifice of thousands of victims annually in the Aztec and Nahua calendrical maize (corn) ritual. The Inca confined wholesale sacrifices to the occasion of the accession of a ruler. The burning of children seems to have occurred in Assyrian and Canaanite religions and at various times among the Israelites. Among the African Asante, the victims sacrificed as first-fruit offerings during the Festival of New Yams were usually criminals, though slaves also were killed.

Accusations of human sacrifice in ancient and modern times have been far more widespread than the ritual practice ever was. The ancient Greeks told many myths that involved human sacrifice, which has led some researchers to posit that rites among the Greeks and Romans which involved the killing of animals may have originally involved human victims; at the end of the 20th century, however, archaeological evidence did not support this claim. Some early Christians were falsely accused of cannibalism, consuming sacrificial victims at nocturnal feasts, a misunderstanding probably due to the secrecy surrounding the Eucharistic rite and the use of the words body and blood. From the Middle Ages until quite recently, Jews were often maliciously accused of having sacrificed Christian children at Passover, an accusation which has been termed the blood libel.

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http://www.britannica.com/bps/home#t...20Encyclopedia

Why exactly did xianity make a blood sacrifice (without much blood!) its centre piece? Is it a variation on how to sacrifice? Instead of a substitutionary animal, a theoretical ritual sacrifice is used?

Is the split with Judaism really about the requirement to and how to sacrifice?

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