AD 70 Matters

 In my study of the Christian faith over 50 years, I have been able to see trends, fads, and new understandings. Some were nonsense, like the Prayer of Jabez (actually a marketing tool). One valuable emphasis, at least for me, is the significance of 70 AD.

Our interim pastor explored it last Sunday in regard to Mark 13. The passage is taken by dispensationalists to be about the end times, and it partially is, but it’s really about the fall of the Temple which was to happen in AD 70. Short version of important, long history: In AD  66 The Jews mounted a rebellion against Rome that actually had some success, for a while, until the emperor had enough, sent Titus (who would later become emperor, since it wasn’t all about family succession), and the rebellion was quelled and the Temple left “not one stone upon another.")

But, the part I wasn’t taught: The Jewish Christians in Jerusalem had departed, fled, warned in a contemporary prophecy to leave. (Thus, Jesus words about the mountains, etc.) Whether the part about the contemporary prophecy is true, they did leave, perhaps seeing the connection between the gospel words and what was happening politically. And they Christians were under a different ethic now; although still Jewish, they followed Jesus. (And, by the way, James the brother of Jesus and pastor of the church in Jerusalem, was martyred at this time.)

Rest of the story: this led to the split between Jews and Christians. Fewer Jews became Christians after that. Fewer Christians lived in Jerusalem. Perhaps the converted Jews moved away from their ethnicity, realizing that being persecuted for one reason was enough. Or that their allegiance to Christ triumphed over culture and ethnicity (I won’t use the word race; it is in itself a “racist” word). The New Testament written afterward (John, mostly) is colored by it, whether we see the coloring or not.

So much of the New Testament is understood by AD 70 that it is hard to fathom why it has been a sort of  a secret in lay Christianity for so long.