The Parting, Step by Step

The church and the synagogue did not split in a single afternoon because of a single new revelation. They drifted apart slowly, in stages, over generations, through wars and the rulings of councils. Laid out in order, the events show where the split really happened.

The Timeline

Around AD 33 comes Pentecost. Thousands of believers gather every day in the temple, and they are entirely at home there.

Around AD 57, Paul returns to Jerusalem. The elders tell him that there are tens of thousands of Jewish believers, “all zealous for the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law).” Almost twenty-five years have passed, and there is still no separation.

In the AD 60s the pressure begins to build. In AD 62, James, the brother of the Lord and the leader of the believers in Jerusalem, is put to death. In AD 64 a great fire sweeps through Rome, and the emperor Nero, needing someone to blame, turns on the followers of Yeshua with brutal persecution. In the years that follow, both Peter and Paul are executed. One by one, the leaders fall.

In AD 70, Rome crushes the Jewish revolt. Jerusalem is destroyed and the temple burns. It is hard for us to imagine what that meant. The sacrifices, the priesthood, and the pilgrim feasts all belonged to that one house, and now it lay in ruins.

Even then, the formal split had not yet taken place.

A Prayer That Became a Test

In the decades after AD 70, a new line was added to the daily synagogue prayer, the Amidah. It was a curse against the minim, the heretics. It is usually dated to the eighties or nineties, though historians debate exactly when it was added and against whom it was first aimed.

The Talmud records what was done when the man leading the prayer stumbled over this line: he was removed from his place, because he was suspected of being one of the minim (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 29a). A line of prayer had become a test, and over time believers in Yeshua found themselves pushed out of the synagogue.

A War with Two Messiahs

In AD 132 the Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome turned the break into a canyon. Its leader, Simon bar Kosiba, won striking victories at first, and Rabbi Akiva, one of the most honored rabbis of the day, declared him the Messiah.

Consider the trap that this set for Jewish believers. They were Jews, but their Messiah was Yeshua. Once Bar Kokhba had been hailed as the anointed one, joining his army meant more than fighting for their people; it meant following a rival claimant. Justin Martyr, writing within a generation of the war, records that Bar Kokhba ordered Christians to be severely punished unless they denied Yeshua as the Messiah.

Rome crushed the revolt with terrible brutality, and the believers who had refused to follow Bar Kokhba as Messiah were left further apart from the rest of the Jewish people than ever.

Then the Gentile Church Took Its Own Road

From then on, the church drew its members more and more from the nations, with little connection to the Jewish world. Around 144, Marcion tried to throw out the Old Testament. He was expelled, but his teaching did not die with him. In the fourth century, in the decades after the emperor Constantine had given the faith the favor of the empire, church councils were passing rules against resting on the Sabbath and against keeping the Jewish feasts. The Council of Laodicea, for example, ruled that Christians must not rest on the Sabbath but must work on that day. What had begun as a drift had become law.

Not One Line Inside the Bible

Look at that table once more. Every row after the first two took place after the book of Acts ends, and none of it is recorded in the New Testament. To the last page of Acts, believers from the nations sat with Jews in one synagogue, reading one Scripture.

So when someone says, “Food, purity, the Sabbath, and the feasts are synagogue business, not church business,” he is not speaking a first-century sentence. He is repeating a framework forged in wars and councils centuries later and then laid back over Acts 15. Read Acts 15:20 alone, and the food question can seem open for believers from the nations. Read verse 21 with it, and the question is closed. They were in a place where Moses was read every Sabbath, and they were learning all of it.

The church of today is very different from the ekklesia ἐκκλησία ek-klay-see'-ah of the first century. That is the truth. But if we refuse to admit the difference and press the first century into the shape of today’s church, we cannot read the Bible as the Bible. And the first passages to be misread will always be the ones about food, purity, the Sabbath, and the appointed times.

That brings us to a pastor at a church breakfast.