Russellonius

Good answer! That's what I think, too. In-house prior to the destruction of the Temple with a market opportunity after, and even wider opportunities after the Bar Kochba debacle. After 135CE everybody would have been dispersed. There would have been a shift of authority from the now-gone Temple to whatever was or had been going on in local synagogues. Degrees of assimilation is what the surviving traditionalist refugees would have found in their new host cities.

Robert Eisenman alleged that Paul was the 'Spouter of Lies' in the DSS. It was disappointing when the carbon-dating put the scroll earlier than the time assumed for Paul's ministry. But after reading FRDB for these past few weeks it seems possible to me that there was a series of Spouters of Lies, an archetype, that came to be called 'Paul' in the codex version of the historical drama.

Why was he also called Saul?

A scripture mining operation would have found this precedent of OT Saul situationally excusing the illegal ingestion of blood. Saul-turned-Paul in the NT prescribed ingesting blood as a spiritual alternative to the traditional altar sacrifices. Before and after pictures of the altar.

(Thank you for not saying Gentiles!)

darstec

How can one even start to postulate an early synagogue tradition? We go from zero mention of synagogue in the Old Testament to them available everywhere in the New Testament. Is there any evidence for synagogues or even rabbis prior to the fourth or fifth centuries CE?

Russellonius

Nobody said anything about a synagogue tradition.

The Pharasaic/rabbinic tradition is separate from the origin of Christianity. They are the only two Judaic sects that survived after 134CE. It may be popular among some to postulate their discontinuity from Second Temple Judaism, but it couldn't possibly have happened that way.

maryhelena is trying to discover how Christianity was continuous with a judaism that existed before the Temple was destroyed. I agree with her that it was an evolution or adaptation of jewish tradition undergoing rapid change due to the governing style of Rome after 63BCE when they took over. The proposal is that the inferred authors of the NT envisioned a change in traditional Abrahamic mythology that would alter practices within local ethnically jewish 'synagogues' or 'ecclesia'. (The words refer to demographic sub-group identification, not buildings.)

maryhelena believes that Christianity originated within the Hasmonean family at the end of the their reign in 37CE when Herod the Great took over rule as a client king of Rome.

spin

Plenty of evidence.

There was a synagogue in the late Hasmonean palace at Jericho (pre-50 BCE) according to the archaeological evidence, there was one at Masada (pre-70 CE), another at Dura Europos (pre-250 CE). Another is argued for Qiryat Sefer (pre-135 CE). At Magdala a building was converted into a Synagogue in the 1st c. Etc. (The Ancient Synagogue from its Origins to 200 C.E. (or via: amazon.co.uk), Runesson, Binder and Olsson, Brill: 2008.) Josephus also talks about them, eg BJ 2.285.


spin

stephan huller

Another complicating factor is terminology. Synagogues weren't called 'synagogues' outside Judea in the early period especially in Egypt and Alexandria. The preferred terminology was proseuche but this confirmed in every respect to what we would call a 'synagogue.'

spin

To quote from the Brill Synagogue book:

What in English is translated “synagogue” went under several different names in antiquity (in Greek, Latin and Hebrew): synagoge, proseuche, ekklesia, oikos, topos, hagios topos, hieros peribolos, hieron, synagogion, sabbateion, semneion, didaskaleion, amphitheatron, eucheion, proseukterion, thiasos, templum, proseucha, bet mo'ed, bet ha-Torah, bet ha-kneset.

spin

darstec

As far as I have read, there have been no certifiable synagogues prior to about the fourth century. Furthermore the complete absence of their mention in the OT is suspicious.

And a book by "Christian" scholars is very suspect as far as I am concerned. Neither author is an archaeologist. I think what we have in the book is the equivalent of John the Baptist's bones and the one single cuneiform fragment validating a large commercial Jerusalem we saw recently in the news. We are talking about True Believers here that are trying to validate their faith and nothing more.

darstec

At least half of those do not mean synagogue as in a Jewish church. Among them can be found feast, feast day, temple, mansion, house, palace, etc. What is translated as synagogue for the most part is equivalent to finding the word writing and automatically assuming it means scripture. I think it is very wrong to give special meanings to words found in biblical texts when the simpler common definition will suffice. For instance it is very misleading to call the OT iesous Joshua and the NT iesous Jesus. They are the same name. It is also misleading to call elohim god in some places and messengers, judges or angels in others. elohim means sons of El or council of El and should be designated as such each and every time. But that would not serve a hidden theological bias.

Same here with synagogues. Christians and Jews see church buildings everywhere even if they have to use a bigger hammer to make it fit.

darstec

They weren't called synagogues anywhere in or outside of Judea until the second century. That is an anachronism. And proseuche means prayer or an open field gathering. It has nothing to do with any building built for Jews. That is just another faith justifying definition for a prayer or prayer gathering. Buildings are not a legitimate use of the term.

darstec

Maryhelena mentioned local existing synagogues.

Why do people insist on calling the one and only Temple the Second Temple? As far as any archaeologist not a theist is concerned, there was only one.

I think that the fact that in Pomeii and Herculaneum there is not one mention of Jesus, the messiah, a christ, nor christian is pretty good evidence that nobody else heard of Christianity either. It was a second century fabrication after the Final Diaspora of 134 CE.