Denominations
- General Theology
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One small step toward truth perhaps ?
Nothing in any Scripture shows or indicates that at that time they were any denomination at all. They were assemblies of Jewish believers following Jesus, or fallen or at risk of falling away from obeying Jesus.
We can rule that out because Revelation is dated to the late 1st century and is regarded as the last book of the NT to be written, by St. John the Theologian and Beloved Disciple during his exile on Patmos (where today there is a thriving monastery). While on Patmos he had a vision which was written down.
By that time, it had been perhaps as many as 40 or more years since St. Paul in his epistle to the Galatians wrote “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, neither slave nor free, for all are one in Christ Jesus.”
There were of course Christians of Jewish and Samaritan descent and their descendants represent a significant fraction, perhaps a plurality or even a majority of the membership of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East and the related Catholic denominations (Chaldeans, Syro-Malabar Catholics, Syriac Catholics, but perhaps not the Maronites) (both in India and the Middle East, for large numbers of Kochin Jews from Kerala were converted, as well as a group of 400 survivors of a shipwreck that was sailing to India along the southern trade route from Alexandria down the Red Sea, calling at Abyssinia (modern day Eritrea or Djibouti) and/or Socotra, off the coast of Yemen, which had a Christian majority population until they were killed during the genocide instigated by Tamerlane in the 12th century; this group has remained endogamous and can prove their Judaic heritage.
They are definitely a majority of the population of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox Church, an Oriental Orthodox church which until the 20th century was part of the Coptic Orthodox church, which can be said to prefigure the Messianic Jewish movement insofar as the Ge’ez liturgy consists of a modified version of the Synaxis portion of the liturgy of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Judaism, which was the official religion of Ethiopia until the conversion of the Imperial house and most of the country to Christianity in the fourth century, around the same time that the Georgians were converted, about ten years after the conversion of Armenia in 306 and the Edict of Milan in 314, making Ethiopia either the fourth or fifth country to embrace Christianity (after the Kingdom of Edessa, a city-state, the Kingdom of Armenia, the Roman Empire, and possibly the Georgian tribe known as the Kart’velli. Edessa also had a substantial Jewish population, for it was one of the cities where St. Thomas the Apostle and two members of the Seventy, Saints Addai and Mari, who worked with St. Thomas as his disciples, spread the Gospel - St. Thomas took an overland route following the other route favored by Jews trading with India (a trade that began when Alexander the Great established communications between the Greek-speaking world and India, leading to an exchange of ideas, silk, spices and so on, and the spread of Judaism and later Christianity to India). This northern route was from Antioch or Damascus to Edessa, then Nisibis, then ancient Nineveh (modern day Mosul, at the time probably called Mepsila), then Tikrit, then Seleucia-Cstesiphon, where the Babylonian Talmud was replaced, the city that had replaced Old Babylon when the Tigris shifted in alignment and which in turn was abandoned and replaced by Baghdad (which has grown to be adjacent with or overlap the ruins of Babylon) when the Tigris shifted again, and finally to Basra, from which one would board a ship and sail to Kerala down the Persian Gulf and close to the shore of the Persian Sassanid Empire, and modern day Pakistan. Churches were planted all along this route, like along the southern route, although we’re less sure who evangelized Socotra since they were all martyred.
At any rate, the Ethiopians are mostly of Jewish descent although there were some non-Jewish tribes ruled by the Solomonic Kingdom (whose history is complex; for a time in the 17th century it split into three, due to a schism between the Orthodox church and two heretical churches). If you look at the liturgy of the Beta Israel, it is extremely similiar, with both the Beta israel and the Ethiopic churches (Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox and Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox) using nearly identical vestments, for example, Jewish kohanim wear the same attire as Ethiopian Orthodox bishops and levites wear the same attire as Ethiopian Orthodox deacons., except with the Star of David instead of a Cross, and this style of vesture has been preserved despite most, but not all, of the Beta israel having fled the country after the Derg Communist revolution and the martyrdom of Emperor Haile Selassie and many Christian leaders (like most Communist states after Stalin, the Derg was anti-Semitic, whereas the late Emperor was not; fortunately, the Jews had the option to flee the country; the Derg was also opposed to Christianity and meddled in the affairs of the church, forcing it to select a Patriarch who had been vetted by the Communist party (who was in turn deposed after the Derg regime collapsed in the 1990s), but the Christians had no where to go in terms of an alternative homeland that would actively help their evacuation, nonetheless, the evacuation of the Beta Israel by the IDF was a great thing, and Netflix made a very good film about part of the operation, “Red Sea Diving Resort.”
Since most Jews worship in a very different way than the Beta Israel, Messianic Judaism has the opportunity to fuse the synaxis according to the Nusach and the varying Siddurim used by the Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Romaniote, Bukharan and Karaite Jews with the Eucharist. This was also done in antiquity in the East Syriac Rite, which is the other Christian liturgical rite which is heavily influenced by Judaism; the Synaxis, or Liturgy of the Word, begins with a Torah portion and its corresponding Haftarah, albeit rearranged from the one year lectionary used in the Babylonian synagogue to match the Scripture Lessons and liturgical occasions on the Assyrian calendar, and these are followed by an Epistle and a Gospel, and in place of the Torah Ark in the Holy of Holies, behind a curtain, is the altar, which is treated with the strictest rubrics of any denomination in terms of its sanctity (even minor liturgical accidents will require the altar to be reconsecrated). Additionally, the East Syriac churches historically had Bemas, which were of the raised platform variety, facing the Altar in the same way the Bema in a Synagogue faces the Altar, albeit connected by a walkway for the easy movement of clergy such as the deacons and the Presbyter who might be reading the four different scripture lessons (in the diaspora in the US at least sometimes one of the two Old Testament lessons is omitted, but in the Middle East all four will be used, and also in the more liturgically robust parishes n the US).
Recently some Chaldean Catholic churches have been restoring the Bema based on the ancient architecture (the Chaldeans are the mainly Arabic speaking former members of the church who separated in a schism along tribal lines in the 17th or 18th century, perhaps because unlike the rest of the Church of the East, they no longer used the Aramaic language in the vernacular; the largest population of native Aramaic speakers in the world are the 700,000 speakers of Neo-Assyrian Eastern Neo-Aramaic in the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East (the two groups were estranged in the 1960s by a schism over the former moving to the Gregorian calendar but are in the process of reunification).
It should be noted that all of the native Aramaic speakers live in the Middle East, mainly Iraq, Iran, and with smaller populations in Syria and Turkey (but these are more associated with the West Syriac Syriac Orthodox Church, which has a much less Semitic liturgy, being based primarily on the ancient Greek liturgy of Antioch but with some Hagiopolitan influences (from Greek liturgy of the Church in Jerusalem, whereas the East Syriac Rite as far as we know has only ever been celebrated in Syriac, Arabic, Malayalam (among those in India, who, following the Portuguese occupation of Kerala in the 1500s, almost entirely, perhaps entirely, joined the Syriac Orthodox Church or became part of the Catholic communion, the Syro Malabar Catholic Church, which still uses the East Syriac Rite, although in the late 19th and 20th centuries the Assyrian Church of the East made a comeback in India.
Nonetheless, the Church of the East actively evangelized both Jews and other Aramaic speaking people, along with Persian speakers, Arabic speakers and others; indeed, at its peak it stretched across Central Asia to Tibet, China and Mongolia, and was larger at least in geographic area and possibly total membership than the Roman Catholic Church, before the genocide of Tamerlane killed all of its members outside of the Fertile Crescent and the Malabar Coast of India.
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