Tuesday, July 31, 2018

The process of Orthodoxy

The difficulty for any religious movement is that its internal justification for stability is the pointer back into the founding times, into in illo tempore, where the orthodoxy was completely revealed and implementable, while from the external viewpoint, the orthodoxy is the end result of the process.

The internal justification has a hard time with the fact that the external view often can point to internal events that tilt the trajectory one way or the other without any justification in the terms of the dogmatics.

For example, the resolution of the contention between the Judeo-Christians for whom the Gospel of Matthews is written and the Hellenistic Christians targeted by the works of Luke is not independent of the population sizes of these two groups, nor of the wars that the Jewish state fought against the Romans after the initial destruction of Jerusalem (which both Gospels assume). It is even possible that at the time of Matthews, the plane was already tipped against the Judeo-Christian groups, possibly by evicting the early Christian community that was Jewish from Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 ad (so the German Wikipedia on Judeo-Christians).

Clearly, Paul's writings presume a more Hellenistic and less Judeo-Christian setting and support that possibility, especially when considering the differences in the depiction of the Apostel Convention in Jerusalem (Gal 2 vs Acts 15).

Amusingly, one of the main time points in this process of the separation is the synod of Jamnia, that has itself the structure of a time point that is supposed to encapsulate a process---not only the termination of the canonical structure of the Hebrew Bible, but also the expulsion of the Judeo-Christians from the synagogue and the elevation of the Nazarim as a heretical sect into the Birkat HaMinim. As Günter Stermberg is quoted at the end of the German Wikipedia article on Jamnia, the retelling of the tradition made
aus vielfältigen, kontroversen und widerstrebenden Prozessen ein punktuelles Ereignis
out of a plurality of controverse and antagonistic processes a single-point outcome (own translation)
 QED

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