OSHER 767 - Out of the Ashes: The Rise of Christianity from the First Temple to Paul

With the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, the Jews of Judea faced an existential and ideological crisis. Different groups resolved that crisis in different ways. One was the development of new and expanded concepts of Messiah and redemption. When Judea faced a new foe 550 years later, those concepts were thrust up against an intractable enemy, the ever-expanding Roman Empire. But this time a more successful resolution was affected by a small group of Messianic Jews who believed that the Messiah had indeed come, had been executed by the enemies of God, and would come back soon to lead believers to an apocalyptic victory that would initiate the kingdom of God on earth. We will survey the sources for the emergence of earliest Christianity (the "Primitive Church") from the fall of the First Temple (586 BCE) to the pilgrimages of Paul (first century CE), and the conversion of Constantine. We will draw upon Archaeology as well as Ancient Near Eastern, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Aramaic literary sources to supplement the information in the latest of the Jewish Scriptures, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hamadi papyri, Intertestamental literature, and the earliest of the Christian Scriptures to reconstruct how the Jews of ancient Judea coped with the religious crisis inherent in the fall of Judea and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; and how the process of Jewish revival from the ashes of the Temple laid the foundation for the emergence of Christianity and its evolution from a Jewish messianic sect into the Early Church.