Studying the History of Abrahamic Faith

[Grip Docility]

This is an interesting argument, although we do see that there were still some good Jews alive even when Christ was born, for example, St. Symeon, and we also see a desire, which motivated people to be baptized in the Jordan by St. John the Baptist and Forerunner, and which also drove the later conversion of the majority of the Jews to those churches which are now Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, the Church of the East, and sui juris Eastern Catholic, so that only a minority of the Pharisees continued practicing what had become Rabinnical Judaism, after the conversion of most of the Ethiopians to Christianity in the early fourth century,.*

Rabinnical Judaism in turn changed dramatically, first with the codification of the Oral Torah into the Mishnah following the dissolution of the Sanhedrin brought about by the devastation inflicted on Jerusalem following the failed Bar Kochba rebellion, and the forced removal of the Jews from its precincts and from much of the Holy Land. Further changes would follow the compilation of the Mishnah commentaries into the Talmud (there are actually two Talmuds, but the one compiled in Seleucia-Cstesiphon is the only complete Talmud and is much more influential than the other Talmud compiled in Jerusalem, which by the time of the Talmudic sages once more had a Jewish population. And still more change would follow the publication of the Zohar and the emergence of Kabbalah, a form of mysticism which became extremely pervasive throughout Judaism, except among the Karaite Jews, who had broken away from the Rabbinical Jews in the sixth century AD, rejecting the authority of the Rabbis and the Mishnah in favor of the interpretation of the Torah and the other books of the Tanakh, which we call the Old Testament, according to a logical method known as the Kalaam. Some people call the Karaites the inventors of Sola Scripture, but this is not really the case, since while there is a certain freedom of thought in Karaite Judaism, particularly when it comes to observing the Torah, where a more rational approach is used (versus the highly restrictive approach favored by Rabinnical Jews of the Orthodox, and to a lesser extent, Masorti, Conservative and Neolog Jews, and to a still lesser extent by Reform Jews and Reconstructionist Jews), Karaite Jews still have a traditional, prevailing interpretation of the Old Testament, and make use of a Siddur, a liturgical prayer book, similiar in content to the orthodox Rabinnical Siddur, and also the Defter, which is the equivalent used by the Samaritans (I am blessed to have an exceedingly rare Englsih language translation of the Defter).

The Siddurim predate Christianity at least in terms of their content - the modern form of Jewish prayer appears to have begun to emerge with St. Ezra the Priest and St. Nehemiah the prophet, and developed into a system of three daily prayers, which developed into the Christian prayers of Matins, Vespers and Compline; and with lessons from the Torah conducted with great solemnity, followed by a related lesson from elsewhere in the Old Testament, called the haftarah. Some of these Torah/haftarah pairings were preserved in the ancient East Syriac liturgical tradition of Christianity, which follows them with what became the norm, an epistle lesson and a corresponding lesson from the Gospel Book, which is treated with reverence analogous to that shown by the Jews for the Torah scrolls. The Old Testament lessons are retained, and depending on the liturgical rite, are either read at the main service (which has a Jewish analogue in an additional prayer said on Sabbath and on certain feast days), which usually involves the celebration of the Eucharist in traditional churches, which is in turn a successor to the animal sacrifices of Second Temple Judaism and Ethiopian Judaism (indeed the Beta Israel continue these sacrifices to this day), or at Vespers the night before, and serve to show how the Old Testament is in fact Christological prophecy.

Aside from the basic thrice daily pattern, which we see in early Christian books of church order such as the Didache, which commended as a minimum prayer rule saying the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays (which Eastern Christians still do, and John Wesley tried to revive this practice in the West, by encouraging Methodists to fast and to pray the Anglican office known as the Litany on those days, ideally in church), additional hours were also added, not so much intentionally, but as a result of the reconciliation of the practices of Christian hermits and monks with the laity, and the different schedules kept from when Christianity was illegal, which required saying Vespers after dusk, and Compline at midnight, and Matins before dawn, and from the hypothetical ideal times, so the result being we also have the Midnight Office, with three Nocturns, which displaced Compline to earlier at night, and offices of Lauds after sunrise, and Prime at the first hour after Sunrise, and Terce (roughly 9 AM), Sext (noon) and Noone (3 PM), which correspond to the arrest, crucifixion and death of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ respectively. In practice, these are usually grouped together in various ways, and are sometimes said at times other than what one might expect, for example, on Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday, the Eastern Orthodox serve a Vesperal Divine Liturgy in the morning, which combines Vespers with the Divine Liturgy, and Matins happens in the evening, so the Orthodox equivalent of the Tenebrae Service on Maundy Thursday, known as the Twelve Gospels Service, is Matins for Great and Holy Friday.

This liturgical excursus, I have posted largely for the benefit of my friend @tampasteve , who recently talked about the Didache with me in another thread, and my new friend @Grip Docility ; for the benefit of his edification I have included much more additional detail in this reply than was strictly speaking necessary, as he is discerning a vocation and one area of formation is learning about ecclesiastical history, and a crucial part of that was touched on by the interesting replies of my friends @Yeshua HaDerekh and @FredVB. I will also perhaps add this to my ChristianForums blog at some point (someone ought to suggest to the XenFora developers whose software powers this and other forums that they add some integration so that members can directly export forum posts into their personal blogs).

Footnotes:

*This blessed event happened around the same time as the blessed conversion of the Georgians (in 301 AD, the city state of Edessa converted to Christianity, followed in 306 by the Kingdom of Armenia, followed in 314 by the Baptism of St. Constantine (which would eventually lead, during the reign of Emperor St. Theodosius I, to Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire, around the time he smashed the altar of the goddess Victory in the Senate and banned paganism, but not before a long period of Arian** tyranny beginning with St. Constantine’s son Constantius), and this was followed a few years later by the conversion of the Kingdom of Kart’velli, the largest and most powerful of the tribes that comprised the nation that would become known as Georgia after its patron saint, St. George the Martyr, who was a soldier in the Roman Army who openly converted to Christianity and received the crown of martyrdom, and who thus figuratively slew the dragon of Paganism (the word dragon actually means devil in several languages including Romanian, which is why I find the recent enthusiasm for dragons in fantasy such as The Game of Thrones to be … disturbing).

And at the same time that happened, most of the Ethiopians became Christian after King Enzana, the Negus of the Kingdom of Axum, the largest and most powerful of the Abyssinian kingdoms, whose subjects had practiced Judaism since the conversion of the Queen of Sheba, whose son was the result of her affair with King Solomon, but some Ethiopians had been Christian since the first century as is recorded in the Book of Acts. And like with Georgia, this mass conversion started with the conversion of the rulers of the most powerful kingdom - in the case of Georgia, the evangelism was the work of the Armenian princess St. Nino (in Georgian; in Armenian and other more conventional languages her name is Nina, but Georgian has a vowel shift affecting feminine words). So in the case of Georgia, their conversion resulted from the prior conversion of the Kingdom of Armenia, and a member of the Armenian nobility having the courage to evangelize to the rulers of her country’s powerful and dangerous northern neighbor. A similiar pattern would occur with the spread of Christianity among the Slavs culiminating in the conversion of St. Vladimir and the baptism of the Kievan Rus people, who are the major ancestors of the modern day Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians.

** Arianism is the denial of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, by insisting that our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ was not God, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things are made, who became man for our salvation, as the Gospel of John ch. 1 v. 1-18 explain, and which is reiterated elsewhere in the New Testament and the Creed, but instead by declaring that He was a creature, and that there was a time when He was not, which is inherently heretical - indeed Arianism is the common thread linking a number of heretical cults that have splintered off Christianity over the years, some forming their own distinct religions, such as Islam, and others lingering on the fringes, for example, Mormonism, the J/Ws, and the Unitarian Universalists, to name just three of the more notorious offenders.

At any rate, the Arian tyranny resulted when St. Constantine’s son Constantius was corrupted by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, by the latter heretic persuading him to accede to the Arian cult as he acceded to the curule chair hitherto occupied by his father Emperor St. Constantine I, and so it was that upon the death of his father, Emperor Constantius initiated a massive persecution of Christian hierarchs who refused to deny the deity of Christ, a persecution on a scale not seen since the reign of Diocletian, which ended only with Julian “the Apostate”, who persecuted Arians and Christians equally in favor of his Neo-Platonist Paganism; his successor Valens largely stopped the persecutions, but was still an Arianism and Arianism remained the closest thing to a state religion of Rome until Emperor Theodosius came to power, reigning primarily from Constantinople, and also formally dividing the Eastern and Western empires, an event which precipitated the rapid decline of the Western Empire during the lifetime of St. Augustine of Hippo, prompting him to write The City of God, but which probably saved the Byzantine Empire. And unfortunately Arius had evangelized the Gothic tribes who subsequently invaded and oppressed the Christians of the Western Empire, and many of the Visigoths in North Africa later converted to Islam, and conducted a genocide which exterminated all the Christians of the countries now known as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

 

[Grip Docility]

No, Karaite Judaism is a reaction to what we now call “Orthodox Judaism.” Orthodox Judaism is basically the religion of the Pharisees, but with the Oral Torah written down in the Mishnah, and commented upon in the Talmud, along with some very entertaining and historically fascinating sections, for example, Tractate Baba Bathra contains, towards the end of Chapter V in Volume I, what I am convinced is the world’s best collection of tall tales about fish and sea monsters and so forth: YAHUAH

Then, the Kabbalists took the Talmud and other material and created a mystical system based on it, explained in books such as the Zohar, and further refined by mystics such as Isaac Luria. And although there exists a supposedly Christian adaptation of the system, in my view, the Kabbalah is entirely incompatible with Christianity due to its embrace of emanationist mysticism and aspects reminiscent of Valentinism and Manichaenism. And some claims of Kabbalists, such as the legend of the Golem of Prague, are not credible.

The Karaites reject all of that and practice something much closer to ancient Judaism. They differ from the Sadducees in that they embrace the same canon as the Orthodox Jews, and believe in the Resurrection, but they completely reject the idea of Rabbis, or the Oral Torah, or the Talmud, or Kabbalah, and their understanding of the Torah is much closer to what you would think is meant by the text, since Orthodox Judaism tries to create a sort of fence around the Torah that would make any violation of it theoretically impossible, but which in practice does so at the expense of the plain meaning of the text. So for example, because the exact formula for the blue dye used when making the fringes of Jewish garments has been lost, these are white in Rabinnical and Orthodox tradition, rather than the white and blue fringes actually specified in the Old Testament. Karaites were at one time a very large sect, but now only 50,000 survive, mostly from Egypt and Syria, from which they had no choice but to emigrate to Israel or the United States; there is one Karaite synagogue, in Daly City, California (a suburb just south of San Francisco), and a few live on the East Coast as well and if I recall were trying to organize a synagogue, and there is one Karaite writer who is popular among Christians … Gordon is part of his name, I can’t recall.

In Israel, Karaite and Ethiopian Jews have faced discrimination not from the civil government or the rather secular majority of Israelis, but from the Chief Rabbinate, which is controlled by Orthodox rabbis, who attempted even to require the Ethiopian Jews, also known as the Beta Israel (which is Ge’ez for “House of Israel”, Beta being in this case derived from the same Semitic triconsonantal root as the Hebrew Beth and the Aramaic Bet and the Arabic Bayt) to undergo “re-circumcision” but this was blocked by the Israeli government, which wisely wanted no impediments that would discourage the Beta Israel from emigrating from the anti-Semitic communist regime known as the Derg as quickly as possible (the Derg also martyred Emperor Haile Selassie, who could have saved his life by renouncing Christianity and embracing Marxist-Leninism, which makes him a martyr analogous to Czar Nicholas II and, in a slightly different way, King Charles I of England (who was martyred as much for his staunch Anglicanism and his tolerance for Roman Catholicism as anything else, and who could have saved himself I expect by embracing the Puritanism of Cromwell; my friend @tampasteve might have something interesting to say on this as he is a member of a society set up in honor of King Charles I the Martyr).

Practically, the discrimination against Karaite Jews and the Beta Israel mainly comes down to them not being able to call the delis, butcher shops and grocery stores that serve their community “Kosher” despite the fact that they adhere to Kosher as it is understood by the Karaites and Beta Israel - this might sound reasonable considering their majority status until one realizes that there are slight differences in how Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi (Yemenese), Romaniote (Greek) and other Jewish communities interpret the Kashrut dietary laws, and the same processes used to resolve these (for example, the Sulchan Aruch, or “Set Table” a code of Jewish law by Joseph Caro, a Sephardic rabbi known as the Mekhaber, Hebrew for author, is published with glosses by an Ashkenazi rabbi, Moses Isserlees, known by his Hebrew acronym the Rema), which makes it usable by both, whereas the Mizrahi Jews of Yemen use a code of Jewish law compiled by the celebrated Orthodox Jewish rabbi and philosopher known in the West as Maimonides, who is known among Jews by his Hebrew acronym the Rambam,* not to be confused with the Ramban, a Catalan Sephardic rabbi, philosopher and Kabbalist mystic known in the West as Nachmanides.

At any rate, my point in mentioning the above is that I feel that the Chief Rabbinate could have partnered with the Karaite and Beta Israel authorities to develop a guide to Kashrut that would allow all three groups to use the word Kosher with regards to their butchers, delis, grocery stores, and eateries, and to serve each other, but unfortunately the Chief Rabbinate controls the use of the word Kosher in Israel, despite the majority of Israelites not caring about it that much, the Orthodox lobby remains influential and even now plans to conscript Charedi and Chassidic Jews is extremely controversial and problematic (I myself think the solution is to avoid conscription, since most Israelis are patriots, and there is no shortage of volunteers given the extreme danger the country finds itself in at present following the terrorist attacks last year and the continued attacks since by Hamas and Hezbollah).

This is also a cautionary note, if we do ever make Christianity the official religion in the US, which I would be inclined to support in order to stop the continuing attacks by atheists against our religion and the increasing domestic persecution, while avoiding a single established church, and protecting the rights of Jews, we must be careful to avoid creating an authority which could effectively enforce the policies of one denomination on the others and thus create an established church by the backdoor, so to speak.

*Maimonides wrote a famous work entitled “The Guide for the Perplexed”, which I fear someone will have to eventually rewrite, only this time as an aid to comprehending my CF.com posts, with multiple glosses for use depending on which forum I am posting in.

 

[Grip Docility]

Nehemiah Gordon, he puts out some interesting information that a lot of Messianic believers like to read or listen to. He was Orthodox Jewish but changed to Karaite at some point. There is a fair under current in Messianic communities of people that lean towards Karaite understandings, and even some conversions from Messianic to Karaite, but being as they are so limited in distribution this is not as large as it probably would be otherwise.

 

[Grip Docility]

Iconography and Liturgy, Piero Marini, 20 January 2005

2. The iconoclast crisis

The Second Council of Nicaea marked the end of a long process of reflection on the meaning and place of images in the life of the Church.

Before the beginning of the third century, there were few images in the Church. This was due to the danger of idolatrous practices widespread in the pagan world, which had already been at the basis of the Old Testament legislation forbidding the fashioning of images.

The peace of the Church at the time of Constantine had decisive consequences. As the number of baptised Christians increased, exterior signs of Christian devotion multiplied, the cult of the martyrs grew, people began to make pilgrimages, and everywhere new churches and basilicas were built. Christian art ceased to be mainly funeral iconography, unintelligible to the uninitiated, and was used to further the evangelisation of the growing numbers of Christians.

In the fourth century, for the first time in the history of the Church, voices were raised in opposition to religious images on the basis of the prohibitions contained in the Old Testament (cfr Ex 20:4; Dt 4:15-18). Canon 36 of the Council of Elvira, (ca. 300 AD.), a Council of which we know relatively little, decreed that “images may not be exposed in Church;” while iconoclast statements are found in the letter from Eusebius of Caesarea to the Empress Constantia and the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis. According to scholars, this first form of aversion to icons was a limited and restricted phenomenon, perhaps somewhat coloured by Arianism; there would seem to be a connection between the Arian insistence on God’s transcendence and the banning of images. However iconoclast views persisted as the centuries passed, and so other voices were raised in defence of icons. Gregory the Great (540-604) wrote that “it is not without reason that in the older Churches the lives of the saints were depicted in paintings... what Scripture is for the literate, so the image is for the illiterate... images are the books of those who do not know the Scriptures” (Letters, IX, 209).

The use of icons became more widespread in the sixth and seventh centuries, encouraged by popular faith, legends and miracles. Yet it did not spread evenly throughout Christendom; because of their cultural background, the Syrians and Armenians, for example, were much less inclined to use images. Significant, the emperors who encouraged iconoclasm were of Isaurian or Armenian origin. In 692 the Council in Trullo stated that: “in certain sacred images the Precursor is portrayed pointing to the lamb. This portrayal was used as a symbol of grace. It was a hidden figure of the true lamb, that is Christ our God, revealed to us according to the law. Having therefore accepted these figures and shadows as symbols of the truth handed down by the Church, today we prefer grace and truth themselves as the fullness of this law. Therefore to expose by means of painting that which is perfect we decree that henceforth Christ, our God, shall be represented in his human form and not in the old form of the lamb” (Can 82). Already for the Fathers of the Council in Trullo, the image of Christ implied a confession of profound faith in the incarnation.

One factor which contributed to a hardening of positions for or against the use of icons was the advance of Islam, which claimed to be the highest and purest revelation of God, and accused the Church of polytheism and idolatry in her veneration of images. The eighth century saw the rise of heated disputes. The opening act of the first stage of the iconoclast conflict was an order, issued in 726 by the Byzantine emperor Leo III ‘the Isaurian,’ to destroy the image of Christ over the bronze gates of the imperial palace in Constantinople; the image was replaced with a cross beneath which the emperor placed the following inscription: “Since God cannot bear for Christ to be portrayed in an image without word or life and made of corruptible matter despised by Scripture, Leo and his son the new Constantine, engraved the sign of the cross, the glory of believers, on the palace gates.” That act was followed by the official promulgation of measures against images and their veneration, as well as by acts of violence directed against icons and those who venerated them. It should be recalled that these iconoclastic measures begun by Leo III came only a few years after the edict of Caliph Yedzid II to destroy images in every Christian province he conquered and attacks on Christian worship by Jews. The emperor sought a cultural compromise aimed at enabling Arabs, Christians and Jews to live in harmony by eliminating elements of conflict. Reasons of state were more important than the rights of the faith. Pope Gregory III reacted in 731 by excommunicating those opposed to icons and their cult. In the East it was mainly Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople, George of Cyprus and John Damascene who defended the veneration of icons. Germanus stated that to reject icons was to reject the Incarnation; for in the icon “we depict the image of [Christ’s] human aspect in the flesh, not that of his incomprehensible and invisible divinity, because we feel the need to represent that in which we believe, in order to demonstrate that God did not embrace our nature only in appearance, as a shadow, but that he became truly man” (Letter to John of Synnada). John Damascene fought the iconoclasts at various levels. He countered the accusation that in icons a piece of wood was adored, saying: “It is not matter which I venerate, but rather the Creator of matter who became matter for me” (Discourses, I, 16), and added that icons are “the books of the illiterate” (Discourses, II, 10). However the most important argument was theological; the dogmatic foundation for the cult of icons is the Incarnation. The Word became flesh: Jesus is the human face of God and therefore we may represent Him (Discourses, I, 22). The Old Testament forbade images; in the Old Covenant God had revealed himself only by word. In the New Testament, the Word becomes an image. Psalm 47:9 was often used to defend icons: “What we have heard, we have seen.” John Damascene makes a clear distinction between the icon and the prototype which it represents. The image is the object of veneration, not adoration; the latter is reserved for God alone.

In 754 a Synod convoked at Hieria on the Bosporus at the initiative of the emperor Constantine V gave normative status to the decisions of the iconoclasts. About 388 Bishops took part, but none from the Sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch or Jerusalem. The Synod declared the emperors equal to the Apostles, filled with wisdom through the working of the Holy Spirit, and charged them with leading the faithful back to the right path and instructing them; it also condemned the making and the cult of icons. It insisted on the distance between the icon, a material object, and that which it claimed to make visible. It considered the Eucharist the only true image. In this way, iconoclasm, hitherto supported by an imperial edict alone, became a dogma of the whole Church.

In the two decades that followed, the monks, the chief promoters of icons, were violently persecuted; numerous monasteries were confiscated, their monks were forced to join the imperial army, and some were tortured. In 769 Pope Stephen convoked a Synod at the Lateran which anathematised the Synod at Hieria; the Patriarchs of the East, Theodore of Jerusalem, Theodore of Antioch and Cosmas of Alexandria also rejected the decisions made at Hieria.